The Siren Call Of Chautauqua
Why We Return, Why We Love This Place
Perhaps it is because my father Raymond Johnson was born in the wild country on the old Goshen Road in North Harmony, far out near the Pennsylvania line in the middle of a snowstorm on Feb. 1, 1921, that I have an affinity for such places — the rolling hills and fields of southern Chautauqua County, the dark green forests, the winding country roads. And there are so many in Chautauqua County. I have driven these country roads for 50 years, and I am familiar with some like old friends. My mother loved to take drives particularly down to Corry, where we enjoyed a hamburger and a milkshake at a diner on Route 6.
My father too loved to take Sunday drives in North Harmony. He idealized his years there on that Goshen Road farm, though I’m certain the years were less than idyllic for his hardworking Finnish mother Martha who had to be up before dawn and fed the farmhands three meals a day in addition to caring for her own three little girls and my father, the baby.
The Goshen Road is special to me, my favorite place in the county. It sits at 1650 feet elevation. The name is Biblical, meaning the great plain and the Egyptian location where Joseph and his family found sanctuary. I like to drive down it now and then, from Panama to Bear Lake, past the great Brokenstraw Forest planted by the CCC in the 1930’s, alongside the Brokenstraw Creek (mostly hidden in the forest) and just north of the great Niobe Swamp. I like to stop at the now empty rise where the Johnson farm once stood, where my dad was born, and where a new farmer makes his living. He stopped to speak to me once, kind and friendly. The apple orchard is still there, he told me, pointing up the hill past the barn.
The Johnson family lived there from 1916-25 when my Viking tall and blond grandfather Ben ran a successful dairy farm with the help of his brothers and worked the fields with his well-loved Percherons. In 1925, they gave up the farm. We’re not sure why, though the family rumor is that Ben could no longer send his cows to slaughter. One of his Percherons died of colic. His heart, family members say, was broken. In my lifetime, grandfather Ben never spoke of the farm. All I know of the years there are from memories told to me by my three Johnson aunts, Marian, Helen and Jane. My grandmother, a woman of few words in any case, would just laugh and say, well, that was a long time ago.
And so they left the farm and headed for an entirely new venture, Brooklyn, New York, where grandmother Martha’s mother and sisters lived. They stayed a while — at least a year that my father remembers as where he attended kindergarten. But Chautauqua called them back and they returned in 1926, never to leave again.
In the mid-80s, my father bought a sprawling ranch style house on the lakefront in Sunset Bay after he retired, after his youngest daughter Shannon died, and came home here. He said to my sister Vicky, nobody escapes the sweet siren call of Chautauqua once they’ve heard it. So too, I returned after retirement, after three decades of teaching in Florida at two different colleges. It’s that siren call of Chautauqua. There’s something in the hills and fields here, in the lake’s blue and green hues topped by little whitecaps, in the placid cornfields and vineyards as far as the eye can see.
Joyce Carole Oates, the great novelist from Western New York, said in a tweet recently that people have to truly understand Gothicism and obscurity to come from this corner of New York state, south of Buffalo, in the snow belt. Yes, we do. We value simple things here–trees, country fields, waterways. Pumpkin pies. Maple syrup. We like country drives on holidays with family. We like the tall dark evergreens, the long snows that embrace us like memory, the brief but glorious summers, the joy of spring.
Here in Chautauqua County we’re at the edge of the state, the edge of the United States, the edge of a Great Lake, the edge of another country. It’s a county of hills and valleys, a great gorge, some mighty waterways. It’s a land built by glaciers. It’s a land settled by hardy souls.
To me, Oates resembles Nathaniel Hawthorne in her writing that blends fantasy with realism in a mystical fashion just as Hawthorne does. Both of them use nature and landscape as character, and both of them understand well how place contributes to art, how place contributes to character. Oates, from Lockport, a writer whose childhood was full of want and lack, is shaped by the fierce cold of western New York, the blizzards and challenges of living here in our corner of the state. As a child, I recall awakening in the depth of night to the house groaning in the wind and cold on winter nights. Our furnaces never came on until dawn, so the night was a whole other world of darkness and creeping cold. If I touched the window glass in my room when I was a child mid-winter, it would often be wet and icy. I could trace a fingernail in it. I think when one grows up here, a person becomes used to harsh conditions.
My father had a fey sense of the world that he conveyed to us too. I think it came from being born in the middle of nowhere, near the Niobe Swamp. In any case, dad loved rural roads in the middle of nowhere, dark forests, long dirt roads leading to wild places in the county where he loved to walk in the fields sometimes amidst corn taller than he and hay waist high. It’s a love of wilderness he conveyed to me. And this kinship with wilderness, with the ambiguity of beautiful yet dangerous nature, is Gothic in construct. It’s part of Hawthorne’s charm and Oates’ fictional worlds. It’s certainly part of mine.
Thus when the novelist says one must understand Gothicism and obscurity, she must mean something like that. I’m haunted by her statement. I think this county is rich with haunted landscapes, wild places, swamps and hills and rocks where only wild creatures live.
Sometimes I feel a solitude so great I am overwhelmed. Sometimes I feel a kinship to this place and this land, to this town my immigrant grandparents lived and worked in, so great I am moved beyond words. Those of us who live here love it and respect it. We love the trees of autumn and the cool damp air. We savor our brief beautiful summers. We are enchanted by a land covered in white for months sometimes, when time seems to stop and we hunker down in our houses.
And so we people of the county hunker down here, loving our land and our lake, clinging to our pasts and dreaming of our futures. We are bound to this place. It is part of us. For us, it sings its own beautiful, haunted song.
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