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When I sit down at the end of the day and look out upon Chautauqua Lake, it reminds me of the colloquialism that "it is all downhill from here." That is, the water that I am looking at is flowing south toward the Allegheny River, then the Ohio and finally down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico (now called by some the Gulf of America.)
In further reflection, this phrase about going downhill could also describe me at my age… but I resist that description. Getting old is not so much about going "downhill" as it is about being on "cruise control." It doesn't take much extra effort to get old--you just have to enjoy life and watch the scenery as it goes by.
But, back to Chautauqua Lake, the escarpment and its closeness to Lake Erie--we really do live in a remarkable geographic spot. Voyagers, Native Americans, and explorers in the early days of our country, could, by taking an 8-mile portage from the shores of Lake Erie, whose waters flow to the St. Lawrence River and thence to the Atlantic Ocean, put their canoes in a body of water whose waters flowed to the Gulf of Mexico.
It was a connection that opened transportation into about half the whole country. Incredible when you think about it.
About a hundred miles east of us, where Hammondsport, NY is now situated, you could carry your canoe about the same distance to where Bath is… but the rivers there run into the Chesapeake and then back to the Atlantic Ocean.
Yet, if you paddled a bit further west (on what I still call Lake Ontario) to Lake Erie and then made the portage to Chautauqua Lake, you could launch yourself into the West and ultimately down to New Orleans. During the 1700's this was a known portage into the new America. You could move from the St. Lawrence watershed to the Mississippi watershed by just humping your canoe and packs from Barcelona to the Hartfield area around Mayville.
When you look out across Chautauqua Lake today, just think of what it would have looked like back when it was lined with forest with little human habitation. I have paddled lakes like that in Canada where there were no houses or settlements of any kind on its banks.
This is the way our lake would have looked to those early travelers who came through our area. They would have snaked their way south through and around the rapids of the Chadakoin River where Jamestown now is and would have eventually gotten to the Conewango Creek and then the Allegheny River where they could make better time.
How much has changed in just a short period of about 250 years. Now our lake is lined with homes, fishermen come to test their lures, and pleasure boats abound everywhere. Yet, it is good, from time-to-time, to close our eyes and think of what the lake would have been like in early, pristine times.
Having that vision may be why we invest so much in things like sewers around the lake, continuing the research on lake quality, and taking measures to keep our lake's waters clean.
Though we enjoy its benefits today, we still want Chautauqua Lake to be the natural, beautiful, wonderful place that it was before modern civilization got its hands on it.
Rolland Kidder is a Stow resident.