7/17 Reflections at row's end

 

Hammondsport, Keuka Lake

No miles, not a stroke

 

Alan has taken me for a whirlwind tour of Hammondsport and its environs.  His deep family history here shows up at every turn, revealing ‘community’ in the best sense of the word. Weeks ago I whimsically named this blog ‘Laker to Laker,’ and a day with ‘a lake guy’ 400 rowing miles away from ‘my’ lake is simply a mirror image of what he’ll see in me when we head back to Lake George. We went out for a boat ride last night and Alan opined how remarkable it is when one can ‘geo-locate’ on a lake at night simply using the sightlines of mountain silhouettes, the juxtaposition of lights, and the dimly-lit contours of shoreline. It’s knowing a place by heart, by decades of memory and experience and meaning and love, and knowing that what you know is never-changing, a kind of north star. ‘Lakers’ enjoy the unearned privilege of this intimacy with a place through time, and with it, I think, a responsibility to pay it forward.

Hammondsport hosted a wooden boat show this weekend, an event sabotaged by today’s relentless downpour, but a smattering of Centurys, Gars, and Chris Crafts gave the waterfront an old-timey feel. The wooden boat bug isn’t all too different from the kind of environmental protection and stewardship that’s so much on my mind on this adventure. Care, commitment, vigilance, monitoring, corrective or curative action … these are the attributes of the wooden boat owners as well as of the environmental advocate. We inherit something through no doing of our own, and we aspire to care for it, to preserve it, and to pass it on.     

To be blunt – now that I’m coming to the end of this blog as a capstone to this adventure – we’re going to reach a crossroads at Lake George, if indeed we have not already arrived. Unmonitored, untested, or non-compliant septic systems will take us to our next HAB, and the one after that, and we’ll act, but after much natural and reputational damage will have been done. The failure rate of assessed systems points to this outcome.

Or, can we (every constituency that has an economical, emotional, or moral interest in Lake George) act in unison and collaborate to fashion a best path before too much damage is done? What’s in the way of doing what Keuka Lake has done? Why can’t we act before our preservation must become reclamation? That we are not now actively monitoring, assessing, and improving septic systems around the entire lake as a regular practice of protection will someday be seen as the public policy negligence that it is.   

Really, why not now? ‘Best practices’ are out there, great people are in leadership positions, the institutions are in place … and the Lake doesn’t care about politics or process. Time will tell if we are listening to her. Our actions will tell if we are hearing her.