Vision

We have driven back and forth to the Albany area, to Slingerlands, Latham and Troy, dozens of times in the last few months to see cornea and retina specialists.  Jay and I both had cataract surgery on both eyes, so with six trips per eye, that’s 24 drives, plus another 6 so far for Jay’s retina.  He had the retina surgery Friday, fending off early macular degeneration, a surgery that didn’t exist not so many years ago.  Everything has gone well so far, and I’m thrilled with my new vision and my complete freedom from glasses. Jay will be sporting his eye cover for the coming week, and is not allowed to lift or bend, but the surgeon is pleased with the outcome and predicts a good recovery and gradually improving sight.

It’s a beautiful drive back and forth over route 20, the early cross continental road, most of it completed in 1926.  At 3,365 miles it became the longest road in America, from Boston, Massachusetts to Newport, Oregon.  Heavy traffic has long since moved to the newer interstate highways, but US 20 remains intact and is a much pleasanter drive.  Heading home on our section of it, from Albany thru Cherry Valley to Springfield where we turn south, the road stretches over rolling hills, rising and falling with the terrain.  At each crest there is an expansive view – the beautiful Mohawk Valley to the north, and fields and forests undulating to the horizon east, south and west.  In the morning, heading due east for early appointments, we have the rising sun right in our faces. But heading west towards home, there are only these beautiful long views.

We have learned the roll call of towns, where the speed limit drops below 55, and where the cops love to write tickets.  Jay got a ticket in 2023, speeding east down the long hill into Esperance, so we became very alert to the changes in the speed limit. The towns keep us focused on the drive.  They are full of lessons in history, sociology, architecture and economics.  We’ve given them fictional baseball teams with names to amuse ourselves, the Sloansville Sluggers and the Duanesberg Dweebs. I think about the people who grow up in these towns and never leave, especially the rural towns further west of Albany.  The towns change as we approach the Albany area. They are more modern, more suburban, more connected to the bigger world. History doesn’t stick to them as it does to Cherry Valley.  In 1778 British and Iroquois forces attacked the patriots’ fort at Cherry Valley in a battle still vividly remembered as a massacre, with the Native people taking the brunt of the blame for the death and destruction.  

I’ve begun reading Jill Lepore’s thoughtful history of the American Revolution, “These Truths”.  She teaches some of the history that isn’t part of the public school curriculum.  She points out that it was the fact that the Native people had no concept of land ownership that made them so vulnerable to exploitation and displacement.  Looking out over the broad, beautiful landscape on this drive, it is easy to understand why inhabitants would not have developed a theory of ownership of land.  There’s just so much of it.  How could you imagine you owned part of it?  Why would you even want to when there’s so much to share and use?  You can see in the towns how settlers from densely crowded Europe were eager to possess land, to set boundaries.

The Native people didn’t disappear.  I recently attended a zoom lecture by a local Haudenosaunee Chief who talked about his people’s ongoing efforts to protect the land – from pipelines and data centers in this century.  The people who, for a complex set of reasons, fought alongside the British in Cherry Valley, now lead the fight environmentalists join, trying to preserve wild places and to keep our air and water clean.  It seems unlikely that we will undo the theory of private ownership of land, but perhaps we can at least see our ownership as stewardship with the responsibility for protecting what we claim to own for future generations.  It’s a question of vision.