Archival summer, week 6: the place of place, in research and life

Last night I felt tired. It was a good tired. I had managed to fit into the afternoon a trip to the Ithaca Farmers Market for some fresh groceries, a short run around part of the Cayuga Waterfront Trail, a quick shower, and an attempt at a brand-new (for me) recipe for dinner — the Egyptian rice-and-lentil dish kusherie, from my More-with-Less cookbook (which I had planned to really dive into this summer, but was actually opening for the first time in years) which ended up much more delicious than I expected and yielded enough that I think I’m set on dinner for the week. I guess I was in the right state of mind for what happened next.
Too worn out to get any writing done, I had resorted to watching a couple episodes of Game of Thrones, which a work supervisor at NYU finally convinced me to start watching, when, during the credit roll, I noticed to my surprise a handful of bright stars shining bright enough to be clearly seen through the screen windows that face the lake on the other side of the room. It dawned on me that I had spent close to two months living in the top of this duplex cottage on the edge of Ithaca but had never spent any time in the backyard at night, after the stars had come out. So I turned off the TV and computer, and, since it was a chilly night dipping into the fifties and the bugs weren’t bad, spent a little time standing at the edge of the water and sitting in a lawn chair, head craned back, letting my eyes slowly adjust to the stars as more and more slowly materialized in the clear sky. The Big Dipper and the North Star were there, a satellite passed by and was succeeded by a plane’s red-and-green flickers and then a firefly’s slow blink, Jupiter seemed to burn low above the far ridge line, and under the steady gaze of those countless, seemingly immobile pricks of light, each one varying ever so slightly in width and brightness, many faint enough to disappear if you look straight at them, I felt a sort of reassuring bond with my younger self and the wordless wonder I often felt as a child under the night sky. My brain was quiet enough last night to enter that wonder again, linking my present self to at least twenty-five years, a quarter century, of my own best stargazing, dating to the time my parents moved from Jersey City to Liberty Hyde Bailey’s hometown of South Haven, Michigan. I felt like myself, the self I think I know best, but that I so often seem somehow distant from. It was a clarifying, calming kind of aloneness.
Some forces in life give us that continuity despite the experience of an entirely new place (although, in the southern hemisphere, where the sky is less recognizable, I might have had a different experience). I probably only spent twenty or so minutes outside last night, but that short time seemed to clear my mind of much of the stress that has been building this summer around my research and writing, reorienting my thoughts toward the kind of life I actually want to live, one alive to everyday beauty. I remembered that I have always wanted this, for at least as long as I can remember, and since well before I would have described it that way. When I came back inside to the yellow-lit kitchen that I had recently cleaned after the afternoon’s big cooking experiment, I picked up a forgotten mug and pot lid, and the red and green colors of the food scraps that I cleared from the base of the sink had a kind of beautiful clarity and sharpness that I think I would have otherwise missed.
I found the following mysterious quote from Emerson flowing through my head a lot last night, during my time outside and as I prepared for bed afterwards — it’s one that I first read in an honors class in college and quoted in one of the better poems I wrote during that period, so it’s a quote I now carry with me:
“But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nature (1949)

There are other important forces in life, though, that I think are really place-specific. The past two weeks have been marked for me by visits from probably the two guests I most wanted to host during my Ithaca summer, because they have both been deeply influenced by Liberty Hyde Bailey’s writings and philosophy for as long or longer than I have and because neither of them had ever been to Ithaca, the Bailey Mecca, before: John Stempien, seventh-grade history teacher and Director Emeritus of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum where I first met and worked with him, and my mom, Rebecca Linstrom, fourth-grade teacher and organizer of the volunteer-developed Liberty Hyde Bailey Outdoor Learning Center at her school in South Haven, Michigan. (John is working on a number of videos for his summer series on Bailey that will draw from footage of his Ithaca visit — follow his YouTube channel to catch them as they come out!) When I first came to Ithaca for research five years ago, I wanted to find people who knew about Bailey’s work and could help me best understand the chapters of Bailey’s life that took place largely in and around Ithaca, where he moved as a young professor in 1888 and stayed until his death in 1954. Through some initial poking around on Couchsurfing.com, and then following up on a number of emails, I was able to set up meetings with Bob Dirig, former curator of the L. H. Bailey Hortorium Herbarium at Cornell, and Ed Cobb, a researcher in Plant Biology at Cornell and author of the 150-year history of the department. Bob in particular spent a lot of time with me on that visit, giving my a tour of the Hortorium (where Bailey’s massive collection of hundreds of thousands of pressed plant specimens can be accessed, along with many more that have been added in the half century since his death) and driving me all around Ithaca to see the Bailey sights — Bailey’s house in town (now used for student housing), the stone cottage Bailiwick that he had built on his farm as a summer home outside of town (and which he donated, along with much of his farm, to be used as a Girl Scout Camp), the Bailey Conservatory (which at the time had fallen into ruin, but has since been rebuilt thanks largely to the advocacy and perseverance of Ed Cobb among others), Bailey Hall (a large concert/lecture hall at Cornell built after Bailey’s retirement from his deanship and named in his honor), and even the old community mausoleum at Lakeview Cemetery where Bailey is interred alongside his wife, daughters, and so many more members of the Ithaca community.


I’ve wanted to pass on this geographical knowledge to John and Mom for years, but it has never been feasible to give them the “Bailey tour” of Ithaca until this summer, while I’m here for an extended period and they both have the summer off. They both agreed, after seeing some of the places that Bailey helped shape, how much of a better sense they felt they had of Bailey and especially his organizational or community presence after walking the streets where he had done so much of his incredible work. The more you know about Bailey’s legacy as a popularizer of gardening and as the builder of Cornell’s various horticultural and more broadly agricultural programs, the more you begin to see the numerous and artistically immaculate plantings that twine through Cornell’s various paths and walkways in a new light. (Bailey in fact provided the original idea for the Cornell Plantations near the end of his life — a system of intertwined botanic gardens, decorative plantings, and managed woodland that snakes through campus’s walkways and gorges. The name for this system of diverse plant environments has recently been changed to the “Cornell Botanic Gardens.”)

When Bailey writes, in his poem “Campanula,” published in his 1916 book Wind and Weather, that “There is a ferny dell I know / Where spiry stalks of harebell grow,” I can now clearly see a number of “ferny dells” in my mind that Bailey might have had in his own mind when writing it — whereas I once thought solely of the ravines of his childhood in South Haven, where Bailey and I grew up about a hundred thirty years apart, I now also think of certain gorges in Ithaca, and especially of the ravines on either side of the old Bailiwick place where Bailey liked to spend summers with his family and friends. In fact, on a recent visit to the beautiful field-stone house, I realized that a photo at the Bailey Museum of Bailey’s daughter Ethel at the bottom of a ravine was most likely taken there. Suddenly that becomes a snapshot of the family’s life on the farm in the summer, and I can see something more personal about this father’s interactions with his daughter.

The luxury of spending time in a place so formative to an author quickly yields insights like these that can deepen the researcher’s understanding of that author’s work. But it also yields relationships. Since my first visit, I have also been able to meet Scott Peters, whose scholarship on Bailey has greatly influenced my thinking (like this essay), as well as retired university archivist Elaine Engst, who curated the wonderful Liberty Hyde Bailey: A Man for All Seasons exhibit at Cornell, and then-Director of the Bailey Hortorium William Crepet, whose Hortorium office is bedecked with artifacts like Bailey’s cane collection, two of Bailey’s writing desks, the top hat Bailey used for official Dean functions, the red vasculum that Bailey received as a child from botanist Lucy Millington, a box full of award medals that Bailey received over his illustrious career, etc. Added to my earlier contacts Bob and Ed, I have learned much from this proliferating community of Baileyphiles or “Baileyateurs” that I would not have learned otherwise. When Ed organized the 150th-anniversary celebration of Plant Sciences at Cornell, for instance, I was able to attend and interview several elderly people who remembered meeting and interacting with Bailey before his death in 1954. Bob shares with others vivid memories of working with Bailey’s daughter Ethel during the latter part of her nearly lifelong tenure as curator at the Bailey Hortorium, from the way she would furrow her thick brows whenever interrupted from her filing work in the Seed Catalog database that was her passion to the time he had to bum a harrowing ride from Ethel across town — Ethel having been the first woman in Ithaca to obtain a driver’s license, and often having been her father’s driver in their plant-collecting trips across the country.
And these relationships even become friendships over time. Scott Peters found time to grab lunch with me earlier this summer and took me to the same Indian restaurant where he would get lunch with his friend and fellow Bailey scholar Paul Morgan, back in the days when they were both spending the summer in Cornell’s archives working on their own dissertations. Bob Dirig, who gave me my first Bailey tour of Ithaca, found time to meet with both John and my mom during their visits with me over the past two weeks, at the same Korean restaurant that he took me to five years ago. Ed and I are planning lunch soon so that we can catch up and Ed can show me the latest Bailey photos that he has unearthed. And every time I bring another visitor for a tour of the Bailey Hortorium, the curator there, Peter Fraissinet, who worked with me on a number of institutional loans related to Bailey Museum exhibits, increasingly knows my quirks and anticipates questions. After inheriting stacks of apparently unsold copies of Bailey’s excellent 1918 book Universal Service (a sort of sequel to The Holy Earth) that had been found “in some old barn on campus,” as Peter put it, on my most recent visit to the Hortorium he gave my mom and I each a copy of the scarce volume, still in the printer’s onionskin wrappers from 1919, knowing that we’d find good homes for them if we didn’t already have our own copies.
Whenever I finish this dissertation chapter, one thing I know is that it will be saturated with the influences of Cornell University and of Ithaca, New York — the landscape, the campus, and the community — much as my Bailey writings have always been saturated with the influences of South Haven. And while I am here, in this land of gorges and gardens, I hope I can continue to let the place sink into my consciousness in more ways than one before I head back to the City in the fall. I think there are more nights under the stars by Cayuga Lake in my future, and probably at least one more visit to a mausoleum before I leave.


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See the full list of entries in my Archival Summer blog series, in reverse chronological order, on my Medium profile.
