Home

I've been thinking this year about what makes a place a desirable one for me to call home.

I've lived in Ohio for my whole life. One year in Canton, seventeen years in Columbus, and now seventeen years in Cleveland. Undoubtedly that's molded my views, what I find comfortable in a place to live. I wonder to what extent those views are inherent to me, and to what extent they're a result of where I've lived, or of life experiences that I could have had no matter where I lived.

My sister has lived in New York City for more than a decade. Earlier this year I visited her there and I found it to be a great place to visit but my suspicions were confirmed that I could never see myself living there. Even if the higher cost of living could be ignored, there's one very important obstacle to my ability to enjoy living in such a place. I really, really like spending time in nature. I've realized that it's very beneficial to my mental health. New York is a huge city that is basically devoid of anything resembling wilderness. Spending time in nature for an NYC resident requires going far out of one's way. It's not something you can just casually do after work. I'd go crazy in a place like that.

Two weeks ago I returned from a trip to another, very different, part of New York State - my family's annual Adirondacks vacation. I love visiting the Adirondacks every year. The mountains and lakes and trees and air are refreshing to the soul. In fact, I realized that there are three places now that have come to feel at least a little something like home to me. Cleveland, first and foremost. And Columbus, of course. The Adirondacks are the third. (And yes, there was a period of time last year when Nashville also felt like home, but that's obviously no longer the case.)

I have two interests that I feel especially passionate about, though - nature is one, and music is the other. Although I could imagine myself living in the Adirondacks (setting aside the fact that there's not much there in my current line of work) more than I could in New York City, the huge reduction in concertgoing opportunities would be hard to bear. And although the Lake Placid dining scene has improved a great deal since my family first vacationed there, I'd also miss the many wonderful restaurants of all different cuisines I can frequent back home.

New York City, of course, has far more to offer in the realms of live music and dining than Cleveland. And the Adirondacks have more nature to offer than Northeast Ohio. So for someone who is strongly pulled in those two conflicting directions of city life and outdoor life, Cleveland is a nice middle ground.

It's not just Cleveland, though, that fits me so well. It's the specific location I now call home, in Cleveland Heights, a large suburb just east of the city proper. I live on a lovely street lined with large trees (much like the one on which I grew up) in a neighborhood where I can easily walk to numerous restaurants and bars, a drugstore, a grocery store, a bakery, a movie theater, and a library. At the same time, just a mile away from my house, and easily accessible within minutes by bicycle or on the way home during my short commute from work, is a gorgeous park system, running along the course of the Doan Brook waterway. Roughly marking the border between Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights are two beautiful lakes (Horseshoe Lake and Lower Shaker Lake) at which great blue herons and other wildlife can be spotted, and in between the two lakes, there is the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes.

The early evening moon reflecting off of Horseshoe Lake.

A wintery scene at the Nature Center.

Lower Shaker Lake at sunset.

My mountain bike leaning against a tree in front of a very calm Lower Shaker Lake reflecting the sky.

The lakes are beautiful, but undoubtedly my favorite part of the Doan Brook waterway is Roxboro Ravine, a narrow gorge that takes the brook downhill from Lower Shaker Lake. I've written about the ravine before, on more than one occasion, and in fact dubbed it my favorite place in the world. Cleveland is known for its great "Emerald Necklace" of Metroparks surrounding the city, and the Metroparks are certainly a reason for civic pride, but the ravine, a park hidden in plain sight in the middle of a residential neighborhood and that most people don't know exists, is to me more wonderful than anything the Metroparks have to offer. One can walk down a trail just tens of meters away from an at times busy street and instantly be transported to a place that feels like it could be miles away from civilization.

Certainly there are more remote and more secluded and yes, more beautiful natural locations that I've visited in my many travels, including in the Adirondacks, but there's just something extra special about the ravine existing in this rugged and gorgeous state right smack dab in the midst of densely populated inner ring suburbs, and the instant escape it provides from city life. Due to the thick tree cover, steep walls, and rushing water, there are places in the ravine where if one didn't know better, it would be easy to think there were no other humans for miles around. I've had so many great times there over the years, going running, hiking, riding my mountain bike, and (of course) getting engaged to Cara.

The ravine and the lakes are truly a treasure, cherished by many who live in the area. So it might be hard to imagine the threat they faced half a century ago. A plan was put forward that, had it come to fruition, would have made the Heights a far different place from the one I now love to call home.

In 1964, Cuyahoga County Engineer Albert Porter proposed the creation of a new system of freeways to connect the eastern suburbs to downtown Cleveland. These freeways would have run through Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights - the Clark Freeway would have run almost directly along the path of Doan Brook.

I have been aware of this history for some time, but recently, perhaps due both to my continuously growing love for Doan Brook and my growing unease about all the troubling changes happening in our country and world, I've taken a greater interest in learning more about this history. I happened upon the existence of a limited run 2011 book called The Legacy of Clark Freeway Fighters that recounts the history with a focus on interviews with the now elderly women who took the lead in fighting the freeway plan, and I quickly decided to track down and purchase a copy for myself. Once I had the book in hand, I fittingly took it after work one day to the spot by the ravine's waterfall where I've come to enjoy doing so much of my leisure reading. As it turned out, a seemingly endless torrential downpour stranded me under the rock overhang there for almost two hours (much longer than it took me to read the book), but I didn't really mind. I had nowhere else I needed to be, and it was great fun to experience the sights and sounds of the storm, including the sudden rapid expansion of the waterfall, as well as the two very wet raccoons I spotted in a tree on the other side of the ravine.

Getting back to the Legacy book... as I sat there, and began reading the book, and looked at the map of the proposed freeways on one of the early pages...

...I suddenly felt overcome with emotion, as I thought about the wonderful community I call home, and the fact that one of the freeways on that map would have run a stone's throw away from the waterfall by which I sat, and another of the freeways would have run pretty much right through or next to the house in which I live. In one of my recent posts, I wrote, "It's absurd the extent to which our society has prioritized fast automobile travel over so many other things that are so much more important." In that post my focus was on the lives lost as a result of that excess prioritization of fast automobile travel, but those lives are just a part of the "so many other things that are so much more important." I'm so, so grateful to the residents of the community who knew their homes and parks were more important than the ability to get downtown a few minutes faster and who got together and organized and succeeded in stopping the freeway plan. And not only did they stop a negative outcome, they turned it into an additional positive outcome, as the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes was intentionally created at the site of a proposed freeway interchange to help demonstrate the value of what would be lost if the freeways were built.

It was the women of the community, members of garden clubs and civic organizations, "little ladies in tennis shoes" as they called themselves, who took the lead in the fight, and it was a wonderful thing that the editors of this book were able to obtain (via interviews conducted by students at The Intergenerational School in Cleveland) and share the decades later perspectives of some of those women. I'd like to share with you a few of my favorite quotes from the interviews.

"I just couldn't believe that they would put a freeway through there. It was too beautiful of a park.... Many people who lived east of Shaker Heights and beyond just couldn't wait for the freeway to be built because they wanted to hop onto it and whiz downtown.... It is a challenge to get other people to appreciate nature because they're accustomed to looking at it but not seeing it." - Kay Fuller

"The whole thing is just unthinkable and Albert Porter, then County Engineer, boasted that he was not afraid of a bunch of Shaker Heights matrons being able to interfere with his freeway. He was stomped on in the end. I think it was the first time in many people's lives that they realized that they could do something.... I think that it should be evident to young people that with a well-organized protest - and this was very well-organized with lots of people with expertise in many areas - you can achieve a lot. The lesson is you can't say, 'I can't possibly do that.' or 'We can't possibly stop that.'" - Gloria Reske

"Activism was in the air. The Civil Rights Movement was inspiring to everybody. The fact that there were people out there who were fighting for their rights, and who were marching, and really taking a position, often at great risk to themselves, was a model for us. If they can do that, what are we doing sitting around doing nothing, twiddling our thumbs? When people were so active in defense of their rights, how could we just sit?" - Kathy Barber

"My mother was a tremendous nature lover and we would drive down to her hometown in Wellington, which we thought of, as little girls, as a very long trip - it was 60 miles and she liked to go the hilliest way. We would get to the top of a hill and she'd stop the car and gasp, 'Let's just look at this beautiful view!' This sort of excitement about beauty was a big part of her life and that carried over to me and I hope to my children." - Sally Burton

I'll be forever grateful to those "little ladies in tennis shoes" for standing up for what was right and for helping preserve and shape for the future the amazing place I now call home. Their actions and the effects of those actions are a lesson for us all of the importance of activism, and it's a lesson that's especially important today. We all have a role to play in deciding what the world in which we live and in which our children will grow up looks like. Not all such actions will be successful, but if no one takes action on an issue, failure is assured - you never know until you try. And in a world with so many big and seemingly consuming threats, the Freeway Fighters remind us that even at the small local level, people working together can make a meaningful difference.

It does occur to me that the Freeway Fighters had advantages that many activists don't. It saddens me to think of all the other communities, disproportionately populated by people with less wealth and darker skin, that have been destroyed by America's obsession with freeway building. How many other places with homes and parks just as beautiful as those in my neighborhood have been torn apart so that people who lived somewhere else could "hop onto" a freeway and "whiz downtown"?

(It's also worth noting that the Shaker Lakes are not natural lakes but were created by the Shakers who settled in this area in the 19th century - so human beings are capable of shaping their environments for the better as well as for the worse.)

Near the end of the book is a short essay titled "Proving That Trend is Not Destiny" by David Beach, director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History's GreenCityBlueLake Institute. It's a great distillation of the issues that I want to highlight in this post so I'm going to quote extensively from it:

In a narrow sense, Albert Porter was right. In the '60s he was the Cuyahoga County Engineer, and when he looked at Cleveland and the eastern suburbs he saw that there was going to be a mess if more roads were not built.

With his rational, engineer's mind, he studied projections of population migration and increasing traffic flows. He saw that the east side was going to need more road capacity to keep traffic flowing smoothly - a lot more capacity. Indeed, the east side would need enormous freeways in multiple locations, so everyone would have easy freeway access.

The overriding concern was "the convenience of the motoring public," as the highway planners were fond of saying. Our whole society had to change so more people could drive more cars faster. And this made perfect sense if you cared more about speeding through places than the quality of places - if your vision of "progress" was the development of a sprawling, frenetic, high-mileage, high energy-consuming society.

For Porter, these were the inexorable trends, and he had to plan for them. But some people in the path of those freeways refused to be held captive by such trends. They believed, as urban critic Lewis Mumford once wrote, that trend is not destiny. People can have a different vision. Behaviors can change. Different public investments can be made. And the trends can be deflected to create a different future.

So they rose up and stopped the freeways that would have destroyed what they loved about their communities. The battle against the Clark Freeway, especially, became one of the iconic struggles for conservation in the history of Greater Cleveland. It was a training ground for dozens of community and environmental activists. It inspired thousands of people to believe that they could have a voice.

Fifty years later, this area on the east side of Cleveland is the hole in the regional highway donut. It's a very inconvenient place for the motoring public. And that is wonderful!

A lot of people who don't live in the Heights complain about the lack of convenient freeway access to this area. I've come to realize that my home is a great place to live not in spite of the lack of convenient freeway access. It's a great place to live in large part as a result of the lack of convenient freeway access.

I read another book recently called Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. It's a collection of personal little stories (published in 2012) about what makes Cleveland the place it is and I liked it a lot for the diversity of perspectives it presented to paint a realistic picture of Cleveland with all its grandeur and all its flaws. As I read the book, I of course enjoyed every mention of a place that was special to me. The beginning of Stephanie Gautam's "One that Denver Lost" especially struck me:

As a child growing up in Cleveland Heights, I felt that my hometown was a paradise. The ravine off North Park Boulevard was just steps from our duplex on South Overlook, yet to me, it was a wilderness promising adventure and otherworldly discoveries.

I never set foot in Cleveland Heights as a child, and yet as an adult, the ravine to me has been much as it was to young Stephanie. I've found so much adventure and made so many discoveries there. How wonderful it would be to grow up in such a place. How much we owe to the activists who preserved it. And how important it is that we carry that same spirit of activism into the future.

Costa Rica Part 2: Animal Adventures

It's been longer than I intended since my previous Costa Rica entry, but I'm still planning to write about the whole trip. So, let's pick up from where I last left off, in Tortuguero National Park.

Tortuguero means "Land of the Turtles." It gets this name because of the sea turtles that make their nests on the beach there. There was an optional excursion to go see the sea turtles at night, which we unfortunately didn't have the cash for. We did, however, see a multitude of other extraordinary animals, almost from the moment we arrived. As we stood in the open-aired reception area, enjoying juice drinks and getting our introduction to the accommodations, there were some bats on the high ceiling, and a small lizard on the wall. We soon made our way to our room, a charmingly rustic place with nice wooden floors and rocking chairs on the porch. It's worth mentioning that we had no air conditioning. Now, we were fortunate that the temperatures at night were comfortably sleepable, helped by big rain storms on both nights we stayed there. The downside to the lack of a/c? It was so humid that it was almost impossible to air-dry clothing, and the money in our wallets even became damp from the air! But that's really a minor quibble; it was an amazing place to stay.

The Laguna Lodge where we stayed is located on a narrow strip of land with water on both sides - a wide river to the west, and the Caribbean Sea to the east. After setting our stuff down in the room, Cara and I headed out to the beach. Yet before we even reached it, we were met with what I'd consider one of the most amazing sights of the trip.

On the ground before us, there was a line of moving things. Leaves - pieces of leaves, to be more accurate. A closer look revealed they were carried by red ants. Lots of ants. In one direction, scores of the insects carried their burdens; in the other direction along the same path, ants headed out to gather more. The line extended for probably fifty meters before disappearing into the forest.



Now, I study invertebrates, so I'm perhaps more inclined than most to find this a captivating sight. But I think just about anyone would have to admit that this was really freaking cool. Especially once you learn more about what the ants were actually doing. They're called leafcutter ants, and as I later learned, they use leaves to cultivate a fungus that they have a mutualistic relationship with. Seriously, ants have a complex society in which they practice agriculture. Check out the Wikipedia article. Ants are amazing. Life is amazing.

After observing the march of the ants, we continued out to the beach, to see a choppy Caribbean. We weren't supposed to swim there because of the currents, but it was definitely fun to put our feet in the water. We also saw some more neat animals out on the beach - crabs, in a variety of sizes, scuttling in and out of their holes. Walking back from the beach, we encountered two more fascinating critters, a large lizard and a very colorful grasshopper.



So at this point, we had been at the lodge for maybe an hour, and I'd already seen an astonishing array of wildlife. As a biologist and all-around nature enthusiast, I was pretty much in heaven, and I found myself marveling at what a wonderful place this was. Things would only get better from there.

The next morning, we went on a guided wildlife cruise through the canals and waterways of the park. Our tour group headed out in three boats, making our way from the wide and open channel by the lodge into narrower, more secluded waterways. Now, I definitely have to give major credit to the tour guides and boat captains here. Most animals find it beneficial to blend in with their environments. I could easily imagine having gone on the same cruise without expert guides and seeing almost no animals at all (although I did feel a certain sense of pride when I was the one who spotted a turtle swimming near our boat). Time and again, we would be slowly floating through the waterways, when one of the guides would point to something, and there would be some conversation in Spanish. We would float closer, all eyes would hone in on the indicated location - and there, among the lush foliage, would be some fantastic bird, or reptile, or even a group of monkeys.



Here in Northeast Ohio, one of the most exciting animals to spot is the Great Blue Heron. We've seen quite a few in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, as well as closer to home at the Shaker Lakes. They're beautiful creatures, incredibly graceful in appearance with their long necks and beaks. In the Tortuguero National Park of Costa Rica, there's an incredible diversity of birds that are each just as astonishing as the herons here. We saw several different types of heron on the cruise. The most striking in appearance was probably the aptly-named Tiger Heron.


We were also lucky to see wild turkeys - both a male and a female at the same time. According to the guides, this was a rare sight indeed. A toucan was another treat. Probably my favorite bird, though, was one I'd never heard of before. It's called an Anhinga. This bird, unlike some waterfowl, does not have oil to waterproof its feathers. This makes diving easier, but before the bird takes flight, it must dry its feathers by spreading its wings out. This leads to a truly spectacular sight.



I spotted several of the birds over the course of the week, and it was always a thrill. Perhaps even more exciting than the birds (and the iguana and caimans) was when our guides spotted monkeys in the trees. We saw groups of both howler monkeys and spider monkeys on the cruise. The encounter with the spider monkeys was especially amazing. We were in a section of the waterways where our boats were roofed in by the trees, and there, up above, were several monkeys, watching us. (They're very intelligent creatures, and I have to wonder what goes through their heads at such moments). After some time, they decided to move, and it turned out that there were more than we were initially aware of. And the way they move through the trees is just spectacular to witness - swinging from branch to branch with what appears to be wild abandon but is no doubt greatly controlled. I'm sure most people have heard of how monkeys have prehensile tails, but I don't remember ever seeing such a thing in action - certainly not in person and in the wild. The way the monkeys would propel themselves through the air and then grab on to a branch with their tails before letting go and grabbing the next branch with their hands was simply incredible. As with the ants, I got a sense of just how amazing life on this planet Earth is.

So, the wildlife cruise was definitely one of the (many) highlights of the trip. The whole stay in Tortuguero had a certain magical quality to it. There are no motor vehicles there at all, adding to the sense of peace and connection with nature. We enjoyed relaxing in the pool, or in our rocking chairs on the porch watching and listening to the rain pour down at night. We also enjoyed some fabulous food. I'm generally not much of a seafood person, but the fish we had at dinner the first night in Tortuguero was probably the best I'd ever had, and it got me on a kick of eating seafood throughout the week. Fresh seafood and fresh fruit are two things that I would never get tired of if I lived in Costa Rica. When it was time to leave Tortuguero after our second night, we were a little sad, but also very excited about all the other great things ahead of us on our tour. And those will be discussed in blog entries to come.

Roxboro Ravine . . . it rocks!

I thought it might be fun to write some posts about neat places around Cleveland (this isn't entirely a music blog!), so now, while I'm still recovering from a broken hip, some words about one of my favorite places to go when I have my normal mobility.

I suspect that not many people are familiar with the term Roxboro Ravine. A Google search returns very few results. Here's one, though; I think it's where I learned the name:

Path down into the Roxboro Ravine (formerly known as Ambler Park), approximately where Bellfield meets North Park Blvd. (from Cleveland Heights Historical Society)

Quite pretty, isn't it? The spot pictured doesn't look exactly the same today, but anyone who has spent a lot of time in the ravine would have no trouble recognizing the image. I'm sure that a lot more people are familiar with the place known as Roxboro Ravine than with the name Roxboro Ravine, but at the same time I'm sure many people pass by it often while remaining unaware of the wonderful place hiding in plain sight between North Park and Fairhill roads in Shaker Heights.

I was certainly one of those people once. As a cross country runner at CWRU, I often ran along North Park, on the grass right next to the ravine. I undoubtedly glanced down into the ravine from time to time while running by, but (to my memory) did not venture down there at all for my first two years of college. I remember a run my junior year where a couple of my teammates suggested heading down the wooded trails there. I voiced my disagreement, worried that it might be dangerous and not wanting to risk an injury.

I've since been injured twice on those trails, but that hasn't hampered my enthusiasm for running there. The trails aren't inherently dangerous; they just require somewhat more care and surer footing than running on roads. The broken arm in particular was due to completely reckless behavior on my part - I was walking, on a fallen tree, across the brook that flows through the ravine. That was risky enough, but then, as I neared the end of the tree, I began to pick up speed. I guess I just couldn't wait a few more steps until I reached solid ground, and I paid the price for my stupidity when I slipped, fell backwards several feet to the ground, and caught myself with an arm that one glance instantly revealed was broken. I walked out of the ravine up to North Park and was lucky enough to immediately encounter some other people, one of whom was a student at the Case Medical School and drove me to the hospital.

So I've certainly had some adventures in the ravine. (Since learning the proper name, I still usually think of it as just "the ravine." Cara and I have another name for it, as well - "Leslie Anne Ravine," a pun on the Decemberists' song "Leslie Anne Levine." I'm not even sure now which one of us came up with it, I think it was her? We are pretty silly.)

Roxboro Ravine really is a fantastic place for running. In the past few years, I've come to enjoy trail running more and more. It's a great way to commune with nature, and it's much more stimulating to my senses and my mind than running on the streets. The trails in the ravine require more attention than most. There are all sorts of rocks, roots, sharp turns, and quick ups and downs to navigate through. None of it is excessively difficult if proper care is taken, but it's a much more rugged trail than what one might typically find in, say, the Metroparks. I have to say, somewhat egotistically, that running is more fun when you can run fast, and running fast through a rugged, forested trail full of twists and turns is really fun. I've covered the trails through the ravine so many times that my feet practically know each step of the way. I really feel lucky, living in an urban environment, to have such a great place for trail running so close by. (It also seems to be a popular place for mountain biking. I've never tried mountain biking myself, and frankly, the idea of doing it on some of the more treacherous segments of the ravine's trails seems rather scary.)

Running in the ravine is great, but sometimes it can be nice to take in the joys of nature at a more leisurely pace. Cara and I often like to go on walks or hikes together (again, I'm looking forward to getting back to doing this after my injury is all better!), and Roxboro Ravine is one of our favorite places for such excursions. We've traversed the trails there in all seasons. Our most recent hike there was on a beautiful spring day, and contained a cool surprise. As we walked, we noticed there was music coming from somewhere nearby. And not someone's stereo system - this was live music, played by a couple of brass instruments. After we walked farther down the trail, an upward look revealed the musicians' location. They were sitting on the back patio of one of the houses on Fairhill that overlooks the ravine (I'm really jealous of the people who live there). It was like having a concert performed just for us while we enjoyed a great stroll through nature.

That was a memorable hike, but definitely not as memorable as the one that took place on March 7 of this year. That was when Cara and I got engaged. Here's a picture of the spot where it happened, which I took just before the big moment (the ring, at the time, was hidden in my camera bag).






















Earlier in the walk, Cara had mentioned that the ravine was "special" to her. This secretly thrilled me, knowing what I was planning to ask her before we left the ravine that day. So I definitely agree, Roxboro Ravine is a special place, for many reasons.