Celebrating Seneca

Counting on the Lake

Somehow the thing gets into your psyche.

There’s just one more thing about Seneca Lake. And it’s kind of hard to explain. If you’ve been around the Lake a while, you start to depend on it. When you are away, you miss it. When you need to figure something out, you visit it. For many people who have spent a part of their lives at Hobart and William Smith, Seneca Lake is a kind of diety, or shaman, or muse.

Deborah Tall, professor of English, in her book From Where We Stand (1993: Alfred A. Knopf), attempts to explain how a sense of belonging to a place defines both cultures and individuals. She provides some of the most explicative language on this otherwise intangible facet of Seneca. Alongside her observations of the facts and follies of everyday contemporary life, Tall finds opportunity to note how the Lake, as an aesthetic presence, serves as an oasis of steadiness. A constant font of the long-range view. "What it gives most freely," she says, "is the chance to muse."

The lake, she states elsewhere, is "a dramatic, compelling presence. Windy days it threatens the docks, turns into a vengeful sea. Summer evenings it can be so still, to dive into it is to send out shuddering rings as far as the eye can follow. Winter mornings, when its relative warmth hits the cold air, it hoods itself in an eerie cloak of mist. Sunsets, it’s painted with heartbreak. It is, above all, a focus, an organizer of the view. I’ve come to count on the lake."

And near the book’s end, she relates an experience that travelers returning from parts south frequently repeat."When I crest a hill to find Seneca Lake laid out before me, my heart pings with a sense of hitting center. The lake is where I first fell in love with this place, and it is still what opens a keenness in me, what makes lines of poetry leap into my head. It is where I know my most generous impulses," she writes, "my greatest optimism." — D.C.

The Seneca Lake series was researched and written by Dana Cooke and Peter Rolph '85 — writer/editors in the Office of College Relations. Portions of the series also appear in the Fall '97 issue of The Pulteney St. Survey. To request a copy, e-mail Susan Murad at murad@hws.edu.