I write like
L. Frank Baum

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Funny! I discovered this website “I Write Like” thanks to blogging friend Karen. You paste a section of your writing into the applet, which then analyzes your writing style and compares it with other authors.

I got L. Frank Baum. That’s funny, because I have never read one of his books. But at least he was a New Yorker! He was from Chittenango, NY, a town along Route 5 that was actually founded by my ancestors.

The section of writing I had analyzed was from an older essay I wrote, “Eating Crow.” I wrote it early one morning, before the clamor and clutter of the day had struck. I like the piece. I’ll include it here for you.

Eating Crow

Where did that expression come from? It has negative connotations mostly, I suppose, because of the crow. It is early morning and the world is still quiet. The rustle of cars on the road hasn’t begun outside my walls yet. I am sipping coffee, pondering whether I should start the laundry early. A group of crows is in the neighborhood. I can hear their cackles all the way down the street and in my yard. It is strange how sounds echo so clearly very late at night and in the early morning. Why is that? Is the air thinner at those times so that sounds echo more easily?

The American crow is a despised bird. Well, at least, I despise them. And a group of crows is not called a group, it’s called a murder. How appropriate.

Crows are pesky birds. They drive out all the other songbirds in the summer. Now that it is autumn, and most of the songbirds have migrated or are in hiding, the crow finds advantage and comes boldly out of the woodwork. The crow is such a brassy, crass bird. There is a superiority in their eye when they stare down at you from their perches in the highest trees. Any seeds (or dog food) that I leave out for other critters are promptly stolen by these murders of crows. They descend arrogantly– right in front of me– in a black cloud of greasy feathers to gobble up the treats. I chase them away and they flap half-heartedly– just enough to move out of stone-throwing distance. But even before I’ve turned my back, they are back again, eating another’s seeds. My cats are terrified of the birds and refuse to chase them. Some help they are. They probably pay off the crows with cat food, begging the birds to allow them to stay here. There’s probably a whole mafia ring of crows controlling my property underneath my nose.

For the past few years, Upstate cities have been plagued by murders of crows. You can’t shoot them out of the city trees and off apartment balconies, so people have resorted to banging pots, blowing sirens, and aiming laser lights at them. This is in the hopes of disturbing their nesting places. It works, temporarily. The murders of crows flee the cities like a CEO on vacation, and head for the hills– my hills. So now I must cope with them– until next summer when the crows descend to feast upon the city again.

Some folks say crows are smart. Aesop’s fable, The Crow and the Pitcher, is about a wise bird. In the story, a thirsty crow comes upon a pitcher with some water at the bottom. His beak cannot reach the water. The crow drops pebbles in the pitcher, one by one, to raise the water up to a level where he can drink. I think it’s an odd story, because wouldn’t the water trickle down around the pebbles back to the bottom? The stupid crow should have used a big rock, that will raise the water for ya.

Noah sent out a raven from the ark. I have wondered if this was a crow. Crows are sometimes called ravens. Noah’s dove had returned, but the raven never did. Noah took that to mean that the raven remained alive, and there was dry land where the bird could live and eat. I know this is true because crows never die and they always go to the best feeding places first and never share.

When I was a kid, my mother constructed a scarecrow for her garden. Who ever came up with that idea first? I wonder if it ever worked. The crows completely ignored our scarecrow. They used him like a Charmin toilet roll, that murder of crows.

I suppose crows do serve a purpose. Somewhere, in the great universal scheme of delicate ecological balance, I know they must serve a purpose. Don’t ask me what it is, though. I just might cast my vote to bring to extinction those murders of crows.

They are quieter now. I can barely hear them far up the hill in the back. The cars outside are starting to rustle and overpower the ubiquitous cackling. I guess I should get the laundry going now.

Chittenango Falls is about 170 feet high. The gorge, as you can see in the photo above, is enormous. There is no doubt that a whole lot of water once flowed down this creek.

The park is very woodsy. Admission for us (a minivan with four kids) was $6. There are no amusements at this park, and the trails are short (some were closed; I suspect it was because of the severe flooding we had before our visit that summer of 2006). But the “atmosphere” was right up our alley– thickly wooded forests, roaring water, lots of green space, benches, and beautiful stonework. The kids were enthralled with watching tufted titmouse birds dive and spin with vicious acrobatic moves over the water (we figured they were catching bugs). Chipmunks scurried everywhere, walnuts, dropping from trees, were just begging to be opened, and there were amazing fossils to be found in the large stone slab steps.

There were fossils in the stone stairs. The kids loved discovering them. According to Wikipedia, the Chittenango Falls park is home to the “endangered Chittenango Ovate Amber Snail (Novisuccinea chittenangoensis).”

Live specimens of the Chittenango snail cannot be found anywhere else on Earth.

I love that Latin word for Chittenango: chittenangoensis. We did not spot any snails.

We enjoyed terrific views of the falls at all levels: above, looking straight down, halfway down, below, and down the Chittenango Creek a bit. I liked the trails best of all. Walking down the trail to the gorge below was no easy feat. The trail was rocky and steep, and narrow at times. I guess that is part of what made it fun– it was adventurous!

The trail begins at the top of the falls. There are a lot of areas convenient to the view.

There were logs and other mangled debris snagged to the rocks. It can be safe to surmise that all this junk was a result from the Big Floods of June 2006 here in Upstate New York.

You can see the wooden footpath in the photo above. A steep trail takes you directly to it. Click the picture if you want a larger view, and then click “All Sizes” for a very large photo.

We made our way down to the gorge toward the creek.

The mulch trails were sometimes a little slippery. This is not a place to wear high heels, ladies. Believe it or not, we’ve been hiking at other places, and some of the women actually had high heels.

Here we are on the footbridge over the creek.

The footbridge leads to more paths, and we wanted to take them, but it was blocked off. A barrier with a sign said that due to the flooding, the trails on this part of the falls was closed. Rats.

We didn’t stay as long in the gorge as we liked. The heat and humidity was unbearable– it was 85 degrees (F) even at 6:30pm. I’d read that down here in the gorge the humidity is about 100%. It definitely felt that way for us. The forest literally sweated around us. The creek looked so terribly inviting, but wading was not allowed. The creek is Chittenango Creek.

This is our idea of a vacation day: quiet, outdoors, near water. You’ll NEVER find me at DisneyLand or Enchanted Forest, ugh. The only thing I wished we could have done was hopped in the water on such a scorcher of a day.

The view of the falls is best in this area.

We continued on our journey, and the trails opened up to a nice picnic area.

There are restrooms and shady places to sit here. It would have been nice to have brought a picnic lunch. Too bad we didn’t, because it was lunchtime and we were hungry now.

Time to make the arduous hike back up to the parking area.