Author Archives: Maria Mu

Some Secret History

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The tour of the secret rooms on West Campus really gave me some knowledge on the past of where I live. I knew that West was very new and probably was built quite recently but I never thought about what existed here before the fancy main houses were contsructed. Professor Blalock described how the old university halls were apparently quite unsightly, of poor quality, and did not have any of the current residential college style events that West now offers. This made me grateful to be at Cornell after 2008 when West Campus was completed. He also offered insight on what West was supposed to have that was never completed because of the recession of 2008. The landscaping was never done, for example, which is why we are stuck with just two sad picnic tables sitting in the open grass field. Hopefully someday the landscaping plan will be in place and people will actually want to spend time in that fishbowl-like quad.

Probably the most interesting destination we were taken to on this tour was the War Memorial Room in Lyon Hall. We entered through these small, locked doors and were greeted by a quite large, lofty room with beautifully painted ceiling beams and stone carving. I was glad I came on this tour to see this incredible hidden room that I would never have access to otherwise.

The juiciest information we got on the tour was about the Quill and Dagger Society room, ie. where it is, how to get into it, where to enter the elevator, etc. Of course, you kind of had to be there for that…

Hiking Casc

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Saturday morning I was more concerned about my CS lab due the next day than I was about going on a two hour hike through Cascadilla gorge. I had promised my suite mates I would go on it with them though, and I didn’t want to do the typical Cornell student thing and bail on something fun for my stream of school work. So off we went through from West Campus to Collegetown and finally to the stairs at the top of the gorge. As we descended the stairs, the bustle of Collegetown faded out. The sound of water splashing over the rock formations took over while we gathered on the path. I never noticed how large and solid the bridge between campus and Collegetown looks. The new point of view felt totally entrenched in nature despite the busy streets just a few hundred feet above. It was also impressive how deep the gorge was. I couldn’t believe that every 50 feet lead to another set of stairs.The guide gave some intriguing background on the geology of the gorge and how it has changed since the 20th century, when it was much higher under the bridge. We continued down, stopping every hundred feet to hear more on the geological formation and the past repairs Cornell has done on it, since it has been closed for 7 of the past 8 years. It was amazing to see this area I walk over all the time but have never thought about how it felt to walk through it. I was grateful to be at Cornell when the gorge was reopenned since it had been closed for so long.

I was most in awe of this massive rock formation that was hanging off the side of another bridge. There was a pile of jagged rock on the gravel under it that had fallen off from rain’s erosion. The guide said that the whole hanging rock would eventually fall down, and ominously said, “hopefully not all at once”. Standing underneath this gigantic piece of gorge, the overwhelming power of nature struck me, its majesty and its danger. It made me glad that I had come along on this excursion instead of doing the same old library routine and being sucked into my to do list all day. It is always good to step out of the small picture hustle of your Cornell workload and see what else awaits you on this beautiful campus.

Discovering My Ignorance: Cornell Apple Orchards

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Over the years I have amassed my share of fruit picking memories–vines bursting with blackberries, beetles tunneling through strawberry patches, prickly peaches from my grandmother’s tree that survives amid Beijing smog. Yes, there is something very engaging about gathering and consuming your own produce. But the missing link in my past fruit pursuits has always been understanding the science behind the fruit, the experimentation done by researchers and farmers to streamline the process or yield the largest harvest.

We followed our tour guide through a grassy corridor between rows of closely planted, rod thin apple trees, heaving with fruit. He turned to us,  started giving the tour spiel, and almost every fact he mentioned completely threw off my assumptions about growing apples. It certainly made me realize that the process involves much more planning and science that I once thought. For example, I (very ignorantly, in retrospect) thought that you could just plant the seed of an apple and a tree would grow and you would have an apple tree. Of course it is not that simple. If you plant an apple seed, it will grow into a different fruit from the original apple the seed came from. This fact alone raised my admiration for apple farmers ten fold, for dealing with such a complicated fruit. Also, I had believed that every apple on the same tree must be the same quality apple. In reality, apples that receive the most sunlight are the best quality and are sold for eating, the ones hidden at the bottom of the tree are more likely to be processed into other apple products like cider. I had a lot to learn.

All of the tour was wonderfully informative and a little hands on (we got to pick apples of course), an experience I would recommend to anyone. The best part was after we had been walking in the hot sun around the orchards, we were lead to the apple storage room, a huge, chilled room stocked with wooden crates of apples piled twenty feet high. It was cool and refreshing and it smelled divinely of the sweet, crisp essence of apple, ‘like a yankee candle’ a friend mused. If only I could bottle up that scent and extract it whenever I need a little reminder to appreciate the hardworking people who study and grow the food that we all too often take for granted.