Chautauqua Vacation 

We have just returned from a very enjoyable family vacation. Sara flew in from Denver early on Saturday. She, Beth’s family, and I drove to the Chautauqua Institution in western New York State in a three-vehicle caravan. Mike carefully loaded two kayaks and our Mini-fish sailboat into my van; Sara and I with a load of luggage set off in one car; and Beth and Rachael followed in another car filled with groceries and luggage (and their blue tick hound Gunnar). We felt at home immediately once we checked into the same house we rented last year, at 8 Judson Avenue. 

The Institution is a unique facility. For forty-three weeks of the year it is a sleepy little resort village located on the west shore of Lake Chautauqua where about four hundred permanent residents regularly host perhaps an equal number of visitors. Comes summer and “the Season”, everything changes. It turns into a gated community flooded with well over ten thousand outsiders, eager to soak up “the Chautauqua state of mind”. The Institution is home to over one thousand houses, numerous small hotels, the magnificent Athaneum Hotel, the massive roofed outdoor Amphitheater, educational buildings, and small commercial shops and restaurants. Most of the houses, built well over a century ago in classic Victorian style, are immaculately maintained, sporting wrap-around porches, sometimes on several floors. The lots are small, with beautiful flower plots. Vehicular traffic is minimized, with many streets restricted to pedestrian and bicycle traffic. The heart of the community is Bestor Plaza, a typical nineteenth century town square with a large fountain as its centerpiece, a classic Library building on one side, and shops and a small hotel on the others. The Plaza has the feel of a Norman Rockwell painting, and the large number of folks enjoying it are equally appropriate.

The Institution was initially founded fifteen decades ago as a retreat for Methodist Sunday School teachers. It has morphed into a center for culture and education (including numerous religions), complemented by physical activities (especially those taking advantage of the lake). Each day there are short course classes available on a wide variety of subjects. Beth taught one this year on Japanese literature; Mike, one on Russian literature. Not to be outdone, Sara and I took a delightful course entitled “Innovators in the Hollywood film musicals”. It will be the subject of next week’s column.

Each morning world-class experts give lectures in the Amphitheater appropriate to the theme of the week. Last week the theme was “Water: Crisis, Beauty, and Necessity”; all the lectures were presented by National Geographic scientists. I was impressed by an early lecture in which a hydrologist presented a model of the planet’s water cycle, highlighting the fact that only one third of the Earth’s land surface has sufficient fresh water to support agriculture. This defined a crisis well; unfortunately, the rest of the lectures, although discussing impressive research accomplishments, failed to address this problem. We heard talks on the underwater ecology of the Great Barrier Reef; extracting ice cores from the top of Mt. Logan in the Yukon, at an elevation of 20,000 feet above sea level; photographing the Coelacanth fish, believed extinct for many years, at an ocean depth of four hundred feet; etc. Each talk was quite interesting and the research significant, but it is a real stretch to see how they related to the theme.  

Each evening the Amphitheater is the venue for a major musical performance. I enjoyed two concerts by the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, an organization made up of expert musicians from major symphony orchestras all over the country. One evening they performed with the “Third Coast Percussion Quartet”, four young men adept at extracting sounds from blocks of wood hit by mallets. They played a contemporary piece specially commissioned for them. Fortunately, the orchestra alone also performed an interesting suite of selections from Benjamin Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes”. Another evening we were treated to Shostakovich’s First Symphony, a typical “first” symphony appropriate for the contemporary music of the time. Many portions in it reminded me of Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The closing concert this week was a blockbuster with the Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge. I was unfamiliar with either group, so I sampled their biggest hits on YouTube. As a result, I elected to not enter the arena, but sat outside on a lawn chair. After sampling the Indigo Girls’ first three selections, I folded my chair and returned to our house, leaving the rest of my family inside the Amphitheater with well over four thousand wildly enthusiastic fans.  

One evening we entertained my next-door neighbor, Howard Alex. He owns a house not far from the one we rented. Howard’s summer has been blessed by extended visits from each of his three children and their families. Another evening we visited my neighbors, Ann and Randy Fox, for dinner. It is easy to be envious of folks who have the opportunity to own houses in the Institution. The highlight of the week, however, was our annual dinner on the porch of the Athaneum Hotel. I can’t imagine a better setting for a meal than on that porch on a warm, sunny evening with a gentle breeze wafting off the lake.  

So what is the “Chautauqua State of Mind”? It is partly intellectual curiosity, the opportunity to learn about world shaking themes (the water crisis) as part of a large audience, coupled with the opportunity to explore one’s niche interests (Hollywood film musicals) in an intimate classroom. It is partly the opportunity to have high level cultural experiences – music, art, drama, literature, etc. It is partly the nostalgic, nineteenth century, walkable small town America environment. And it is partly the low-key, low stress, relaxed lifestyle that permeates every facet of life. We like it, and we already have our name first on the list to rent 8 Judson Avenue for Week Eight next summer.

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