jxmartin

The Pheasant House In the late 1960's,while attending college at S.U.N.Y Geneseo, I worked a few summers as seasonal help in Erie County's Chestnut Ridge Park. It is a thousand acre sprawling expanse of park and woodland some 12 miles South of Buffalo,N.Y.. The most prominent feature of the park is a large hill, atop which sits an attractive stone-flagged casino that is a mirror image of a baronial manor in the Black Forest of Bavaria, in Germany. The enormous toboggan runs and sled hill here have been a source of Winter fun to hundreds of thousands of Western New Yorkers since the park's creation in the 1930's.

THE WINDY CITY As we walked along the banks of Cazenovia Creek, the wind howled around us like a Banshee's wail. The water here is swift moving and clear. The vee, of tiny ripples, disturbed the surface only when flowing around the odd rock or obstruction in the stream bed. The leaves onshore whirled around us in miniature cyclonic eddies, like a special effect from the movies. It is Fall in Western New York. I pulled my coat tighter around me and leaned into the gale. It gets like this in Buffalo sometimes.