Ganondagan

I took my little scouts to Ganondagan last night. It's the hilltop site of a former Seneca community that once housed 150 communal longhouses and over 4K people. Today, there lies a reconstructed longhouse in the midst of beautiful, rolling hills with hiking paths through the woods.

Our guide took us into the longhouse and tried to direct our imagination back to life in the 1600s. As we were seated on the bottom bunks that lined the walls of the house and faced the firepits, she talked about how the structure was built out of elm bark, selling pelts to the traders, herbal medicines, marriage between different tribal families, hunting at the age of 12, etc.

My kids were bored, bored, bored. Much akin to our dreaded ride aboard the Sam Patch last summer, our family apparently doesn't like to learn about the area's rich history in our spare time. In retrospect, since most of my childhood was spent in abject fear of my parents foisting another achingly dull museum tour on us (with my dad eternally chiming, "some day you'll regret this," under the misguided assumption that we would one day grow up to be cultural sophisticates), I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Like mother/like sons.

At the end, a few kids asked questions such as, "It's cold in here. Didn't they suffer from hypothermia?" but after a few minutes of Q&A, one kid finally raised his hand and asked, "Is this thing almost over?" Thankfully, he wasn't one of mine.

Unlike the scouts, I loved it. I could have stayed all night. I wanted to try on the deerskin dress with the fringe and wrap myself in a pelt. I would love to have taken off my shoes and felt the hard, cold soil against my feet. I wanted to light a fire and . . . yeah, okay, I wouldn't know how to cook anything. How did they survive without takeout?

But here's what amazed me the most: the men would walk to places as far away as the Mississippi River to hunt and gather skins to be traded. That's 1500 miles round trip, sans GPS, and they would find their way back to that same, obscure hillside in the middle of nowhere. I would get lost in the woods in two seconds flat-- nevermind trying to figure out which hill, of all the gazillion hills in upstate NY, my family lived on.

Can you hear me now?