My Verona

College Tour 2010 begins with a four-hour drive west on I-90 from Wellesley to Verona, New York; actually, to the Fairfield Inn just off the exit for Verona, a village the charms of which we have not yet seen.  An easy ride on a blustery, mostly overcast, occasionally rainy, occasionally sunny Sunday in April afternoon.   The ride through Massachusetts to Albany is familiar enough, but from Albany west is new and pleasing.  Plenty of old farms, some still working, some just falling down barns.  The grass everywhere is green.  The fruit trees are in blossom.  The hardwoods are budding.  We follow the Mohawk River for a good long stretch and cross the Erie Canal.  We cruise past a few old towns with grand old homes and main streets and small industrial buildings along the rivers and rails, which would be fun to explore and photograph.  But not today, which is for getting where we have to go. 

The Fairfield Inn is on Willow Place.  The window of our room looks out across the parking lot and the street to an old field, the front edge of which is lined with motor homes and the inevitable piles of old bikes and toys and other things that are in various stages of the transition from belongings to junk. 

On the other side of the Inn, just across the main road that comes off I-90, is the sparkling Turning Stone casino and resort, which is owned by the Oneida Indian Nation.  A steady, heavy stream of cars turns into the winding drive and races toward the vast parking lots.  It is as if all the white people, who not so long ago took the land of the Oneida and the Mohawk and the Iroquois to turn it into farms, and saw the farms turn into sad trailer parks, realizing what they had done, believe that some offering to the Indians may save their souls in the end.