Having spent ten years on the Cornell University campus as a graduate student, lecturer, and visiting assistant professor, I can tell you that it is one of the most beautiful and picturesque college campuses in the country. Its waterfalls and gorges surrounding the oldest part of the college fulfill Ezra Cornell's vision for a lovely spot where students would do their best work. Perched up on the East Hill overlooking Cayuga Lake it's an amazing setting, especially in the fall when the foliage changes.
But the winters are long and brutal. Coming from California it was quite an adjustment for me. The cruel thing about Ithaca is the gray sky. The air hangs thick and moist over the finger lake and the fog gets socked in over the town. The sun disappears behind dark cloud cover around the first week of November and doesn't reemerge until around the first week of May. That means December, January, February, March, and April are pretty damn miserable, especially March and April. In those two months where "spring" is supposed to begin to emerge, the weather seems to get colder, grayer, more blistery and blustery, the winds pick up, cabin fever sets in.
I remember walking each day to my classes over the suspension foot bridge only to look down on a snowy day and see the puffy snow on the ground and the misty air and feel like you could just float on a cloud all the way down the 800 foot gorge to a soft pillowy cushion of snow. It was an illusion. The entire time I was there there was about one suicide each semester. I remember walking to class one busy winter day, crossing the Fall Creek gorge bridge like any other day, only this day to see a wreath and some flowers sitting there, the telltale sign that some poor soul had lost it and gone over (the flowers weren't there the day before). It's very sad. And Ithaca can be a very, very depressing place. It's a great place to work on your dissertation because there's nothing to do outside for six months of the year except get battered by mother nature.
I was always impressed with the health services at Gannett Health Center, where highly skilled and empathetic counselors were always available. They're very helpful in getting you through to the other side during those long winters of cold, wet, windy weather, and cold, demanding and egotistical professors. Even on a "good" weather day it still "Ithacates" or is "Ithacating," which is what the locals call this dreary, cold, icy rain that mists into your eyes constantly and makes it difficult just to roam around.
The suicides are the tragic consequence of going to school on top of an ice-age glacier zone. But it sure is beautiful. And the summers, when they finally come, (and thank goodness they always do), with the lush foliage and green grass and bushy trees everywhere, Ithaca is really a paradise -- for a few months. Then the air begins to shift in September and October and after a few winters there you understand at that time of year that you're not going to see the sun for six months so you try to drink it in as much as you can.
I remember a grad student who committed suicide off one of the gorges. It was so sad because all of the other grad students knew exactly the kind of forces that could push someone to that point. But it's the gorges, even with their beauty, that make it happen so readily. It's just too easy. I often thought about it myself as I crossed one of those bridges. It would be so easy to hurl yourself over the little fence.
My advice to Cornell students during the brutal months of March and April is to go to the Chapter House or to Rulloff's or the Nines join your friends and drink lots of beer and eat pizza and chicken wings and listen to live music every night after you're done studying for your exams and writing your papers. Then go home and crawl into bed. Don't even take a peek at those gorges when you're crossing over them.
[Codicil: I'd like to add that 90 percent of my profs at Cornell were the greatest, and all of them would probably agree that "egotistical professor" is a bit redundant. And I believe that Slope Day is a healthy thing even though it's drenched in alcohol. And I think drinking with friends is better than pouting at home.]
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Rob Fishman: Cornell Suicides: Do Ithaca's Gorges Invite Jumpers?
The fatal allure of Cornell University's gorges has become the stuff of myth. And sometimes tragic reality, as this month, when three students were lost in as many weeks.
