Dwyer Memorial Park

Dwyer Memorial Park is on Little York Lake in Preble, a county-maintained park on a small glacial kettle lake that sits in the agricultural and forested hills between Tully and Cortland. I pass through this corridor regularly on the back roads, and Little York Lake is a fixture of it in the way that a body of water becomes a fixture when you drive past the road to it enough times and then stop long enough to understand what it is.

What it is: a clean kettle lake, modest in size, with the primary public access point maintained by Cortland County at the northern end. The park provides the beach area, the parking, and the infrastructure that makes the public access function without the deterioration that afflicts county-maintained parks when the maintenance budget is not matching the visitor load or the county ownership is not paying attention. At Dwyer, the maintenance is present and the park functions.

I came in April on the transition out of winter, which is the version of a park like this that I find most revealing for photography. The beach was not yet open for the season, which meant the park was empty in the way that parks that serve summer recreational populations are empty in April. The maintenance crew had been through. The parking lot was clear of the winter's accumulation. The access road was open and condition-appropriate.

The water in April on a small kettle lake in Central New York has a clarity and a color that the summer does not offer. The thermal mixing of spring eliminates the temperature stratification that the summer heat creates. The sky reflection in that condition, with the winter sediment having settled and the warmer algae not yet established, is a clean mirror. The deciduous treeline was at the bud stage, which produces its own specific color register, neither the bare gray of winter nor the full green of summer. Green in its first days at the bud stage, from a distance, reads as a kind of smudge of color at the horizon rather than the solid mass the full canopy becomes.

Little York Lake does not get attention from people who are discovering the Finger Lakes or the Adirondacks or the Catskills. It is a local lake, known to the people who live in this part of Cortland County and to the people who fish it and whose kids have grown up using the county beach. That local scale is part of its value as a working location. There are no tour buses, no organized recreation traffic, no days when the parking lot is full and the access road is backed up. It is available in the way that local things that have not been discovered are available.

A regular in-county stop for me, and one that earns its place on the working circuit across seasons.