Growl Sounded Awfully Good

 

Nothing’s so far when you’ve already done it once.  Niagara Falls, New York is about a five-and-a-half-hour drive from here.  I’ve done it before, about a month ago, on election day.  But I spent the night there in Buffalo before I came back.  Today, I have it in my mind to go all the way up, pick up my older daughter and drive straight back.  I made it about five minutes down the road before I realized I needed to turn around and grab my phone that had been charging there in the wall. 

 

One call.  And then another.  Driving up to Albany is familiar.  The Catskills come into view.  Its misty where you cross the Platekill Creek, as it often is this early in the morning.  By the time my calls have finished, I’ve lost WFMU and try to listen to the news on NPR, but all they seem to have is “local” news.  I am tuning in to hear that Trump or some of the other prominent Republican deniers have finally confronted reality, but this is all about the New York State legislative agenda for 2021 and then a special on just why polling was once again so inaccurate, which I don't want to listen to.

 

What’s that over to the right?  It’s a broad, flat estuary, and I don’t know the name of it till I stop at a rest stop to relieve myself.  There in the vestibule is a huge map of New York State and I now becomes clear that this is the Mohawk River and it flows all the way from up near Lake Oneida, all the way down till it joins the Hudson, just north of Albany.  This must have been a major artery on the Erie Canal.  This broad, open plane is why cities like Schenectady, and Rome and Utica came intro prominence.  An article I skimmed in this month’s National Geographic on the Great Lakes, referred to it as America’s third coastline.  This merited some reflection. 

Classic rock radio, somewhere up-dial yielded The Guess Who’s  “American Woman,” which I immediately turned up to full blast and tried to sing along with Burton Cummings who’s white-boy grizzled growl sounded awfully good to me.  I sounded pretty good to me too, in the way that one does shredding in the shower, with no one around.  Hitting the second syllable of the word “American” way up high where Burton does, was beyond my capacity to handle without cracking.  I’m confident that I sounded excellent, as I know there aren’t any recordings out there to disabuse my vanity.

About thirty minutes out of Buffalo my wife called and suggested my older one was already on the pedestrian bridge, heading back to the U.S. side.  Her phone wasn’t working.  We agreed we’d meet up at tacky glass tower they have there with Chinese and Halal, and Indian and a half a dozen other cuisines advertised there for the boisterous pedestrian traffic that’s been reduced to a trickle now.  I guess it was late enough in the afternoon so that the young kid who came up to collect fees only asked for $5.00.  On Election Day, it was $10.00.  My wife called and said she was still crossing the bridge.  Quite a bridge.  I walked over to the where the exit must be.  There were two people with luggage.  But she was solo.  Not long after she rang.  Her phone worked again, now that she was over the border.  That was her, there talking to another young lady whose dad was also picking her up.  “No.” She didn’t need a view of the Falls.  Caught it from the Canadian side.  We headed back along US 90 and had such a great talk for the next five hours.  I marveled at what a remarkable woman she continues to wax into. 

 

 

 

Tuesday, 11/24/20