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