Photo Essay: Niagara Falls

Yesterday I was up early, and left my Motel 6 in the town of Niagara Falls at sunrise for the short drive to the falls.  The road signs, arrows, and special lanes were set up for millions of visitors, but on a Monday morning in October at 8:00 am the parking lots were empty.  A light sprinkle was already touching my windshield under a clear sky as I got out.  From there it was simply a matter of following the thunder. 

They say the view is better from the Canadian side, and I’m still shooting with just an iPad camera, but still it was an epochal experience.  Under a miles-wide standing rainbow the whole river pours into the cove of space like an ocean meeting the edge of the world.  On the far side the combed green-and-white curtain falls with the slowness of fatal scale.  It’s a theater in the round of the apocalypse.  Spray blasts the stone-slick pavilions that verge right to the edge of the precipice, where the bulbed water goes over into rippled light like at the scalp of a tremendous Venus on the rise. 

Almost more enchanting were the little trails on Goat Island that follow the river around and through the island.  I was lucky to get a sunny morning between two rainy days: the hard October light and the remnants of Fall color were beautiful. 

The view back up the river

Leaving Cornwall

The day had to come.  Early this morning I squeezed my belongings into my Miata trunk once more, said goodbye to my brother Ben, and departed the family home in Cornwall Connecticut.  After more than a month of residing with him, I’m on the move again.

A last look at my Miata in the grass driveway at Cornwall

I’m happy to say that I leave my brother in a better spot than when I came.  In the last month he put an end to his unemployed streak of many years by finding TWO new jobs: part-time kitchen work at a local retreat center in Cornwall, and, come November, a two-week gig in his real line of expertise, backstage tour assistance for jazz musician Stanley Clarke on a northeast tour.  The music gig came second, but Ben had already impressed the folks at the retreat center enough so that they’ll hold his job while he’s away.  His attitude is much improved, and I like to think I helped him turn a corner.  This morning our two cars drove together as far as West Cornwall, where he turned off for the retreat center with a wave and I, with an answering wave, drove on through the red covered bridge and off for points west.  It was good to spend the time with him (and he was a wonderful host).

My brother Ben

In a earlier post I warned my readers that the blog would thin out over the last month, as my road trip turned inward to personal matters.  That period is now done, and I hope to get back to regular reporting as the last leg of my trip commences: westward across the USA back to Seattle.

I’m actually headed first for Chicago, where I’ll also be stopping for a while, staying with my friend Robb Drinkwater.  This will be another personal reunion, and on top of that I want to use the pause to get some rewriting done on my novel (which I was unable to do in Cornwall for various reasons)—so yes, it will still involve inward-focused time.  Chicago, however, is an exciting major city, as well my ancient stomping ground which I haven’t revisted in almost 30 years, so there will be plenty to do, to see, and to write about.

In the meantime I’m back on the road, heading west.  It felt good to be humming along again in my Miata, shifting smoother now with its new clutch, though still unsightly with its big dent in the rear from my Mexican misadventures.  Unfortunately for the renewal of my road trip it was a day of furious, sopping rain.  I was crossing upper New York State on I-90, and was looking forward to breaking off at lunchtime to explore the Finger Lakes region, which I’ve never seen.  When I got there, however, I couldn’t see anything, the horizons napkin-soaked into a grey-white smear beyond the highway, and I decided to just keep driving.  I had a fast-food lunch at a turnpike rest area, and made it to the west border of New York in plenty time for a hot wing dinner down the street from my Motel 6.  Ah, life on the road.

The whole day pretty much looked like this.

But I’m spending the night in the town of Niagara Falls, and tomorrow I’ll be off to see —guess what?

A Jaunt to Rockport by the sea

My haunting of friends, relatives, and old familiar scenes continued: since I was in Boston I took a quick trip Northeast to Rockport, Massachusetts, to visit Bill and Sue Waller, cousins on my father’s side whom I hadn’t seen in years.  Bill and his wife Sandy live in the same granite-walled country house near the sea that belonged to my Uncle Marvin and Aunt Pat when I was a tiny new addition to the world, and the winding road to it took my Miata by the abandoned tool factory and past glimpses of blue Atlantic with breaths of salt and seaweed, down to the unchanged corner at Philips St. where I fell through a tunnel of memories.

Sandy and Bill Waller

It was great to see my cousins.  I was sorry to miss my niece Renée and nephew Julian, absurdly elevated in my absence to college at Smith and PhD work in Germany, respectively, but I was able to sleep in Julian’s little slope-roofed bedroom upstairs that was Billy’s before him, and I had more time to catch up with Bill and Sandy.  We had an enthusiastic reunion, hugging, talking and joking in the familiar kitchen and cluttered diningroom.  Bill’s an astronomer now teaching science at the local high school; Sandy an engineer doing facilities work.  They fed me like a king (a lobster dinner the first night, rosemary lamb the second), and I regaled them with tales of Mexico.  We walked the edge of the shore on the huge, glacier-broken rocks, where multi-gabled mansions of weathered shingle face the cold Atlantic and maybe a plain white lobsterboat browses at the pots out there.  Such scenes call to deep within my childhood blood, and it was hard to reconcile them as being even on the same planet with those of Tzepotlan and Jalpan just a few months ago.

Later I strolled by myself around the town of Rockport, a salty New England town so picturesque as to be almost a parody, and hence flooded with visitors on this last of the warm sunny weekends.  Lobster buoys hung in restaurant windows; the many art shacks with their walls of sunsets and dinghy scenes were awful, but the clam chowder at the Leaf & Bean was worth waiting for (a recommendation from Julian passed through Bill), and the classic view of the harbor was one that my parents at least never tired of.  Their bygone sighs of satisfaction called up a smile of my own while I waited for the other tourists to leave the good photo spot.

My Uncle Marvin (my father’s brother) was a fine artist—many cuts above the art shack crowd—who never became well-known and eventually turned to architecture, but not before leaving behind a large body of work in a midcentury impressionistic style.  My cousin Sue, who also turned out an artist, and who lives just down the street from Bill and Sandy in a flat filled with paintings, old photos, and trinkets of the past, is compiling all of Marvin’s pieces into what will be a book of his art; she flipped through the album pages on the couch to show me.  She’s in her 60s, and hampered by an earlier stroke, but not only is she spearheading the book but she has become the family “curator” (Bill’s word); she showed me 1880s photos and told me stories I’d never known about my grandparents and great-grandparents. 

Sue Waller

On Monday morning Bill and Sandy woke early to go to work, and after sleep-drugged goodbyes in the kitchen I got into my Miata and hit the road back to Cornwall.  I had a strange errand that required a long loop: there’s a location just South of Providence, Rhode Island that’s integral to my novel, and which I had only seen on Google Street View.  Since nothing in New England is far from anything else, I drove down to see it in person, get impressions and take photos.  A high chainlnk fence that rather features in my plot turned out to be not there, which might require rewriting. 

It was an uncertain day, with fast-moving clouds pulling tidepools of sun and shadow over the autumnal hills, and I told Google Maps Navigation to get me to Cornwall while “avoiding highways” (a nice Settings option I found).  The result was an anfractuous horizontal trickle through the back roads of Rhode Island and Connecticut, my Miata top going up and down as the waves of black-bottomed cloud came and went.  Each leaf-strewn road framed in old homes and crimson and pumpkin trees was more charming than the last, until I was home.

A Wicked Fun Time in Boston

Last week I took a four-day jaunt Northward from Connecticut to visit my good friend Max in the Boston area (Belmont, to be precise), and renew my age-old love affair with Harvard Square.  The weather was unseasonably warm, the skies were blue, and it was wonderful to stroll through that little warren of streets charged with collegiate energy, retail in sentimental convection, and immutable red-brick facades.  We had lunch at the good old Border Cafe, coffee at a new arrival called Mike’s Pastry, took a walk along the Charles...

Max is always good for unusual entertainment, and he led me to a very “Harvard Square” event: Trash Night at the Brattle Theater.  This institution consists of airing an epochally bad movie and encouraging the audience to yell jokes and comments at the screen, like a live, ad-lib Mystery Science Theater 3000.  The theater was packed with nerds of all ages, the “film” was a mid-1980s abortion called “Space Rage,” filmed on location in some dirt lots using dune buggies with cardboard shells, and the impromptu commentary rang out fast and furious.  The main movie was interrupted with a few artistic “commercials” made by the organizers, little two-minute whimsies assembled from period clips that managed to be more surreal than the movie itself.  It was great fun and I recommend Trash Night to anyone with an appetite for kitch if they find themselves within range.

On another night we went out with two other old friends of mine, Cherie and Susan, to an event more properly “Boston”—a trivia contest at a sports bar (the Cherry Tree).  This was no minor-league trivia contest: it had named teams, printed blanks on which to write answers, “hint” songs played over the stereo, and a complicated five-round scoring system.  Max and the other regulars were delighted to have me along for the “Sports” category, but I would only have been useful for baseball questions and alas the “Sports” ones thrown at us were for football.  Our team finished woefully, but by then I’d had two pints of Sam Adams and was quite satisfied.  The next day the Yankees won their playoff against the Indians, which also satisfied me, though being in Boston I kept quiet about it.

Visiting Boston is always an exercise in nostalgia for me: I’ve lived in the area three separate times, dating back to my days attending boarding school at my beloved Cambridge School of Weston, where Max and I first met.  On one sunny afternoon Max and I decided what the heck, we would dial the nostalgia meter all the way up (or back, as it were), and we drove out to our old school, top-down in the Miata.  Though the Cambridge School was in session, the place was oddly deserted--most of the students, we saw, were gathered at the lower fields for a soccer game--and we were able to walk at will through the little campus of grassy lawns, wooded slopes, and buildings both new and familiar.  The big modern Art & Science center, a recent addition, was admirable but had displaced a belt of woods integral to the geography of memory; my old dorm under the pines, however, had thankfully become only more decrepit since 1980.

     Newboys, my old dorm

Personal journeys.  Visiting an old school is always a re-measuring of life against potential, and rare must be the alumnus who comes out from that stroll ahead.  I will say that it was satisfying to revisit CSW in my yellow Miata on the return loop of a great road trip through Mexico.  That’s the kind of thing that looks good in alumni magazine blurbs.  But like the Yankees, who went on from their playoff victory to lose to Houston and fall short of the pennant, my return loop brings me closer to greater dissatisfactions: my unfinished novel, my unsold land in Connecticut, my shaky prospects for finding work when I return home.  Reality approaches: in many ways my future is up in the air. 

But I still have a month of my road trip left!

A Month in Connecticut

Today marks—hard to believe!—a month that I’ve been living with my brother in Cornwall, Connecticut.  The October trees have flamed and thinned and I’ve raked the lawn into wheelbarrows full of brown leaves to cart into the back field; the crisp scent of autumn fills the air; at night Orion heels over the silhouetted evergreens and the wavy belt of the Milky Way stands crystal clear, splitting the sky over the roof of the house.  My childhood home has been a beautiful place to camp for a while.

Ben has been an excellent host, putting up with me for a month.  He’s been cooking delicious dinners, and in return I’ve tried to be a helpful boarder, buying groceries and doing bits of needed maintenance like cutting down some thorn bushes that had grown up against the house.  We’ve settled into a comfortable, perhaps too comfortable, routine: with both of us on vacation, as it were, the days blur one into another.  In the mornings over coffee, the TV news reminds me that I’m really back in the United States of Absurdia.  In the afternoons I walk the country roads or we trek through the woods together.  Evenings we’ve been advancing through the fun Marvel superhero series on Netflix that I never saw: “Jessica Jones,” “Daredevil”...

In terms of my purposes for being here, I have good news, bad news, and expensive news, as follows: 

• Helping Ben find a job: victory!  With my assistance he landed a part-time waiter gig at a local retreat center, though it doesn’t start for another three weeks.  I’m still looking to find him something else with which to supplement it, as that alone won’t meet his bills.
• Selling land: fail!  I have some land here for sale, and was hoping to unload it this year, but unfortunately Cornwall has fallen into an epochal buyers’ market, with dozens of properties listed.  Not sure why.  But after meeting with my real estate agent I see no likelihood of selling my piece for what it’s worth anytime soon.
• A cheap road-trip month: Whoops.  One goal of spending a month here was to ease my travel budget, but wouldn’t you know it: my Miata’s clutch finally failed for good and needed to be replaced!  An $1100 bill.  Still, better to have it happen here than when I cross the country in winter...

The main thing my brother and I share in common is a love of music, and Ben, who plays a mean blues guitar, has introduced me to the Northwest Connecticut music scene.  Each Thursday he plays at a friendly open-mic night in the town of Norfolk, often with his friend Jason, and I’ve gone along as a percussionist.  Of course, I don’t have any drums here, but in true percussionist fashion I made do with a metal popcorn tin (it had a great sound, though up on stage the lid did tend to pop off mid-song).  There’s a good music community here with a lot of skilled performers; the open-mic evenings tend to end with a fun general jam session, and overall it’s made me miss my drumming roots.

Ben and I onstage at the Infinity Music Hall in Norfolk, CT

When our turn was done I took photos of the other performers, where I really missed my defunct Canon T6i: my iPad camera just doesn’t do too well in low light.  Still, it was worth capturing the bevy of eclectic New England characters strutting their respective stuff.

    Ben and his friend Jason