I spent four summers during college traveling around Europe, and I always felt a bit ashamed that so many of the Europeans I met there had seen so much more of America than I had: they had been to the Grand Canyon, driven Route 66, hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, seen San Francisco and Hollywood, whereas I had been to within a thousand miles of none of them. In the intervening years I have seen a great deal of America, having made visits to forty-nine states by this point, which have been a source of great pleasure to me. But there are still some notable gaps. Having been born in the largest city in New York State where I have lived almost my entire life, I still had never been to the second-largest city in New York: Buffalo. This trip out to California gave me an opportunity to fill in the gap. The visit would be brief, but intimacy is made of repeated brevities.
On the way out there my companion and I stopped off at another New York site long on my list, Letchworth State Park, the “Grand Canyon of the East.” It did not disappoint. The park is a 17-mile-long segment of the Genesee River, where it cuts a channel several hundred feet deep through highly striated sedimentary rocks. The result is a kind of less colorful, more diminutive version of the Grand Canyon, but one superior in verdancy: and color is available in the fall, when the trees which cover the canyon-tops and hold the talus-slopes assume their autumn hues.
As with the Grand Canyon, the primary trail follows the rim of the canyon, and following it provided pleasingly varying views of waterfalls and rapids and the like. The river was brown with sediment, indicating that the channel was still getting deeper, at least until it arrived at a “dry dam,” a tall dam structure which impounds no water except in flood stage, when it moderates river-flow and ensures a gradual release of snowmelt. The dam is ugly when empty, and has changed the hydrology of the river: sediment has been building behind it so much so that the river very nearly disappears behind it into a miasma of wet sand more than fifty feet deep.
A nice red oak overlooking the gorge of the Genesee.
The park itself could probably use a facelift, and would probably be a good location for a park lodge like the ones which crown the rims of the Grand Canyon; it is a place for a comfortable overnight stay watching the light alter the tints of scenic grandeur. Much of the rim trail is lined with decrepit chain-link fence and some of the stonework has fallen away. But while the human things have decayed, the spot is still quite beautiful. My friend and I both agreed that this was a place we would like to return to.
Trips through New York typically fill me with contradictory feelings. The state has been losing population for quite awhile now, and the economic equality which built the Erie Canal- and Southern Tier-towns is gone; in those towns it seems every business could afford a finely chiseled cornice or sharp brickwork, and every house was comfortable and the largest house in town not more than three times as large as the smallest. Earlier generations of Americans typically felt that they were on the nine o’clock position on Fortune’s Wheel, rising to a summit. We are not so confident today.
But often I hear so much bad news about the upstate economy that I am surprised by the general prosperity I see, the comfortable homes with well-manicured lawns and multiple vehicles in the driveway. On our way into Buffalo we passed through Aurora, a tony burb of Buffalo where everything was pretty and in place and the houses were large and the kids looked like they got SAT tutors when necessary. I had been staring at the map wondering if we could fit in a visit to Millard Fillmore’s house, and sure enough, we passed right by it. We had spent enough time at Letchworth, and wanted to get to Buffalo, so we did not stop. I don’t think people much care about the presidents who dithered and compromised for the two decades prior to the Civil War. Even if our human judgement is animal and immoral, we all are more intrigued by the bloody principle of Lincoln and John Brown than the civilized “let’s agree to disagree” of Fillmore and Pierce. But we saw Fillmore’s house at least. It would be considered modest for a high school teacher today.
The house where TR became president.
We drove into downtown Buffalo, marveling at the monumental buildings, and stopped at the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site; McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo during the Pan-American Exhibition, and Roosevelt took the oath of office in the house of some prominent Buffalonian (where I believe he was staying). We did sample some of the serviceberries growing on the property while we were waiting for my friend who was going to meet us, take us around, and put us up for the night.
Loyalty to one’s hometown is one of the qualities I love and admire, and this friend had it: she had moved back to Buffalo from Brooklyn and was trying to find permanent employment making Buffalo a better place to live. She brought us down to the waterfront, where the Buffalo River enters the lake. The river, still lined with old industrial buildings, had mostly become recreational space: there was a walkway along its edge and kayakers in its waters. My friend had worked for Buffalo Riverkeeper and knew what was in the water: “If I were kayaking, honestly, I really wouldn’t want to fall in,” she said. She had done some of the writing for a guide on how much fish you can eat from the river (not much per month, that’s for sure). But people seemed to be enjoying themselves, and there was a craft fair in the park by the river. We had our first icecream of the season and there was blues music. It was perfectly pleasant and there was an atmosphere of hope in everything. The waterfront was not as beautiful as it could be, but even so it had become a destination, which meant that people would probably continually fill it with more life. We busted out a frisbee and enjoyed some pleasant exercise after a day spent mostly in the car. I picked up some apple cider donuts for tomorrow’s breakfast from a local vendor.
The Buffalo Waterfront.
She was hoping that the industrial buildings themselves would be preserved, while I was more inclined to tear them down and make everything look like Central Park – I don’t typically find industrial buildings beautiful. But I had to acknowledge that a few decades ago aesthetes didn’t find old residential buildings aesthetic either, and they tore down scads of fine waterfront buildings all over the United States which we would be much happier not to have lost now. So the preservationist ethic may be wiser in this situation.
We went down to the Outer Harbor and saw the amber light of the sunset over abandoned buildings. There was a nature preserve there which was atwitter with birds. The lake is amazing for those whose eyes are not accustomed to it: an inland ocean, you can hardly believe it is fresh water. After sunset we dropped off our things at her house, walked the pugs, and went out for dinner featuring (my friend’s specialty) local craft beers.
Bill Clinton said of his presidency that his principle was that anything which increased the interdependence of the world he thought was good and he fostered it. The backlash of my generation is to do the opposite: what my friend was trying to do in Buffalo was to make Buffalo less dependent on the rest of the world. She wanted Buffalo’s food, housing, entertainment, and products to come as much as possible from Buffalo and its surrounding countryside, the nearer the better. With that economic policy came a kind of spiritual discipline as well: to keep things smaller, more manageable, and more purposeful, to decrease the extension of one’s life in exchange for an increase in intensity, to have time enough to have a garden and tend it mindfully. I saw this going on all over the United States, where every town it seemed had some new farmer’s market and brewery and there were people who wanted to promote what was local.
to keep things smaller, more manageable, and more purposeful, to decrease the extension of one’s life in exchange for an increase in intensity, to have time enough to have a garden and tend it mindfully, to resign oneself to the local seasons and to accept their limitations. I saw this going on all over the United States, where every town it seemed had some new farmer’s market and brewery and there were people who wanted to promote what was local. But of course I saw the Clinton vision as well, the Walmart trucks barreling down the interstates – so many Walmart trucks, you can hardly believe how many there are, all over the interstates all over the country. I don’t really know which is wiser: perhaps Clinton’s wisdom will avert a major war with China. Probably both are necessary, and parts of the same phenomenon. What is noticeable is that on an individual level what we seem to desire is to participate in life more fully: my friend was going to be going off to slaughter chickens in a few days. She said that she ate chickens, and so didn’t want to continue doing it without being fully mindful of the cost of her appetites. It is probably the intense global specialization of our economy which is producing this desire for a more full and conscious human life outside the workplace.
We rose at four a.m. the next morning to make Kansas City later that day. The house was still quiet, but as we were leaving I remembered our donuts were in the kitchen. I doubled back and saw the pugs behind a kitchen gate staring suspiciously at me. Good God, I thought, those dogs are going to start barking and howling and going crazy. I stretched my legs over the gate, walked to the counter, took the donuts in hand, went back over the gate and walked out the door. The dogs didn’t make a sound.
At the beginning of a trip, your thoughts go everywhere, uncertain what the trip will be like and what it will mean, whether it will be a descent into the sorry and difficult places of your life or something happier. The silent departure and darkness encouraged thought. My traveling companion slept as the sun lightened the vineyards along Lake Erie and I listened to Peter Gabriel:
I caught sight of my reflection
I caught it in the window
I saw the darkness in my heart.
I saw the signs of my undoing;
They had been there from the start.
And the darkness still has work to do
The knotted cords untying.
The day is done, and the stone is cast.
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