I was up early the morning of the
trip, even though I’d completely packed—and checked and re-checked
everything—the night before. I hadn’t slept much. I was excited to see the
Falls, of course, but even more? I wanted to see Gil’s face—wanted to see it
and remember it. Remember it forever.
Father drove me to school in the
dawn’s early light. The parking lot was already full—well, nearly full, with
cars and parents and kids struggling with luggage. It looked as if some of them
had brought enough to supply them or a month’s stay. We were going to be there
a single weekend.
We finally found a spot—not close,
though—and Father helped me get my small case and backpack out of the trunk. Off
in the distance, closer to the school, was the bus, its engine running, adding
its exhaust to the early morning fog. We stood there, Father and I, looking at
each other.
He wasn’t going to make the first move,
say the first thing. So I grabbed him around the waist and hugged him so hard I
heard him exhale heavily. “I’ll miss you, Father,” I wept into his coat.
I was not sure he’d heard me until,
as I was hurrying toward the bus, I heard him say, “Me, too, Vickie. Me, too.”
Seventeen
Niagara Falls is nearly six hours
away from Franconia, though almost all of it is on Interstates. I-71 North to
I-271 (by-passing Cleveland) to I-90 East. Long before we reached Buffalo, New
York, right near the Falls, we began to see signs about the attraction. Ads for
motels, restaurants, sites to see.
I’d learned in Niagara: A History of the Falls, which I’d already read—and which
was in my backpack, too—that the Falls had absolutely stunned its first white
European visitors. (The local Native Americans, of course, had long before
discovered and been stunned by the Falls.) But, said author Pierre Berton, “For
most of the eighteenth century the Falls remained [to Europeans and Americans] almost
as remote as the moon.”[i]
His book has great photographs and maps that show that the Niagara River—whose
flow forms the Falls—is not really a river at all but just sort of spill-over
from Lake Erie, and that spill-over runs for thirty-five miles until it
splashes over the Falls and on into Lake Ontario.
Once—and this is almost too bizarre
to be true—on the night of 28 March 1848 the Falls actually… stopped. Just stopped. The silence woke up people who
were sleeping nearby. The next morning, puzzled residents and visitors crawled
all over the rocks above and below the Falls, explored the caves that the
torrents of water had always concealed. Some wondered if the end of the world
were at hand.
But then they heard a roar, felt
the vibration of the earth … the water was back. Everyone hurried to safety.
And what had happened? A powerful
east wind had driven the flow called the Niagara River back toward Lake
Erie—and some ice jams helped, too. But when the winds resumed their customary
direction—west to east—the Falls returned.[ii]
I know. I know. I’m getting off the
subject. But if you had to tell what I have to, you would want to get off the
subject, too.
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