Chapter 3
Never Over the Falls
Niagara Falls, Canada.
It was so easy to condemn it as a tourist trap – high prices, cheap
thrills and souvenirs – tourists guided and seduced into spending their money. But the place was far more complex and fascinating
than that. I had written an article on Niagara
Falls for a major magazine, pointing out the negative touristic aspects of the Falls. But I also combined them with a deeper, more
intimate look at the Falls and the city that was attached to them, coming away with a more
positive view. I had not realized that the
editor held an unshakable disdain for the place. It
seemed he was interested only in piece focused on the cheap, gaudy and sensationalized
elements of the Niagara Falls. I rewrote the
piece more to his liking, but it was not negative enough.
I found this unfair and gladly accepted a kill fee.
Photo: Illumination of The Horshoe Falls - Niagara Falls,
Canada. Copyright 1980 - 2008 Thomas Martin Smith. All rights reserved.
But to a
significant degree, he was right. Niagara
Falls had become its own theme park that might aptly have been called Human Follies Park. The current legacy of human development that clung
to the roaring cataract sucked its living from it – leeches on the green and blue
back of Niagara. It ran the gamut – the
chaotic plethora of hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops and those “other
attractions” as diverse and unrelated to the Falls as Marineland and the glut of
museums honoring Elvis, Houdini and Dracula, as well as Ripley’s Believe It or Not,
Guinness Book of World Records and Louis Tussaud Wax Museum, not to mention miniature
golf, a casino and, as mentioned, the world’s largest Ferris Wheel – so many
commercial extravaganzas that you had to see this carnival for yourself to appreciate it. Fun houses to the human experience.
What the hell,
each to his or her own – after all, 17 million people came here every year to partake
of the Falls and its environs. And no one was forcing them to go anywhere or to spend their
money.
The
“tourist traps” were centered primarily in the area adjacent to the north
boundary of Queen Victoria Park, anchored to the steep road that sloped down from the
bluff, Clifton Hill, and out of view of the Falls. It
was a gaudy, glittering, noisy carnival of wax museums, loudspeakers, pulsating lights and
fast food emporiums. Its kiosks and gift shops
hawked everything from pens that let you strip a pretty woman by letting the ink flow
down, to caps with plastic feces on the brim, to fine gold jewelry and Waterford crystal.
On and around
Clifton Hill you saw other museums, dedicated to geological wonders and all manner of
human engineering, heroism, extremism and buffoonery.
Along the gorge on the outskirts of town, you heard the ominous but benevolent hum
of monstrous hydro-electric generators sucking their drive from the river’s flow.
But any
cutting satire or witty parody that could easily be drawn down on a place like this only
oversimplified and distorted its reality. I
felt that the true essence of Niagara Falls was in the range of human experience and our
diverse relationships with Nature.
As Melawend
and I motored slowly toward the seductive precipice, I saw on my right along the
riverbank, the massive façade of an Italian palace – a grandiose monument to the
extortion of public favor, architectural hucksterism, almost a political statement in
stone. In this case it had been directed at
potential electric power ratepayers of the early 1900s.
This was the old Electric Development Company powerhouse. The EDC was a syndicate of which two of its
founding companies were known for price gouging and inferior service. To dissuade the public, who loudly favored public
power, the EDC built this neo-classical monstrosity of Indiana limestone. It was 91 feet wide, 40 feet high and had a
colonnade of massive stone pillars along its 462-foot length. It was nothing more than a mammoth hall the size of
five regulation hockey rinks that was used to house eleven 200-ton electric generators. It was sealed up for now – destined to become
another museum?
Just beyond
the powerhouse, where the turbulent river curves before plunging over the
“horseshoe”, tourists of all ages were strolling along the promenade. There was
an Oriental family with the mother toting their daughter who was skipping along while the
father carried their infant son on his shoulders. An
older couple that wore matching windbreakers walked hand in hand. A young couple with long wild hair and dull baggy
clothes embraced by a tree beside the river. There
were many tourists ambling to and from the Falls. Their
numbers would swell my midday until you had continuous threads of people weaving along.
I envied those
who would be seeing the Falls for the first time, especially those who had come a long
distance – even the ubiquitous busloads of ever-posing Japanese tourists. I envied those old enough to retain their first
impressions – I had none. I had first
seen the Falls when I was a baby and there were no photographs captioned,
“Tommy’s fist view of the Falls”. Even
if there were, I’d only be interested in seeing what my parents looked like then, and
I had other photographs to show that. Through
the years, the Falls, though never the less awe-inspiring for lack of a first impression,
were simply easily accessible to me, just 25 miles from home.
I wondered
what preconceptions those first-time viewers had of the Falls. I had met some of their kind over the years and a
lament about the area was echoed: “Why didn’t they leave it in its natural
state?”
What many
tourists apparently did not realize was just how many diversely motivated people comprised
“they” and that the first of them had come over 300 years ago. Perhaps if someone like John Muir had been the
first white man to see pristine Niagara, you might have had, instead of manicured lawns
and gardens, the dense natural forest with only footpaths from which to observe this
natural wonder. Niagara Falls was doomed long
before it was discovered. It fell when people
first figured this out: Natural Wonder + Development = PROFIT$
It can be
justly said that the first white man to see and publicly tell about the Falls was the
first in the long succession of its exploiters. Father Louis Hennepin wore the gray cloak
and cowl of the Recollet priest. In 1678, he accompanied LaSalle in his quest for the
Mississippi River, seeking for himself escape, adventure and a little glory. On a cold December morning, peering through
snow-covered evergreens and leafless deciduous trees, he strained to discern the source of
a growing noise that he would later describe as “…a sound more terrible than
thunder.” He descended the rugged bluff,
likely near the present Clifton Hill, and came upon the gorge, “…this most
dreadful Gulph.” He wrote: “When one
stands near the Falls and looks down, one is seized with Horror, and the Head turns round,
so that one cannot look long or steadfastly upon it.”
Hyperbolical
Hennepin, in his Description de la Louisiane,
embellished his description of the Falls with such phrases as “could not behold
without a shudder” and “a great and horrible cataract”. He created such a fantastic image of the Falls that
he became famous in Europe, thereby becoming the first of Niagara’s hucksters,
extorting personal gain at the expense of truth and the innocence of his readers. He might be forgiven, for exaggeration of exotic
wonders was the fashion of his time. The first
view Europeans got of the Falls was an engraving based on his description, one that gave
the Falls a height of 500 feet and depicted them against a background of mountains,
something with which his European readership could identify.
But would the
fact the Falls were only 167 feet high and dropped from a flat forested plain have kept
tourists away? Not likely. Their splendor was in their width (now 20 times
wider than they are high). It was in those
tumbling, churning waters and that billowing mist and the forbidding walls of the gorge.
For almost a
century, interest in Niagara was swept aside by pressing matters such as the Conquest of
1759 of the British over the French at Quebec City and by the American Revolution and by
the War of 1812 – wars that created two nations – leaving one of them divided to
this day.
(We’ll cross that shaky national bridge soon in this story.)
The Falls once
again defied description. They defied John
James Audubon – the exacting painter of birds – to paint the cataract. He gave up, concluding that he would
“…imprint them where alone they can be represented – on my mind.” Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, felt that a new
language would be needed to describe them.
But the Falls
did grow in grand superlatives since those first penned by Hennepin until they became one
of the greatest travel clichés of the new world. They
became part of The Fashionable Tour of the 1830’s, drawing rich tourists who were
burdened by great expectations.
Melawend and I now rode slowly beside what was
perhaps the best viewing area – along the stone and iron railing in front of Table
Rock House. It was a source of pride to me
that having got my photographic feet wet on this spot, that my work, “Made of the
Mist” hung inside this, the building closest to the Horseshoe Falls.
Those tourists
now huddling by the railing, leaning over the very brink of the Horseshoe Falls, and
getting wet in the drizzle from the mist, could look across the frothing abyss to Goat
Island. That splendid piece of real estate
that separated the American Falls and the Bridal Veil Falls from the Horseshoe Falls was
almost as pristine as it was when August Porter bought it in 1815 when it was ceded to the
U.S. He had defied requests to develop and
commercialize the tiny island, choosing instead to put up a toll bridge and let people see
the cataract from wooded pathways.
It was from
Goat Island in 1834 that Nathaniel Hawthorne first looked upon the Falls. The following year he wrote, “Never did a
pilgrim approach Niagara with deeper enthusiasm than mine.”
Well, perhaps
some of these leaning tourists might have contested Hawthorne’s claim. I wanted to park Melawend and ask some of them what
they thought of the falls. A few years back, I
had asked that of some visitors. A couple from
London was touring Canada on their fifth wedding anniversary. The husband, standing behind his wife with his arms
around her, rocking her gently, said, “There is so much more to them than you see
from books.” Others said “Truly
grand”; “Awesome!”; “Breath-taking!” “Do you know where the
public washrooms are?” A middle-aged
woman from Australia said, “I’m utterly disappointed. They’re not nearly as high as I’d been
led to believe." Hennepin hyperbole
resurrected by one of her friends.
Hawthorne had
come under such a burden.
“Oh, that
I had never heard of Niagara until I beheld it,” he wrote. “...but I had come thither haunted with a
vision of foam and fury, and dizzy cliffs, and an ocean tumbling down out of the sky
– a scene, in short, which Nature had too much good taste and calm simplicity to
realize. My mind struggled to adapt these
false conditions to the reality, and finding the effort vain, a stretched sense of
disappointment weighted me down. I climbed the
precipice, and threw myself on the earth – feeling that I was unworthy to look at the
Great Falls, and careless about beholding them again.”
More typical
tourists today, whether they were disappointed or not, would grab that “we were
here” photo of themselves with the Falls in the background. I had obliged a few such tourists by turning their
own cameras upon them and shooting them thusly. Then
they would take their tours, plod through the carnival of Clifton Hill, stuff their
suitcases with Niagara Falls souvenirs, and leave, later to boast they had
“done” Niagara Falls.
They were not
unlike the American tourist Hawthorne encountered – “no rare character among
us,” as he, the tourist, “produced a volume of Captain (Basil) Hall’s tour,
and tried to adjust Niagara to the captain’s description, departing, at last, without
one new idea or sensations of his own.”
Hawthorne
softened his own view and became contemplative, concluding that; “the beholder must
stand beside it in the simplicity of his heart, suffering the mighty scene to work its own
impression.”
Perhaps it
took a woman’s sensitivity to see an essence of beauty beyond the horrific power, as
did Harriet Beecher (Stowe), who was yet to pen Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. She was visiting in the
same year as Hawthorne. She sat on the huge
now-fallen rock ledge known as Table Rock that existed just beyond those leaning tourists. “Oh, it is lovelier than it is great,”
she wrote, “so veiled in beauty that we gaze without terror…”
Eight years
later, Charles Dickens stepped off a train from Buffalo during his five-month tour of the
United States. Unlike Hawthorne, the great
author (yet to write Great Expectations and The Uncommercial Traveler), approached the Falls
with child-like impatience: “…every moment expecting to behold the spray.” Like so many in the presence of overwhelming
Nature, Dickens was moved to ecstasy. Of
standing on Table Rock, gazing upon the Falls, he wrote, “…when I felt how near
to my Creator I was standing, the first effect, and the enduring one – instant and
lasting – of the tremendous spectacle, was Peace, Peace of Mind, tranquility, calm
recollections of the dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness; nothing of gloom
or terror. Niagara was at once stamped upon my
heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses
cease to beat, forever.”
Dickens spent
“ten memorable days…on that Enchanted Ground!” wandering, studying the
cataract from every viewpoint he could find, “lighted by the sun and by the
moon.”
The history of
Niagara Falls was full of bright and dark moments, full of hucksterism, exploitation,
engineering marvels, conservation, cheap thrills, daredevil stunts and tragedies, life and
death – these things filled volumes. As a
whole, the area was overdeveloped and yet the area immediately around the Falls was green
and, when few tourists were around, peaceful. I
had lived nearby nearly all my life and I was still discovering amazing things and
tranquil niches. As Melawend and I neared the edge of the city, I recalled how I took the
place for granted, realizing that I could always come back and yet I would not be bored,
if I just learned a little more. This time, I
just didn’t know if I would be back. And I decided that that would be the way I would
approach the clichés to come.
Now, I was
nearing the edge of the immediate area I regarded as "home". Niagara Falls had been part of it. I shopped at its malls, went to its cinemas, ate at
its fast food emporiums and sought inspiration and solitude in its quiet recesses. It was a great place for a divorced father to bring
his daughters and share some good times. I had done my first model shoot here and had had
my first one-man photo exhibition in Niagara Falls.
As Melawend
and I continued along the parkway toward Niagara-on-the-Lake, I remembered coming to a
particular place when I was lonely. It was the
Sundowner, a strip bar on the far side of town. Many
of the strippers were French Canadian girls, beautiful and smiling but necessarily aloof.
“I do
zeese for Jacques, my seex-year-old boy” Dominique had said. “I wants nice zings and a good future for
heem.”
She was
sitting at the bar, smoking heavily, wearing the briefest of bikinis, waiting her turn. She looked at the men who were gawking at the
dancer on stage. “For me, zey
don’t exeest. I am a dancer. I dance. I
take off my clothes. The money is good. Zat eeze all.”
The patrons
were men of every age and background and you often saw the glint of wedding rings in the
dim light around the stage. The jolliest
men were white-haired and ruddy-faced and wore suits.
Many men were stern-faced, suggesting defiance: I don’t have to be here. But
if you were alone and missed making love, it soothed the lonely soul to see all these
beautiful completely naked girls, their seductive gyrations and their come-hither smiles. If you smiled back at one, she might come very
close to you and mock-proffer you her breasts or perhaps rear entry. You thought: Good God, if I could just take one of these girls
home, just one! If you thought a bit
longer: For what?
A one-night stand? A sexual
souvenir? Yeah!
And longer still: I don’t want to be here – I want one girl in my life.
The reason
behind making love was that there would be more love after the loving. Corny to some, but that’s how I felt. I would sip my beer slowly, pick one girl as my
favorite and study her expressions, her moves and her body (as a photographer, I loved the
play of light on the female form). Then, like
you can now temporarily hold a website after disconnecting from the Internet, I would take
those images, until they faded, and fanaticize that she was Her, the girl I had spent many
years looking for and had not yet found.
This memory
and the bulge in my crotch subsided too as Melawend and I followed the Parkway along the
gorge. With “The Honeymoon City"
behind us, my thoughts then turned to companionship and how very important that could be. I was leaving home and became intensely aware that
I was alone. But beneath me I could feel the
steady soft vibration of Melawend. I was
comforted by a sudden realization that there would be a constant presence of energy,
warmth and unquestioning support (a physical support that I began see as including
spiritual and moral support). For the moment,
I was glad to be alone. I didn’t want
anyone to know that I was even contemplating a close friendship with a machine. In this leaving home for a journey all the way
around the world, it became obvious that this motorscooter and I would come to depend a
great deal on each other.
As Melawend
and I rounded the curve high above the Whirlpool, I remembered the story about Mr. and
Mrs. Eldridge Stanton, a young honeymoon couple who had become trapped on an ice floe in
the river and were caught in the raging current. It
must have been heart-rending to stand helplessly on the shore and see them embracing each
other just before the floe capsized and Eternity claimed them. Their bodies were never found.
We rounded the
curve and headed for the Niagara Glen. I
remembered being with friends of my youth who had been ripped from life – I
remembered spear-fishing with Bill “Stretch” Pooler who died many years later in
a car accident while asleep in the back seat. I
remembered wrestling with fiery Johnny Vandersluis who lost his life in a motorcycle
accident. Life could be so short, I thought,
fate so cruel.
We must not waste a single living day!
My mood had
been in flux – flowing from uncertainty to exhilaration to nostalgia to sorrow. Now there was a growing anxiety: I must get moving!
I barely noticed the Sir Adam Beck Generating Stations or the Floral Clock when I
passed them or the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge when Melawend and I went under it. As in one those drives you make habitually, I was
riding absent-minded of my destination – now heading for Niagara-on-the Lake (once
Newark, the capital of Upper Canada). It was
at the mouth of the Niagara River where it flowed into Lake Ontario. I knew what was there – the Shaw Festival
Theatre, Fort George, and streets of preserved stores and mansions. And in the park by the river’s mouth there was
the gazebo that had been built for the filming of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone.
Did I really have to see all of that again, just now?
When I reached
the junction at Queenston Heights where the Parkway descends the Niagara Escarpment, I
stopped. Just before I did, I had seen the
image of Sir Isaac Brock, hero of the War of 1812, standing proudly high above the trees
atop a fluted, climbable Doric column of Queenston limestone. That was enough.
I decided to get on with my eastward journey around the world, which meant
that I would have to turn west here and head around The Golden Horseshoe. That was the rich hook at the west end of Lake
Ontario: vineyards and orchards merging with the rich commercialized and industrialized
megalopolis that stretched from St. Catharines, through Hamilton and Toronto and ended at
Oshawa.
There was one
last detour I could not forego. In St.
Catharines, I rode slowly past the big white stucco house that had belonged to Tom and
Anna Darby, my maternal grandparents. The
house was narrower now. The breezeway and
Grandpa’s tool shed had been torn down and a new house had been squeezed into the
plot where Grandma had had her beloved garden with its huge chrysanthemums. A compact car was in the semicircular driveway
where Grandpa had parked his prized Rolls Royce – I remembered that Grandpa use to
sing, “Me and my Shadow…”
I imagined the
interior the way I remembered it – the vaulted ceilings; rooms made elegant by
Grandma’s artistic taste and Grandpa’s collecting of antiques. How I missed those Sunday dinners and pounding the
grand piano beneath the chandelier and the Christmas presents piled high on the davenport
and riding Grandma’s stair-side elevator up and down until I heard “That’s
enough, Tommy.” I missed being in the
basement with Marilyn, my sister, playing “socatash” (kneeling on the floor and
bashing a plastic bowling ball back and forth across the floor with plastic bowling pins). I remembered Grandma’s warm hugs and drives to
the old courthouse with Grandpa in the old thickly upholstered Lincoln Continental.
I remembered
being with Grandma in the hospital the day she died. I
could still feel the hard clutch of her soft hand – a gesture that said what she
could not. “Good-bye, Tommy. I don’t want to leave you!” In her grip, I knew that no rage burned hotter in a
passionate heart than life in the hour of its ending.
I remembered
helping to carry Grandma and Grandpa Darby to their graves, just as I had helped to carry
Papa and Nanny Smith to theirs. All of them
had gone within two years of each other. Please come
back! God, how I missed them!
Enough, I thought.
Get back on the road.
.
Chapter 4
The Golden Horseshoe
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