My Improptu Honeymoon

“You want to go?” Carol asked. She seemed anxious for a decision. We had just passed a sign reading GREY LINE TOURS: NIAGRA FALLS and we were now passing the on-ramp to the freeway, our one opportunity to reach that destination.

“I do,” I said. “But for me this is just a return to hitch-hiking days. The real question is how do you feel?”

Carol slowed the car to a crawl. “How much food do we have?”

“Well, a box a’ crackers, most of a jar of peanut butter and some of that drink mix you like.”

She chuckled. “Hey, we are all set!”

“Jack Kerouac would think so.”

“Just to be sure, Niagra’s only about seven hours from here, right?”

I was a little testy over having to repeat myself: “Again, I don’t actually know. My friends say it is though, and just to ask, does it really matter? It could be ten hours and we’d still need a day to really get there and see the place, right?”

Carol raised her eyebrows to signify a conclusion. “…And y’know what?” she said, “This’s probably gonna’ be our last chance to take this trip before gas is six bucks a gallon!” She then cranked the wheel to its leftmost position and applied new pressure to the gas pedal to take us onto the highway and adventure.

Our trip had begun as a frenzied journey to see my then-hospitalized father in Cleveland, but, finding him not merely well but lively, we made plans to visit an old college friend of mine about an hour away in the north-east corner of the state. In spite of a call beforehand though, that friend, distracted by other commitments, was not at home, and so we ultimately found ourselves in the driveway of his house, facing the prospect of either inconveniencing my parents for another night or starting the long drive back to our home in Indiana. Then we saw the sign for Niagra though, and at first we just chuckled at the notion of such a spontaneous trip, but we also began to weigh the option of just having a small adventure...and after three years of almost nothing but responsibility, we chose the excitement.

Once on our way, the road before us seemed the perfect environment for anyone in a mood for discovery. Mysteriously unidentifiable trees and bushes flanked the asphalt in the dark, and the anonymous houses, businesses and facilities passing us only added to the mystery and anticipation. The black strip before us seemed like a destiny, and, for at least a while, I anticipated its unguessable end-point with excitement.

Unfortunately though, crossing into Pennsylvania killed that mood completely. Here the land seemed exhausted, and the whole area was scrubby and unverdant, with only some run-down stores and shambled houses as signs of a mere, flickering life. I no longer saw myself heading into a place of mystery and wonder, but into some post-industrial wasteland, a place without event but still full of peril—if only that of a prolonged stranding!

On our entry into New York State though, the greater amounts of plants, people and buildings implied both economic vitality and the many small dangers of both city life and wildlife, but I was actually happy to be in this new and at least somewhat challenging place. The radio’s automatic tuner had stumbled onto a Canadian station and so it was playing music new to us, and the very unfamiliarity of those songs subliminally added to my then-current sense of strangeness and wonder, and both Carol and I fell into a swoon.

An hour down the road form the state line we crossed an arching bridge high enough to excite Carol’s acrophobia, and so I held and caressed her hand while cooing softly to calm her. Off the bridge though, we needed only twenty more minutes to reach the parking lots for the falls, and even from those concrete slabs we could hear the sound of all that vast and ceaseless water. Upon leaving the car we simply began, without saying a word, to wander directly away from the road and toward the greater volume of noise. Unfortunately though, we quickly realized that the complexity of landscape, with all its trees, buildings, hills and vales, blocked the constant roar unevenly and left us unable to guess our way.

We then stumbled on a parked police cruiser and asked the officer behind the wheel for directions. Unfortunately he had a sense of humor.

“You do know they shut the thing down at night, don’t you?” he said, but after our journey we must’ve been pictures of annoyance over encountering even so small an obstacle as his uncooperation. He looked at our faces in sad sympathy and then promised never to make that joke again.

He then explained the best path to the falls to us, and, following his directions, we quickly arrived before the twin torrents of American Falls and Horseshoe falls. After only twenty minutes, the sheer vastness of this natural wonder, the romance of the place and the insane spontaneity of our journey got to me, and I once again proposed to Carol, who, oddly, and in spite of an obvious prior agreement to the idea, refused. Her engagement ring was still back in Indiana after all, and she just wasn’t going to marry anyone, not even a current husband, without it.

After that, we just stood, staring in wonder at the incomprehensibly vast water plummeting to the ground, and I just had to ask a stupid question:

“So, do you think it can actually be prettier with the lights on?” My tone betrayed my disbelief.

“I don’t know” Carol said. “I just wonder why people feel they have add to something like this.”

I had to nod to that. Nothing in the world could actually add to the experience of The Falls. Regardless of that, though, after an hour and a half staring at this natural wonder and fending off mosquitoes we decided to take our tired selves somewhere to sleep.

Getting back in our Toyota, we found a park available for camping and tried sleeping there in our car. Unfortunately though, we soon found that even the slightest motion by either of us would rock the entire vehicle and wake us both. We therefore decided to lay ourselves on the ground under the stars, and, as a city boy unused to the sheer density of starts normal to rural skies and the utter solidity of the Milky Way overhead, I once again had to stare at the silent spectacle of it all. Even in the face of that miracle though, I began to drift to sleep....

But then there was a growling and a scratching from the bushes...

“…Carol…hey, Carol…wake up!…there’s some kind of animal out there.”

My wife did not completely wake. “…So?’ She glurg'd without opening her eyes.

“Well, we don’t know what it is. Maybe we should get back in the car.”

“Everything’s louder ‘n the woods. …T’S prol'ly jus' a ‘coon 'r a woo'f or som'th’n’.”

“You sure?”

“…Well, ‘f it’s a bear, we’re probably dead already,” and with that conclusion she rolled away from me and returned to sleep. A moment later, though, she sat up, laughing. I assumed this to be a sign that she had figured out the species of our semi-intruder and that that creature would turn out to be amazingly unthreatening. She then turned to me, still smiling.

“Do you realize what I said?”

“Well, yeah...that the ‘thingie’ over in the bushes there was probably no problem. So?"

“No, I said it was probably only just a wolf….and on hearing that, you just decided to go back to sleep.” She laughed at her realization again and rolled back on her side.

“So?” I said to her back. We had a wolf at home, originally a pet of my wife's, but now probably closer to me, and so I tend to see wolves more as friends than predators. I therefore couldn't see Carol's very obvious point. “Don’t think he’ll come’n play with us." I said. "He’d be wild! He'll keep to himself.” Carol then laughed again at my lack of alarm, and just said that she was too tired to explain the peculiarity of my comments. We both went back to sleep.

At some point those mosquitoes found us again and vampirically chased us back into the car. We awoke in the morning with huge appetites though, and, counting our few bills and coins, we decided to go to Denny’s and split a Grand-slam with grits. Now, for a guy from a largely Polish neighborhood in the citified north, grits are somehow both exotic and all-American, but unfortunately, the short-order cook behind our breakfast seemed to be taking his recipes from The All-Cholesterol Cook-Book. My bowl had nothing but undercooked corn grindings floating in melted butter, and I had to force it down

Our next day at the falls was fun but without specific incident. We saw those same vastnesess in broad daylight, and both our familiarity with them and their loss of any night-borne mystery made them seem just a little smaller to us, but the sheer clarity of our daylight view also illustrated to me that the sheer height, volume and magnitude of these natural wonders was beyond anything in my experience and that I could only pretend to understand the eternal event of The Falls through some abstraction like numbers of tons of water. We also stumbled onto Bridal Falls, plainly visible from our original perch and we felt just a little stupid for not noticing it previously, though beside theses two greater falls it did seem like a lesser attraction.

We had no money to pay admission to the caves behind the falls, or the tour boats at their foot, or the many incidental attractions in the town, and so we spent the day simply wandering and imagining ourselves to be one of the first white explorers to this area or one of the Indians living here before their arrival. After a day of this meandering though, we recognized the need to be back in Indiana by the start of work the next day and so we returned to the car, sad to leave but fully aware that responsibility was another word for necessity; and we had plenty of both! All through the long drive back to Ohio though, even the land seemed to offer me reasons to stay. The industrialized wilds of New York seemed even more interesting and alluring, and the tired, used land in of Pennsylvania seemed even less of a reason to leave this better place. Back in Cleveland we stopped again at my parents’ house and said some depressingly lasting farewells before we started lugging ourselves back home. From there the trip seemed eternal, and I wasn’t happy till I saw our house....