Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (33 page)

Patricia asked, “Have you called the law?”

“Oh, sure. But what can they do? They said they’d start patrolling back here. But what’s the chance of them showing up when he’s here?”

When we were on the road we hung our folding chairs on the back of the cart over our bicycles. On the backs of each one I stitched a piece of bright orange material. On one I wrote our website address. The other had “Mule Ahead” on it. I took the Mule Ahead chair and set it up between Della and the parking lot. Then we hung our florescent safety vests out in the area, and we put orange banners on Della’s halter, mane and tail. It would take a pretty stupid poacher to think she was a deer.

Just before sunset, we went to the Italian Club for cocktails. The main topic at the bar was the local news–Lacawanna was the center of an international story. Seven local men, of Yemeni descent, had recently been charged with running a training center for the Taliban. They were known as the “Lacawanna Seven.” That afternoon they were in court for a bail bond hearing, and one of them got out on bail.

“Oh, great! Now we got a terrorist running loose.” The bartender said. “Just what we need, eh? How’s you supposed to feel safe with someone like that out on the streets?”

When we went to bed that night, I wasn’t concerned about a foreign terrorist. We were worried about some local with a shotgun out to fill his freezer. Patricia and I both had a hard time getting to sleep.

“Did you hear that?”

When Patricia nudged me with her elbow, I was already awake. I had been listening to it too. Either a car, or a pickup, had pulled into the parking lot with its lights off. It stopped behind the club house and sat idling for a while. Then I heard the tires slowly roll across the grit on the asphalt. It sounded like it was headed our way. When it got to the edge of the asphalt it stopped.

That’s when Patricia asked me, “Did you hear that?

Just as I said “Yes” the motor revved a bit. Then the tires started to creep out onto grass in the direction where Della was grazing. I already
had my jeans on, and was reaching for the flashlight, when a floodlight suddenly blazed on.

Patricia screamed, “It’s him! It’s the poacher!”

Headlights came on and engulfed Della with light, as I tripped and stumbled through the tent door. Waving my flash light, I yelled. “Hey, stop! Over here!”

Suddenly, the vehicle made a sharp right turn and its headlights blinded me as it came my way. It wasn’t until it stopped next to me that I realized it was a police car. The officer asked, “What’s going on here?”

I pointed toward the club house. “They told us we could camp here.”

“This ain’t no damn campground! What’s with the mule and all this stuff?”

He was moving his floodlight back and forth on the tent and the cart while I said, “We just stopped for the night. We walked here from Arkansas, and we’re headed–”

The cop blurted out, “Hey. Hey! Hey!!” Each “hey” was crisper and louder.

“Yous was in the paper today! I read it just before I came to work. You’ve got the mule and walking to the East Coast. Then yous are going around the world or somethin–right?”

He shook my hand and wished us luck. Then he said, “You know there’s been a poacher back here.”

“We heard.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll keep an eye on things tonight. Welcome to Buffalo!”

We got lots of press coverage everywhere we walked. We never asked for it. It just happened, and I had mixed feelings about that. Most of them good. But sometimes it was nice to encounter people on the street who didn’t know anything about us.

Patricia always said, “I think the press is good. Because when people read about us first, then they know we’re not gypsies, tramps or thieves.”

I had to admit, being in a big newspaper like the
Buffalo News
did have its advantages. After reading our story Roy Haller, a member of the Upstate Mule and Donkey Association, took the route the paper said we were on when he drove into Buffalo that morning. He was going to try to find us winter accommodations in western New York.

Because of the article, Blasdell’s invited us in for pizza. The next afternoon the owner of the Malamute Saloon yelled at us from his side of South Park Avenue. “How about a beer and something to eat?”

Farther into the city, a baker gave us two bags filled with fresh bread and other goodies from his one-hundred-year-old brick oven–the only commercial brick oven in Buffalo.

I think being in the newspaper and on the evening news helped us in city traffic too. Cab drivers all read the newspaper–that’s part of their job. It gives them something to talk about. So usually they knew who we were and what we were doing. Walking in a city we always want the cabbies on our side.

Obviously it helped with the police. You always want them on your side no matter what you’re doing, especially in city traffic.

It certainly helped to have that recognition with drivers who were jockeying for position in the heart of downtown. That’s where we were Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. Of all the greetings and gestures we got downtown, none were ugly. Some of the hands that waved at us only had one digit up, but none of them was the middle finger.

Buffalo’s City Hall was the most impressive municipal building I had ever seen. It’s a massive tan brick art deco structure with more than twenty floors and six wings. On top was a dome of multi colored tile. Acid rain had stained the brick, but the dome was still brilliant.

If I were superman just passing through Buffalo, I would have to stop and fly out of City Hall just because it’s such a classy building. Metropolis’
Daily Planet
looks mighty plain compared to Buffalo’s City Hall.

We got a real good look at it because we walked around the same block three times before we got on the right route–but we weren’t the only ones lost. During the work day, barricades had been erected for street repairs. So when people got in their cars to drive home, they found themselves going in directions that they weren’t used to taking.

Here again, being in the newspaper helped. A policeman, who’d read our story, escorted us a few blocks and headed us in the right direction.

The Buffalo News
article helped us get through downtown and helped us meet some nice people. But I’ve got to say, some of our most memorable Buffalo encounters were with people who knew nothing about us.

Like the young black man standing at a bus stop on South Park Avenue. We were headed toward downtown, and as we approached him I could tell he was doing his best to ignore us. With his arms folded across his puffed-up chest, the man’s eyes were focused straight ahead at the street. I knew he saw us coming, but he was intent on ignoring us.

So when we got in front of him I said, “Whoa Della.”

The young man didn’t look at me, until I said, “You waiting on the bus?”

“Uh, yeah.”

With a straight face I said, “Well, it broke down. So they sent us to pick you up.”

Every shred of coolness dissolved, and his arms melted down to his sides as he slowly turned to survey the situation. While he panned from me to Della to the cart his whole body began to slump. He looked straight into my eyes and asked, “What?”

I tried, but I couldn’t keep a straight face. He was quick to catch it and a wide toothy smile sprang to his face. “No, man. That ain’t right!”

Laughing, we brushed palms. “You got me dude. You
really
got me!”

From City Hall we took Elmwood Avenue north. Nearly everyone we encountered while we walked up into Buffalo said it was the coolest part of town. Both Buffalo State College and the Buffalo campus of State University of New York were nearby. It had art galleries, a couple of museums and lots of boutiques. People told us the coolest coffee houses and hippest bars were on Elmwood. It sounded like a good street to walk a mule on.

But what they didn’t tell us was that it’s a main commuter route out of downtown. It was a little after 5 p.m. when we finally got onto Elmwood and we became part of the gridlock–not the cause of it, just part of it.
With everyone else, we were at a standstill for several minutes in the five-hundred block. Traffic had just begun to move when I heard a female voice yell, “You, with the horse, stop! Wait for me.”

When I turned to my right I saw a woman with long blond hair waving and yelling from the crowed doorway of a bar. She was trying to push her way through the crowd as she yelled, “Wait for me!”

From the cart, I heard Patricia sigh, “Now what?”

Traffic was gaining momentum, so I quickened our pace to keep up with it. Behind us the woman continued to yell, but her voice was soon drowned out by the noise of rush hour.

A block farther, traffic was at a standstill again. After I craned my neck to see if I could spot what the holdup was, I turned to look at Della. There was the blonde from the bar beside Della holding onto the bridle, kissing the side of her face. This woman was in her mid-thirties, and while looking nothing like Marilyn Monroe, she had that kind of face and physique, and she was cooing to Della. When I looked back at Patricia in the cart, she was grimacing and shaking her head. I knew what she was thinking.
Who’s this flake?

I turned back to the woman who was grinning at me with lush pink lips that said, “I just love this.” Her voice had the vibrato and breath of afternoon cocktails. “Where are you going? Come stay at my place.”

Had I been a single man, I might have entertained that invitation–but I wasn’t. The car in front of us started to move. I said, “Lady, step back. We’ve got to go.”

“Take me with you. I love this. I love you.”

Right then Della stepped forward, and the woman jumped out of the way. But she still had hold of the bridle. I yelled, “Lady, let go!”

I quickened our pace, and she had to jog to keep up. “Please let me go. I love this!”

Suddenly, she stumbled against a parked car and lost her grip on the bridle. We were trekking away as she pleaded, “Take me! I love it! I want to go!”

Walking up Elmwood Avenue, sometimes I felt like we were in a parade. Lots of people yelled and waved at us. Some on the sidewalk clapped
as we went by. And we heard plenty of, “Right on, man!” “Awesome, dude!” “God Bless you!”

We had just stopped for a light, and were at the head of the line in that lane, when I heard, “Can I pet? Can I pet?”

She was a brazen, stout, black woman dressed in a flowered Hawaiian shirt, pink sweat-pants, un-laced work boots and a black knit stocking cap. When she marched up to us, it was more like she demanded instead of asked, “Can I pet?”

Her right hand started petting Della as she shouted, “I love to pet! This is nice!”

Lodged in the fingers of her left hand, was an open cigarette paper filled with tobacco ready to be rolled. Not a shred of it fell out as she rubbed Della’s nose.

The light turned green. I said, “We’ve got to get moving.”

“Okay.”

When she turned to cross Elmwood, I yelled, “Don’t get hit!”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

Then she stepped in front of the car in the lane next to us, aimed her right index finger at the driver and barked, “You wait!”

He lurched to a stop, and so did the other three lanes when she pointed to them on her march across Elmwood Avenue. The whole time, she balanced that unrolled cigarette in her left hand. A block further, we were stopped in traffic again and there she was strolling up the left side of Elmwood. She beamed as her left arm swung back and forth over her head. Clinched in those fingers was a burning cigarette. “I love to pet!”

And on it went, one urban character after another. But none of them–except the drunk woman–offered us a place for the night.

So with the orange beacon on top of the cart, and flashing red lights on the back, we wandered the dark streets of Buffalo looking for a place to bed down. The lights on the cart, and the sound of Della’s steel shoes on the
street, brought many faces to front windows. Several people stepped out onto their porches or into their front yards. Some waved, a few said “Good Luck,” but no one tried to engage us in conversation. And nobody offered a place to stop for the night.

All we needed was a front yard, a back yard, a vacant lot, or some sort of spot somewhere. Like on the grounds of a huge hospital that we came to. It was in the north part of town and had several grassy acres that begged to be grazed on–but they couldn’t find the administrator to give us permission.