All Gone to Look for America (8 page)

On the way back to my motel I decide to take a look inside out of curiosity and there indeed in the marble halls of the lobby is a shop, closed at this time of night, but selling ceremonial tomahawks, coloured blankets and various bits of Indian jewellery. There is also a plaque giving the names of the elders of the Seneca nation in whose name the casino is operated. But it all seems a
bit peripheral to the main business which even near midnight is clearly
thriving
, with lines of decidedly pale faces sitting in rows feeding dollar bills into slot machines. This in itself is new to me: not slot machines but ones that take notes rather than coins, especially notes as low in value as one dollar, which these days can be incredibly grubby considering how many of them you need to buy almost anything. But the single dollar bill is such an intrinsic essential element in American culture that the idea of phasing it out in favour of coins (which would be worth only some 50 pence each, a tenth the amount of the smallest British note) remains unimaginable. Most players in fact feed in larger denominations, fives, tens or even twenties and get proportionately more pulls of the handle, pushes of the button, or electronically-dealt hands of cards.

With twinkling chandelier lights above the flashing electronic lights of the machines and girls in skimpy costumes meandering between them serving drinks, the atmosphere is calculated to eliminate any concept of time of day. I wander over to the circular raised bar in the centre and decide to have just the one more, as a nightcap, especially as they are serving Yuengling, and more particularly because on a small circular stage at head height in the centre of the bar itself there is a saxophone player knocking out a slow cool rendering of the Grover Washington standard ‘Just the Two of Us’ from his classic album
Winelight
. An almost perfect way to end an evening.

There is just the one of me, however, and as I sip at my beer I can’t wholly manage to ignore that built into the bar is an electronic poker machine. Every time I set my pint down after a sip there is a deck of cards underneath it,
displaying
aces and deuces and inviting me to have a go, just a quick game of blackjack or poker to pass the time. And you think – or at least I do, just as I’m supposed to – hey, why not, and slip a five-dollar note into the
inconspicuous
slot in the perspex of the bar counter. Five quick games of blackjack; what harm can it do? Within 10 minutes or so, playing cheap at 10 cents debit a hand, my $5 is a princely $7.50, and the music is still playing and I’m quite enjoying myself and the beer is only $3.50 which is the cheapest I’ve found so far, so what the hell, I have another one, rack up to a dollar a game – big rollers are us – and see if I can break the bank before bedtime.

You can guess the rest. My $7.50, through some incredible unpredictable bad luck with the cards, rises to $11 before dwindling to nothing. At which stage I decide to just play a couple more to make back my initial stake. By the time I leave I am $25 poorer (plus another $12 for three beers plus tip) and as I wander out wearily into the night I realise I have sat there for more than an hour and a half, though it seemed like 20 minutes at most. For the first time
I realise that my residual feeling that supercasinos in Britain would not be a good thing and end up more like an extra tax on the poor and gullible is right on the money, to coin a phrase. Wandering across the parking lot in the rain I feel deeply aggrieved, not at the loss of the money but at the waste of time. Never before have I felt life sucked away quite so meaninglessly as in the past mindless 90 minutes of mental masturbation. Never again, I tell myself as my head hits the pillow. Ha! Ha!

Next morning, the excesses of the night before notwithstanding, 8.45 a.m. sees me standing damp and bedraggled in the continuing drizzle outside the ticket office for the Cave of the Winds reading a sign that warns ‘waterproofs should be worn at all times’ and doesn’t open for another 15 minutes. I had thought the receptionist at the motel might have known this – what time do the various attractions open being a not totally ridiculous question for a tourist to ask at a tourist resort – but she had blithely assured me that everything was up and running by 8:00 a.m. This matters more than you might think to a man
travelling
on an Amtrak schedule. There are only three trains a day to Buffalo, from where I am intending to catch the Lakeshore Limited to Chicago; one leaves in the middle of the night, one at dawn and the last at 12:35 p.m., which means I have to get my ‘falls experience’ in sharpish!

In theory that ought not to be such a tall order, especially as I have planned what I want to do. This is not my first visit to Niagara. I came here once before, admittedly some time ago, at the age of 12 in a family group, all packed into my American uncle’s enormous 1960s Lincoln Continental car which was like the one JFK had been assassinated in, had reverse opening ‘suicide doors’ and seemed to me as far removed from my father’s Hillman Imp as the Starship Enterprise did from the Boeing 707 we had crossed the Atlantic on. We did, of course, what the clever Canadians had programmed us all to do, and went to see the ‘better’ view of the falls from the Canadian side. There was only one problem: I nearly didn’t come back. I was travelling on my father’s passport at the time and, being a rather small child for my age, the US immigration official hadn’t spotted me on the way out – and anyway what did he care, we were leaving the country – but his colleague was not quite so accommodating on our return only a few hours later.

He refused to allow me back into the United States on the grounds that I hadn’t properly cleared customs formalities when leaving. This was
undoubtedly true but a bit of a poser both logically and logistically: first of all, it was perverse to refuse me entry to the United States on the grounds that purely legalistically I had never left and was therefore still there. It was also obviously not the easiest solution to simply abandon a 12-year-old boy in Canada. Common sense – and perhaps the fact that at the time my uncle was a serving colonel in the US Army – won the day, or no doubt I would have a completely different accent today and last night’s conversation in the wine bar would never have happened.

This time around, although the chances of anything even remotely
resembling
a repeat performance were unlikely, I reckoned that in these days of heightened border sensitivity, just in case, I would content myself with doing all my sightseeing from the American side. I have also realised that although we ‘did the falls’, in that visit more than three decades ago, by staying on the Canadian side, in fact missed some of the best aspects. With unexpected time on my hands due to the hotel receptionist’s misinformation, I walked around the State Park which basically constitutes the American side of the falls and is mostly on Goat Island, the small piece of rocky parkland that sits in the middle of the Niagara River and is responsible for splitting the great cataract into the American Falls on its near side and the U-shaped Horseshoe Falls which, as the border lies mid-river, beyond the island, are wholly in Canada.

Goat Island got its name, a sign helpfully tells me, because in the eighteenth century English settler John Steadman kept his goat here to stop the wolves getting at it, though it begs the question of how he got to it himself; this is not the sort of river you want to be paddling across regularly. The view from the bridge is daunting in its own right and affords an aspect of the falls that people who come to look at the cataracts themselves, usually from below, often miss. Behind me, upstream, is a churning torrent as the water rushes over its uneven rocky bed; ahead, downstream, it seems to become faster and more turbulent still, only to disappear all of a sudden in a fine cloud of mist. Only the
persistent
roaring sound testifies to the fact that this vast flood of water is actually dropping a sheer 100 feet onto the rocks below. From here it appears to be a vast river suddenly evaporating into space.

Time for a closer look. Although the Canadian side offers the possibility of getting close to the bottom of the Horseshoe Falls it does so in a very civilised, safe and secure fashion, via a set of lifts and tunnels. The US side’s equivalent is the Cave of the Winds, and it is an altogether less health-and-safety friendly setup. And a lot more exciting as a result. Nowadays there is a lift, which is where I am standing along with two Asian-American women, all three of us
clad in see-through yellow capes with hoods, trousers rolled up to the knees, socks and shoes in a carrier bag and feet in a pair of disposable plastic sandals, all provided as part of the entrance fee. At five minutes past opening time, the lift supervisor in his green national park uniform arrives and ushers us in, telling us how originally there was just a wooden tower built against the side of the cliff. If that seems a bit scary it is nothing compared to the structure that still exists.

The term ‘Cave of the Winds’ is a bit of a misnomer, it turns out; the cave itself – discovered in 1834 and named with the classical flair of those days after Aeolus, Greek god of the winds – was wiped out in a rock fall in 1954 leaving only a dangerous overhang which had to be dynamited to make access even remotely safe. This is a stark reminder that if nature were left to itself,
Niagara’s
falls would eventually be nowhere near the twin towns named after them: natural erosion of the cliff face behind them is slowly causing them to retreat to the extent that in a few thousand years they ought to reach all the way back to Lake Erie itself and drain it. American and Canadian engineers have for decades now been working to delay this by shoring up the cliffs, but as we are not yet 300 years into their recorded history, nobody can be sure how
successful
their efforts really are. Having been close up, I reckon they’re probably wasting their time.

Mark, the ranger who takes over the tour from the bottom of the lift shaft, is telling us this and reams of other mind-boggling statistics as he hops gleefully over wooden decking down across the rocks. The cave may no longer exist but the tourists come anyway, primarily because the access built to get to it is still there and offers one of the most ridiculously hair-raising possibilities of getting up close and personal to a waterfall that at its peak can create
conditions
akin to a hurricane. When I say the access is still there, I mean it is for the moment: Mark and his mates will be taking it down in about six weeks’ time, near the end of November and re-erecting it next spring. This is largely because in mid-winter it gets so cold up here the falls can freeze, crushing anything in their way and forcing themselves over the edge in time-freeze slow motion, like a fast-moving glacier, with maybe no movement for several days, then a few hairline cracks and moments of spectacular violence when huge chunks of ice topple over the precipice. I make a mental note to try to come back and see that some time.

Right now I am more concerned with keeping my footing on soaking wooden decking amidst a whirlwind flurry of spray from the nearest falls, known as the Bridal Veil, which is really a tiny offshoot of the American Falls
cut off from the rest by a rock in the river. I now know why I’m wearing plastic sandals with my jeans rolled up to the knees. I may look like DP Gumby in a rain hood but at least most of me is dry. On the other hand, I’m a bit concerned about how long that will last. I’ve been looking at the wooden supports for the decking and can’t see how they’re fixed to the rocks. I ask Mark, who gives one of those big American ‘Hey guy’ laughs, and says, ‘They aren’t!’ He goes on to tell me, beaming broadly all the time, that the decking supports are simply wedged into crevices in the rock, and have been done that way ever since the whole trestle edifice – which must be at least 200 feet long, up and down the rocks and in a series of raised platforms perilously close to the face of the falls – was first set up in the 1860s. The plan of exactly how to do it is passed on from team leader to team leader, relearned and adjusted each time they put it up and take it down. He seems to think this should be totally reassuring, but I’m left staring at the struts of wood wedged into gaps in the rock beneath me in ashen astonishment and wondering just how quickly a British health and safety department would take to condemn the whole structure. The
terrible
truth is I know deep down that they would do so without even looking at it, which is one more tragic example of how cosseted we’ve become and how much our lives have been taken over by a nanny state. This is one of those big differences between our two countries: we’re brought up to have an instinctive respect for nanny; here they’d probably shoot her.

I’m still glancing at the supports apprehensively as we get ever closer to the falls, the noise grows and the spray from the onrushing torrent is like pointing a showerhead straight into my face. That’s when Mark points up at the highest platform, almost within touching distance of the face of the Bridal Veil, its wooden railings dripping with windblown strings of green moss and with a sign proclaiming
HURRICANE DECK
, and more amusingly next to it, no smoking. This latter has to be a joke. ‘Smoking impossible’ would be more accurate. Mark is gesturing towards it but making no move in that direction himself. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ he assures me, roaring at the top of his voice to be heard over the thunder of the falls, ‘but I do this trip maybe 20 times a day, and I’d have pneumonia if I went up there every time. Suit yourself.’ I look at it apprehensively. The two little Asian-American women have very
obviously
bottled out, and are taking photographs of one another a couple of decks below. But, I tell myself, I paid money to do this.