Erie Co., Pop. 921,390...plus 1

In California, whenever I didn’t know what else to do, I could always go for a drive. I like driving two-lane highways, and I like driving alone in small cars. When I was a little boy, I frequently took off on my bicycle for hours. Yesterday, hand-delivering promotional materials for the ballet school, I had my first real opportunity to drive around this part of the state. It was a hot late-summer day, and you could feel that it was going to be one of the last for a while.
Once you get out of Buffalo and the actual suburbs, Erie County becomes rural fairly quickly. It is like New York City in that way; within a surprisingly short drive of a major metropolitan area, you can find cornfields and pastureland. As a whole, this part of the state is flat. You can feel how the glaciers during the Ice Age really did their work. The region is so flat that it took me a long while to learn which way was north, and I always thought I had a pretty good sense of direction. I’ve since noticed that weather patterns pretty consistently sweep west-to-east, off the lake, so I’ve learned to watch for that. But I’ve also gotten a feel for the position of the sun and the light and such. I imagine that will all change with the onset of winter weather; I can already see how gray skies and snow could be disorienting, not to mention darkness.
The terrain in the southeastern part of the county rolls a bit more than in the north. Not much more, but some. I stopped at a number of Catholic schools on a list my brother had given me. I was not surprised to see that schools even that far out in the country have to take security precautions. Every school had a camera and a buzzer-operated door at its entrance, and in one case the principal himself came out to meet me. He and the man at the Elma Boys and Girls Club were the only men I had any contact with. Otherwise, it was a day of showing up in offices staffed by women, sometimes several women. The church office at St. Catherine of Siena in West Seneca. The school office at Annuciation in Elma. The library in East Aurora. The Boys and Girls Club in the same town. I paid a surprise visit to the offices of one of the papers that advertises the ballet school; it was also staffed by women, and while waiting to introduce myself to the woman on our account, I couldn’t help feeling the effect of being a man, and a stranger at that. In fact, several times during the course of the day I was aware of being appraised as a male animal by my female counterpart. This isn’t altogether new to me, of course; it’s just not entirely familiar, especially coming from a city like New York.
For several hours I criss-crossed that part of the county, doing my drop-offs, getting a fuller and fuller picture of Western New York. I even drove into Lackawanna, the city on the shore of Lake Erie just south of Buffalo. Lackawanna is depressing. I wouldn’t even say “in decline”—the phrase implies some kind of process. Lackawanna feels beyond process. On the very same street I passed several Catholic churches within walking distance of each other—St. Barbara’s, St. Hyacinth, St. Anthony’s—and wondered when the city ever had need for so many of them. The city of Lackawanna also has an enormous and impressive Catholic basilica, Our Lady of Victory. It is a huge church, and I wanted to stop and check out the interior, but there was a wedding in progress. The bride wore white with the traditional veil, but the groom and his ushers were wearing black suits, bright red shirts, and black cowboy hats, which they respectfully removed before they entered the church proper.