The Buffalo River

The school year is a month underway, and I am drowning in papers and quizzes and exams to grade. I'm teaching the usual Intro to Lit survey at Niagara University, and although there's some comfort in that, there's also the undeniable fact that every class is different, and every student is different. It's nice to back in the smaller room I had the first semester, and I'm very glad that the students are good at contributing to the class discussion. My primary objectives are two-fold--getting the students to enjoy the idea of talking about literature as much as possible in this age of YouTube and Facebook, and teaching to the objectives of the syllabus and the department. We really flew through the fiction unit; I was on the verge of postponing Friday's exam, but I'm glad we kept on track. The first paper assignment is coming up fast, and then we get into poetry, which can be very challenging. As my friend Doug said last night at dinner, teaching is infinitely improvable.
The American Literature survey has proved a little bit of a challenge. There are 36 students in the class, and the demographics are broad. I have seniors as well as home-schooled freshmen. I have older students, and the class is 80% female. This makes for a challenging discussion, but I'm going to keep adjusting my methods until things get a little looser and freer. This past week both classes had exam-fear in their faces.

At Medaille, the class I'm teaching is an intermediate composition class. It's also new to me, and something of a challenge, but I'm beginning to see how the three classes fit together and play off of each other. The students are so young, and the other day when I (for what reason, God only knows) used the phrase "you bet your sweet bippy," I had them (and me) laughing. I realized that explaining "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" to them was utterly beside the point. The sad truth is that most of their parents probably don't remember it. Anyway, we're doing this Learning Community thing throughout the semester, which ties their General Education class on critical thinking in with my class. We're working around the theme of "Life as a River" and on Thursday we did something very cool: we took a canoe trip on the Buffalo River. We took the trip with the help of a team from Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper. One of the things we learned was that the river has a "pulse": it actually "reverses" its flow every three hours or so. This means that contaminants aren't cycled downriver--and of course, thinking that way isn't too smart to begin with. We learned that the storm overflow and the sewage overflow combine when the runoff is sizeable, releasing more contaminants into the river--and the surrounding soil. We learned that a number of plants have overgrown the area, driving out more diverse, appropriate species.

We paddled from the junction of Cayuga Creek and Buffalo Creek downriver to the Ogden Street Bridge, and that's where two of the students tipped over. The Riverkeeper team had only moments prior remarked that there had been no upsets the entire season, when we all heard a shout and a splash as the two were dumped into the river. Impressively, the students kept their cool and didn't panic. It took a long time to get them back in the canoe. The canoe was turned over and "t-ed"--placed crosswise over the gunwales of one of one of the leaders' canoes so that all the water drained out. We all finally made it back to the launching point, and relatively speaking, safe and sound.

+41° 7' 38.42", -72° 17' 3.13"

Two weeks ago, after the memorial gathering with my friends from Columbia, I spent the night in Brooklyn at my friend’s apartment. In the morning Helene, her two kids, Dean, 9, and Paulina, 6, and I drove out to the North Fork of Long Island. Paulina was shy, and very much a girl, but Dean was all boy, and we spent a big part of the drive east discussing horror and disaster movies. We got on the subject because he mentioned wanting to see 2012, Roland Emmerich’s forthcoming apocalypse. (I guess he never runs out of floods and fires and landslides.) Dean wanted to know the plots of as many of the movies I could remember, and when I launched into the Alien series we were set for the better half of the two-hour drive. (Paulina was watching a video...and it wasn't Alien.)

The house Helene and her husband rent was on Peter’s Neck, which juts out between Orient Harbor and Gids Bay. The heat and humidity were ferocious, and so were the mosquitoes. It was the first time all year I couldn’t be outside for long without drenching myself in Off! Read, Jenny, and Lake Blinn, friends from Keene, New Hampshire (Read is also a Columbia alum) were waiting for us. We all tumbled out of the car and got settled with some fried chicken and chips. Another friend from CU, Laura, showed up with her two kids, Declan, 9, and Jaden Li, 5, and soon, doused with bug repellent, all the kids were chasing fiddler crabs through the tidal shallows and grasses. Jodi and her partner Jocelyn showed up, and we got ready to head to the beach. The heat was still intense, so the water was cold and refreshing. We splashed around for a while and explored some of the rocks. The others arrived with Boogie boards and umbrellas and towels. We spent a long while in the water, and I was in the process of dragging Lake around on the Boogie board, when suddenly both of us jumped. “Ouch! Something bit me!” said Lake. “It’s a jellyfish,” I said. “I got stung too.” I’d never been stung by a jellyfish before. The sensation is like pins-and-needles, only coming from outside. Lake got out of the water, and between us someone remembered that peeing on a jellyfish sting relieves the pain. (I didn’t ask anyone to pee on my sting.) Eventually we went home and started cooking up linguine with clams (discovering that the secret is that you can never have too much sauce) along with an impromptu marinara for the kids. Read and his family had to start home for New Hampshire (they had to catch the 7 o’clock ferry to New London, CT), but the rest of us sat and ate and talked into the darkness. Eventually Jodi and Jocelyn had to leave, but the rest of us stayed the night.

The next day those of us who remained had a leisurely morning, and all remained fairly calm until the keys to the Volvo stationwagon got locked inside by yours truly. There was a moment’s panic until we figured out there was nothing to do but divide into two groups, one that stayed home and waited for AAA, another that went back to the beach and waited. The lunch and most of the towels were in the car’s rear compartment, so we had to wait for the roadside assistance to show up at the house, open the car, and then for Helene and her son to come with the food. I decided to take a long, penitential walk on the beach--actually, I just wanted a chance to explore, and Laura was watching the kids. By the time I returned, the others had arrived with the food.

The plan for the remainder of the day included ice cream at Nina’s in Orient Point. Helene extolled their root beer floats, and after a hot day at the beach, a delicious, peppery, vanilla-y, creamy, foamy root beer float sounded delicious. We were waiting for the kids to finish their treats, when a man about my age walked in with an older woman, who was wearing a tank top and shorts with a pair of raspberry-colored Ugg boots, which seemed odd considering that the temperature was in the low nineties. I noticed the boots, then noticed the man who was with her. I had that frisson you get only in the moment of recognizing someone famous, and thought, Well, I guess you can’t have a trip to New York…or the North Fork of Long Island…and not see a celebrity. The man and I nodded at each other--in this case, I felt sure that it was more gaydar than him knowing that I knew who he was, and also felt sure that Helene, who knows more about music than I do, recognized him, but was playing it cool like a true New Yorker. Only when we got out to the sidewalk did I say to Laura, “Did you see who that was? Rufus Wainwright!” “You’re kidding!” both women said. “I thought you saw him and were playing it cool…” I said to Helene. “I wondered why you were being so friendly with him,” said Laura, a twinkle in her eye.
Laura and kids headed back to Brooklyn within the hour, and I hung out with Helene and Dean and Paulina for one more day, enjoying the cool and the quiet and the marvelous beauty of Peter’s Neck. I watched the sun go down over the western end of Long Island, and told myself that the summer had come to an end. I returned to Buffalo reconnected with my friends from Columbia, ready for the new school year.