Niagara Falls! Slooow-ly I turned step by step, inch by inch, I walked up to the rat and I.....
As it goes in the famous Three Stooges skit, every time the words Niagara Falls are uttered it causes a memory for me. Unlike the Stooges bit, I don't give Curly knocks on the head! I have fond memories of a visit to the falls as a kid and recently, I fulfilled a 35 year old promise to the lovely Kathy and we made the dash to Niagara Falls!
My first visit was in 1959 when I was six years old. Folks my age will remember how big families used to take vacations back then. We dropped my infant sister Barbara off at our Aunt Letty Anne's and picked up our eleven year old cousin Jeff Gano and piled him and the four remaining Boylan kids into the back seat of our 1953 two door Ford Custom line. Yep, 5 kids in the backseat with a tiny, ancient mattress from Grandma’s Ford's roll-a-way on the floor. I spent most of the weeklong trip stretched out on the ledge above the backseat watching the Canadian clouds roll by and making up stories in my head about them.
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We headed over the Ambassador Bridge with a borrowed pop-up camper in tow behind us, headed toward the Long Point peninsula on Lake Erie, for our first stop. We set up camp at the Long Point Provincial Park on a sugar sand beach. The wind picked up producing waves that were ridiculously high and after being warned to watch out for undertows by Mom, we dove headlong into the surf with Dad, who had taught us all how to swim like tadpoles. The waves tossed us for hours until we left the lake as bedraggled ragamuffins. It was a glorious day to be a kid.
High winds and waves usually means a storm is following on the Great Lakes and by midnight, the tent housing the older kids was flooded and soon all seven of us were sharing the two beds in the pop-up, each of us producing our own personal humidity. Big sister Sue whispered ghost stories to Maryanne and me as we warded off the fat mosquitos that found a secret entrance into the camper, while listening to Dad's gentle snoring. He could sleep through anything.
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It's during the recollection of these family stories that I miss my big sister Sue the most.
The next morning was fresh and we woke to wafts of bacon smoke coming from the blackened cast iron skillet sitting atop the green Coleman stove. We bathed and swam in a much calmer Lake Erie, took a walk along a swamp, breaking the stalks of the jewelweed plant and oozing the white sap onto last night’s mosquito bites before we cleaned, packed up and piled back in car, off for Niagara Falls.
Little did I know that this camping visit to a sand peninsula jutting out into Lake Erie would play a part in a business story nearly 40 years later. The older I get, the smaller the world becomes.
I started a business in 1998 with partners in New York City, one of whom was John Morgan, the great, great grandson of the inimitable J.P. Morgan. We were running late on filing some paperwork when we learned the name we picked for our firm had been usurped by another company. John Morgan's assistant called me and said she thought we should name our new venture after Long Point because it was halfway between NYC and our Royal Oak, Michigan office. She went on to say that the Morgan's had been visitors to Long Point for years and members of some exclusive fishing and hunting club on the peninsula. I liked the geographic angle, but candidly, the only club that I was ever going to be a member of would probably be named the Club for Shlubs.
I saw my Dad that evening and happened to mention our name quandary and the Long Point suggestion. He reminded me of the name of our long ago Long Point camping visit.
"Yes, we had quite a time on our visit to Long Point. Here's what I think you should do. Call up John Morgan and tell him that the Boylan family also has a history at Long Point. We were the riff-raff down at the public beach."
My Dad was a quiet guy, but he had a sense of humor and a twinkle in his eye on this one.
So, I followed his advice. John was not an enthusiastic guy, but he approved of the Long Point name given the Morgan family's long history at Long Point. The Boylan family history went right over his head, or under his feet, I’m not sure which.
"Yeah, John, the Boylan's also have a proud tradition on Long Point."
"Really, are you members of the Long Point Company Club?"
"No, but we camped in a pop-up camper down at the beach."
"Oh."
I'm not sure if John knew what a pop-up camper was, but it may have been the only time I found him speechless.
John Morgan's involvement in Long Point has been gone for years, but in a way we owe him and my Dad for our company's name.
If you're ever flying from Detroit Metro to points east like NYC or Boston, etc. and your flight plan takes you over Lake Erie, you can identify a beautiful spit of sandy peninsula jutting out from the Canadian side. (link to picture below)
But back to Niagara Falls.
My six year old memory comes in fits and starts, but I do remember the Maid of the Mist, the Cave of the Winds and a visit to the Niagara daredevil museum explaining how a lucky few survived accidental or purposeful trips over the falls. They included the first successful barrel rider, Annie Edson Smith, who survived the 192 foot trip in a wooden barrel on her 63rd birthday in 1901. A year after our visit, in 1960, a seven year old named Roger Woodward and his sister fell out of capsized boat up river from the falls. His sister was rescued by bystanders who reached out and grabbed her hand just as she was going over the precipice. Roger, in only a bathing suit and a life preserver went over the falls and remarkably survived, picked up by a Maid of the Mist boat at the base of falls as he went bobbing by.
It's a quite a story and worth visiting via the link below.
Our trip to the giant falls was one of the memories that is embedded deeply enough to remember loads of details...none of which I will bore you with today! But I do remember my first look over the skinny guardrail and seeing the power of the water rushing past us with such ferocity that it made me back up a few inches. The pictures included in this story show us little kids, in picture pose, but for a family without much money, it was a vacation to remember.
And so after a fifty-five year hiatus for me, the lovely Kathy and I spied an opening in our mutual calendars and jumped in the car and made the four hour drive for a date night on the Falls.
We arrived midday and drove through a row of tall hotels, an array of arcades, tourist attractions and a casino, that weren’t there when I was a kid. The falls themselves are constantly changing with the erosion, but some things didn’t change: the Maid of the Mist and the walk behind the falls seemed locked in time. As I stood looking down the same railing as when I was a kid, the water’s turbulence still tightened my gut, and again, I stepped back a few inches. It's not a place I'd spend a week, but those first few moments of peering over the edge and seeing millions of gallons of water per minute roar by, past, over and down into a maelstrom of watery fury is worth every minute of the drive and more.
At night the falls were lit up in various colors and the streets were clogged with us tourists, the scene contrasted against the bright lights of the hotels, casino and Skylon sky needle viewing tower that loomed over everything. For some reason, we human beings think Mother Nature needs an assist.
We woke very early the next morning and walked alongside the falls before any of the tour busses appeared and with only another couple around, watched the light of the sunrise filter through the mist of falls. It was the best moment of the trip.
It’s Monday…let’s go!
Gerry Boylan is the author of the novel Getting There and the short story collection Gerry Tales. Both are available at Amazon.com and the Yellow Door in Berkley, MI.
Link to the 3 Stooges Niagara Falls skit:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=kp&v=U-A9c6VNeRQ
Link to an article about Roger Woodward's trip over the falls: http://www.infoniagara.com/history/rogerwoodward_miracle.aspx
Link to Long Point peninsula picture:
