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Grand Island
Daniele Longo was the most beautiful man I have ever known. Generous, a gentle leftist with an accent — was it Tuscan? I no longer remember — that melted women’s hearts, he was a Raphaelite Christ in beard and flannel. We spent hours driving through Buffalo winter streets, Daniele piloting his Datsun around the gaping holes in the pavement. Daniele would sing Steely Dan songs or rave about that fascist President Carter.
He left for Missoula one year, and then, oddly, returned. I was glad to see him, but I didn’t understand what drew him away from his Mon-TAH-nah.
One day five of us piled into his Datsun, drove to Niagara Falls for the day. His roommate Kevin, another handsome artist; Bernadette, the love of my young life; Berna’s best friend Betsy.
I was a spectator in my own life, a leaf blown onto the river. Berna had watched me too, that winter, spent days with me until even I had to do something about it, and kissed her. My entropic heart shaped the beginning of our love and forced its end. But that day with Daniele was between the two. The Niagara River flowed yet toward the precipice.
We drove along the river toward the falls. Mute at roadside, the giant water intakes of the hydroelectric plant loomed, white monoliths a mile apart, massive and brutalist. The closer one had huge letters emblazoned on its side: “Power Authority.” We agreed that seemed redundant.
The visit to the Falls was like all the others. Six million cubic feet of water jumping the edge each minute, and I was jaded, a local boy unimpressed among the tourists. At the edge the feeling came to me again, a heedless longing to feel the drop for myself. But it passed. We clambered out on the little islands a half mile above the Falls, the current strong. One wrong step on the wet rock and then the fall, and oblivion.
We threaded our way through the maples and asphalt paths, found Daniele’s car again. Two bridges span the Niagara between the Falls and Buffalo. A broad, flat island lies between, Grand Island, five miles across. Unready for the drive home we stopped to walk the river at the island’s north end. We stood on the bank and joked. A long rock breakwall jutted out into the river, a thousand feet back toward the Falls. Suddenly restless, in need of a moment alone, I left them and walked out to its end, a carpet of birds scattering before me and regrouping as I passed. The river flowed past ominous and dark.
I remember days I spent with friends since dead, words and gestures no one knows but me, stories of which I am the sole custodian. They fill my heart sometimes ‘til I can think of little else. I remember days with friends who live still, the trivial stuff a sane man would have long forgotten, the way Berna’s hair shone against the river, Daniele asking in idle song if we were learning about the Eastern way of life. I wonder what they recall of me that I have lost. I have not spoken with Daniele in a quarter century. I miss him more, these days, than I would have thought back then. Each bond I had that day dissolved in time. I have fallen since then, and often, and sometimes the Falls themselves would have seemed a blessing. And I knew none of it that day, knew none of it, nor knew the currents I had hidden from myself. That day is lost, and the one after, and after that, beneath a palimpsest of anger, apathy, of fleeting joy. I reconstruct some details by logic, determining how they must have been, getting one detail in three just wholly wrong. They form as clouds around an image, the point from which the memory solidifies. I turned to join my friends and there she was, walking to me with a cloud of birds behind her, and she came and threw her arms around my neck, and then the fall, and oblivion.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
What stuns me even more than my own memory of days like this is when I talk to an old, old friend and hear details *I’ve* forgotten. Maybe none of us know who are the custodians of our memories, or what they might reveal about who we once were.
By: By beth on 2006 04 01
I used to be somewhat miffed with my memory, because it was so full of what were irritating obstacles to extracting quickly something i needed in a moment. I could read a book and three or ten years later, in a seminar or standing in front of a class of students, pull it out off the mental shelf, open it, and read a passage. But that would always happen with all manner of assorted tidbits of smells and sights and where i was when i read it, or who i was with, and so forth and so on and on. It was nuisance. Now sadly, i am with beth in discovering that i have forgotten things more often than remembering.
Hold onto those Chris; for you, more than most, have been one who has helped me remember journeys and travels long past, days of hiking and climbing, of running and walking in the beauty that is our natural world. Deadman Creek for example, inspired me to recall several trips to that region, crossing into the Minaret backcountry up through those canyons rather than dealing with Mammoth/Postpile road summer traffic. Hank Fox reminding me of days 45 years ago, i had forgotten, learning to ski at Mammoth, then spending decades traipsing about the Eastern Sierra during every season. Hell without these two posts i wouldn’t have been reminded of the fun i had with Dave Beck. Now i have to find him and find out what he is up to.
Thanks really seriously for the memories!
By: By spyder on 2006 04 01
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