by James Dodson
“Why is it in most country music songs,” Maggie wondered aloud, “that the men are always leaving the women and the women are kind of glad to see them go, or else the women leave the men and the men are, like, you know, sick and angry and stuff?”
I explained this was a universal theme in art and music, as irresistible to the seventeenth-century Venetian opera librettist as to the twentieth-century Nashville songwriter. Someone, I noted, had called it the battle of the sexes.
“You mean they like to fight each other?”
“No. It’s just that men and women are made so differently that sometimes the same things that attract us to each other also cause a few problems.” I realized, as I said this, that we were veering dangerously close to our own situation. She and her brother had overheard more arguments in the previous year than they’d heard in their lifetimes and I knew it frightened the daylights out of both of them. Well, it had frightened us, too. “The trick is to learn how to see eye to eye. To honorably disagree, respect the other’s viewpoint, and get over it and on to something better,” I said, thinking this was apparently where her mom and I came up a bit short—or maybe not. Time would tell.
“Right,” Maggie said confidently. “You mean sex.”
I rolled an eye in her direction. “What do you know about sex?”
“It’s what people do when they’re in love and get married. To have babies. It’s very normal, Dad.”
“Ah. I see….”
I nodded, worrying. We’d never had a discussion of sex before because it seemed like only moments ago that my darling daughter was trying to decide which guy she really, really, really liked the most, Bert or Ernie. The Big Talk loomed in the not-too-distant future, but a rain-swept interstate highway in western New York didn’t seem like the time and place to open up this Pandora’s box. Besides, Maggie was only seven, more interested in fly-fishing than boys, right? When the time was right, she’d ask even more unsettling questions and I’d sit her down and tell her exactly what she needed to know about men and women, the battle of the sexes, human reproduction, etcetera and so forth, and where babies really came from—which, as everyone knew, was from lily pads in an enchanted pond somewhere beyond the clouds.
Mercifully, she decided to clamp on headphones and listen to a Roald Dahl book on tape, leaving me once again free to drive along a rainy road with my thoughts. Out of habit, I tuned Old Blue’s radio to a local public station and found a learned head talking to the National Press Club about the crisis of fatherlessness in America. Thirty percent of the kids in America, he said, went to bed every night without a father in the house, and most of the nation’s escalating social ills could be traced to the curse of the absentee father—the alarming rise in teen violence, the growth of urban gangs, the shocking rate of unwed births. America, he predicted, would soon be the most fatherless society on earth.
Under the circumstances, this was a thesis I didn’t need or wish to hear more about so I turned the knob again and learned, on a more cheerful note, that oxygen had been discovered on this day in 1831. It was also the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. interstate system, which I vaguely knew, and the fiftieth anniversary of the bikini, which I didn’t.
The hourly news came on. A bomb had gone off at the Olympics and a security guard named Richard Jewell was being questioned in regard to that incident. I had a first cousin named Richard Jewell and vaguely wondered if the suspect might be him, then decided it probably wasn’t. Elsewhere, the Republicans were getting ready to nominate Bob Dole for president in San Diego and some windbag senator was urging Dole to embrace the idea of getting rid of the U.S. penny, a piece of antiquated currency, he said, that had “outlived its usefulness to society.” The Democrats, who were about to convene in Chicago, were saying pretty much the same thing about Bob Dole.
—
The rain stopped in Buffalo just as we checked in to the Lord Amherst Motor Inn, named for Baron Jeffrey Amherst, the famous British army officer who gallantly fought the French for Fort Ticonderoga and cleverly gave disease-infested blankets to the local Indians, introducing half a dozen European maladies to the North American landscape.
It was our first motel night in six days. We needed firm beds and warm showers and the motel accepted pets as long as you kept them off the beds, which explained why Amos immediately lumbered up on one double bed and made himself comfy while Maggie jumped on the other one, grabbed the remote, and quickly switched on the television to see if Nickelodeon had managed to stay in business without her, reminding me that it had been at least “a whole entire week” since she’d seen an episode of something called Clarissa Explains It All, which rather explained it all.
Seeing Maggie and Amos reminded me why my plan was to try and stay in as few motels and avoid as many big cities as possible on our freestone fly-ramble out to Yellowstone. If I didn’t, we’d all become overweight couch potatoes in no time because, let’s face it, pretty soon I’d start watching CNN and The Weather Channel and we’d never reach Old Faithful and the Yellowstone River.
I washed my face and dialed my parents’ friends who lived somewhere on the south side of town, hoping they could give me useful advice on the best way to see Niagara Falls on a crowded summer morning at the heart of wedding season. I was secretly excited about seeing Niagara Falls. It’s such an icon of American culture. A decade before, returning from our honeymoon to Quebec City—the “Poor Man’s Paris,” as it’s called—Maggie’s mother and I had briefly considered driving over to the Falls for a quick look and perhaps a self-conscious laugh at this living cliché of connubial bliss, but lack of time and money had prevented it. We’d veered south to Vermont instead.
Don Hoffmeyer was an old friend and business associate of my father’s who’d once taken me trapshooting at his club on a hill in Buffalo. He was also a devoted fly fisherman. Don invited us to meet him and his wife, Joyce, for dinner and during it asked me how my mother was holding up since my father’s death. He seemed pleased when I told him my mother was doing well, having more good days than bad. “I’m sure she misses him. We all do. Your dad was a special guy,” Don said. “You must miss him, too.” I admitted I did. More than he could ever know. The fourteen months since his death sometimes felt like fourteen years.
Don started talking about fly-fishing in Canada and I eavesdropped on Maggie, who was busily filling Joyce in on our death-defying escape on the road out of the Adirondacks, how she’d caught the trip’s first trout, and my half-gainer out of Norumbega Girl. Joyce appeared charmed. She inquired about Jack and I said Jack was just fine—riding bikes and learning to swim with his mother on Nantucket, as it so happened. “How marvelous,” she said, “that you can each take separate vacations like that and enjoy it.”
“It works for us,” I replied cheerfully, avoiding my daughter’s solemn gaze.
She ordered angel-hair pasta. I ordered chicken wings. Don, who had a T-bone steak, ordered another round of drinks and started telling me about a staggeringly expensive shotgun he once bought on Regent Street in London, then suggested that we get to the Canadian side of the Falls before noon because the view was better and the parking could be murder if you waited too long.
—
The next morning around ten, we crossed through Canadian customs. The stern lady clerk examined Amos’s rabies certificate and then studied Amos for a moment, perhaps thinking he might be a cleverly disguised fugitive from Interpol’s most-wanted list. Then she studied me to see if I was a deranged individual trying to snatch an elderly dog and a small girl calmly doing yarn games from the bosom of their homeland. The border official bore an uncanny resemblance to my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Wettington, who had an impressive mustache and carried a riding crop on school field trips.
She asked me—none too friendly-like, either—where exactly we were headed. I said we were headed to the Canadian side of the Falls and she looked prepared to slap me for being such a wise-mouth. In the nick of time, I mended my ways to say we were ta
king a shortcut across Ontario to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where we planned to camp and fish in Hemingway country.
“Poor Woody Ham,” I said as we were finally waved through Checkpoint Wettington.
“Who’s Woody Ham?”
I told Maggie the sad story of Woodrow C. Ham. Woody Ham was a meek round-faced boy in my fourth-grade class who never made a peep. One day somebody wrote something pretty harmless about Miss Wettington on the tiles of the boys’ bathroom—Miss Wettington is really a man. Miss Wettington responded by lining up every boy in the class and interrogating us one by one beneath the glow of an intense reading lamp in the janitor’s closet. Woody Ham, of all people, fessed up to the graffiti and was soon led away for summary execution. Miss Wettington had a four-foot wooden paddle with nine holes in it—nine holes, it was rumored, for those victims who’d died from it. The legendary paddle actually whistled, I explained to my daughter, and today it resided in a special exhibit on frontier-era child abuse in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
“Wow. Where is Miss Wettington now?”
“I don’t know. With any luck she’s waxing her mustache and doing twenty-five-to-life in the state prison.”
We parked the truck in a large asphalt parking lot and hooked Amos to a long lead, then headed toward the main set of Niagara Falls viewing buildings, where several thousand other tourists were milling about in the bright sunshine. It was a fine summer day, with giant white battleship clouds serenely anchored overhead. I do hate to sound like a complete hayseed from Maine, but I’d honestly never seen anything quite as impressive as Niagara Falls—the way an entire river rushed over the precipice and the mother of all mist swelled up from the churning tumult below.
It was suddenly obvious to me why the Falls had been such a sacred spot to Native Americans. Long ago they offered crops, game, weapons, and other personal possessions to try and appease the god of the thundering Falls, and the most famous story was the legend of the Maid of the Mist, the beautiful virgin girl who was annually sacrificed to the Falls in a white canoe filled with flowers and fruit. She would calmly guide her canoe into the vortex, it was said, assured of her place in Heaven. The last young woman to give herself to the rite was the daughter of a powerful chieftain, who was so grief-stricken over his daughter’s demise that he steered his own canoe over the Falls. Supposedly their spirits still dwelled in the caves beneath the Falls, a tale guaranteed to pierce the heart of any daddy parent.
I stood looking at the Falls, enthralled by their mystery and power, remembering how as a child the thought of losing one or both of my parents was my darkest fear; realizing, too, how as a parent the thought of losing one of my children had an even more potent terror attached to it. The joys of parents are secret, Francis Bacon wrote. And so are their griefs and fears; they cannot utter the one, nor will they not utter the other. Undoubtedly there were people on a beach in Long Island having thoughts along these same lines.
“Dad,” Maggie said, interrupting these sober thoughts, “what are you doing?” I realized I was standing on a bench, leaning far over the rail—just the sort of dumb fool thing you scream at your kids for doing. Amos was seated on the pavement panting as a small crowd of admirers made a fuss over him. A toddler kept desperately trying to kiss his nose.
“What a nice puppy,” the toddler’s mother cooed.
“He’s not a puppy,” Maggie said. “He’s thirteen.”
“Really? He doesn’t look all that old.”
We chatted with the Donahue family from Atlanta. They’d leased their house in Midtown for the Olympics and vamoosed north to see America while the rest of America was busy watching the Olympics. I didn’t tell them I’d lived there once upon a time and I wondered if they were perhaps traveling in a bus because there seemed to be two or three dozen of them, a team of Donahues all wearing the same Atlanta Braves caps. They were headed to the new Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland next, then maybe to Chicago for a Cubs game or two, where they would fill up most of the outfield seats.
It’s believed about a million newlyweds a year still come to pay homage to the thundering gods at Niagara. A few moments later, two of them asked me to snap their picture. They were a handsome Chinese American couple from Baltimore, Ken and Natalie. Cute kids in matching Georgetown T-shirts, recent grads who had just gone to work on Wall Street. They were drinking diet Cokes held in identical blue plastic holders. I pictured them having two of everything in their long and prosperous married life—two nice kids, two luxury automobiles, a pair of handsome matching investment portfolios, and twin marble bathroom vanities.
Ken explained that they were about to head down and board the Maid of the Mist for a jaunt beneath the Falls. “The Maid of the Mist, you know, is one hundred and fifty years old this year,” he said, and Natalie added that speaking of birthdays Tupperware was forty.
A rangy black guy in a Bulls basketball shirt loped up and patted Amos briskly on the back and said, “Man oh man. Great dog. Let me ride this guy.”
“He’s too old,” one of the minor Donahues told him from somewhere beneath a baseball cap.
Maggie asked if she could unhook Amos because he didn’t like the lead. I said she could but she had to watch him or else he’d be drinking from the Falls or, worse, peeing in it. A tubby geezer in a tank shirt that read Living Sex Symbol laughed and asked me if we’d been down the street to the Daredevil Hall of Fame yet. I admitted we hadn’t but said we were thinking of taking a ride with Ken and Natalie on the Maid of the Mist.
“Don’t waste your time,” the living sex symbol said. “The lines are a mile long and it’s kind of a rip-off. If it was me, I’d go to the museum. Remember that nut Stephen Trotter? He’s there.”
Actually, I did remember Stephen Trotter, the last American to survive the 180-foot plunge over Horseshoe Falls, and the youngest ever, a teenager from Rhode Island whose courage matched Woody Ham’s, one of only five individuals who survived the plunge among the sixteen daredevils who made it over. When the Victoria police hauled him out of the slosh he had only a slight scratch on his arm. “It was real cool,” he told the local paper.
I caught up to Maggie on the steps by the gift shop, where she was still talking to the Donahue matriarch, apparently giving her our entire family history.
“Maggie,” I said worriedly, “where’s your dog?”
“Oh.” She looked around and then pointed to the open gift shop door. “I think he went in there.”
I went in the gift shop and found our elder traveler waiting patiently in line behind a large red-haired woman buying caramel corn. The woman looked a bit like Sarah Ferguson, the celebrity-crazed Duchess of York; perhaps it was even her. I tapped my dog on the head and indicated that he should follow me, but he refused to budge. Amos has a sweet tooth that easily eclipses that of an overweight British royal. Just then, Maggie appeared, flush with an apology.
“Sorry, Dad. I just kind of forgot.”
I grumbled something about learning to accept responsibility, then realized Amos was really my responsibility and apologized. It was too damn hot, too damn crowded. I suggested we get soft-serve ice cream—Amos loved ice cream—and hit the road for Michigan.
The red-haired woman whipped around with flashing eyes. “Where did you find ice cream?” she demanded with a fruity and unmistakably upper-crust British accent. “I simply adore soft-serve ice cream.”
—
We fished late that afternoon on the Thames south of London. London was a town in the southwest corner of Ontario, less than an hour from Michigan. Before we reached the river, we stopped at a convenience store for Gatorade and candy bars. The store sold fishing licenses and I casually asked the elderly clerk if that river out back had any decent fish in it and he replied, “Only pike a foot long, eh?” He smiled as if he might be lying through his dentures.
We found a convenient sandbar ten miles south of the city near a provincial boat launch. Due to the currents, I didn’t fancy
launching Norumbega Girl and having to face a three- or four-mile portage back upstream after an hour’s idle fishing. We would fish from the river’s shore, like Ike Walton’s original East Sussex anglers. The river was wide and had a greenish cast, whether from municipal sewage upstream or late summer algae bloom it was impossible to tell. I’d never fished for pike, which are a freshwater species related to pickerel and a carnivorous fish equipped with formidable teeth that feed on smaller fish, snakes, and other aquatic life, are known to eat four times their weight, and are sometimes called jackfish in Canada. I had a friend who grew up near Ontario’s famed Shelf Region who claimed the northern pike was, ounce for ounce, the most tenacious game fish on earth. I decided to try my luck against the brute by using a spinner rod with a silver minnow lure. Maggie stayed a fly-rod purist and after I tied a lighter leader and Bristol Emerger on her tippet, so she could fish just below the surface film, or what’s sometimes called the meniscus, I watched her wade into the shallows wearing her old canvas sneakers.
“Hey, not too far out. Those currents look a bit tricky.”
A short nod.
She made a cast that immediately snarled due to the crosswind. She tried to untangle the wind knot but finally gave up and asked me to come over and help. I set down my rod and waded through the shallows to the sandbar. Her line was badly snarled. I took out my clippers and snipped off the mangled line, then unwound more tippet from a spool in my vest. We sat on the sand and I tied on a new leader and fly for her, greasing a new elk-hair emerger with float dope.
“Dad, can I ask you something?”
“Sure. As long as it’s not about Miss Wettington. I’ve spent thirty years trying to forget that woman and her whistling hardware.”
“Did you, like, enjoy getting married to Mommy?”
Take a romantic fishergirl who remembers her own birth to Niagara Falls, I thought, and you get exactly what you deserve: ten million questions about matrimony and none you’d care to answer. I didn’t wish to talk about it, but she obviously needed to.
