I went to the Platt Street Bridge today and looked across the Genesee gorge at the spot where Sam Patch plummeted nearly a hundred feet to his death. By my usual arcane methods (that is: seemingly aimless wandering, asking oblique questions, soaking in occult traveling music) I’d found out that decades after he made his death jump here, the Masters of Shinola had been mixing up endless vats of seething midnight goo in the same place. This was above Brown’s Race – which diverted the Genesee River into secret tunnels hewn out of rock, gravity and water providing the energy to drive the turbines. Right there above the gaping gorge, men spent their entire working lives extracting darkness and putting it in bottles and cans so that shoes could have that special spiffy gleam.
Today’s journey was triggered by little reprint booklet Hakim Bey sent to me. I knew about Sam Patch and his death jump into the Genesee gorge, but the illos in the booklet are rather charming. He’s Rochester’s genuine folk hero, a hell of a lot more real than Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill. There actually was a Sam Patch and he really did jump at the precipice of the High Falls, holding his pet bear on a chain. I’m wondering now why so many folk heroes commit suicide. Joe Magarac, John Henry, Casey Jones all did themselves in.
Whether Sam Patch started out jumping off roofs as a boy (as the booklet claims) will never be determined, but he truly did make a name for himself as early America’s premier daredevil jumper. He survived a plunge at Niagara Falls, but the Genesee gorge was too much for him. What the booklet leaves out is the fact that he was fished out of the river months later and buried here in a pauper’s grave. His wooden monument had this epitaph: “Sam Patch – Such is Life.”
Far more famous, if less deadly, Niagara Falls anchors the northwest corner of the Burnt Over District. There are no obvious sites of worship at Niagara. However, in 1825, Mordecai Noah bought land on Grand Island, just above the falls, and named it Ararat. He intended this to be a homeland for the Jews. The experiment failed, and all trace of his utopian vision is long gone, replaced over a hundred years later by Fantasy Island Amusment Park. I went there a few times as a kid – we called it Feeny Island. They had five themed areas: Action Town, Animal Kingdom, Garden of Fables, Indian Village and Western Town. However, no Shtetl-town. Like Ararat, it too went bankrupt and vanished.
Yet Niagara does have one great attraction. Tourists come from the far ends of the globe to see the huge broken river, the endless roaring cataract. But, much as I’m drawn to that sublime power, it’s the call of electricity that I obey: the hum of the wires, the sizzle of vast blue voltage from the powerhouses, temples of electrical generation.
The American side of Niagara Falls has the feel of a ghost town, though humans still walk the streets. Something happened here – much mighty something – mostly newlywed sex and turbines grinding out their rivers of electricity. Once upon a time, it was known as both the Honeymoon City and the Power Capital of the World. Though just across the river Niagara Falls, Ontario, is a far greater attraction, people still come to the American side and peer into the abyss. They stand at the guard rail and stare, as if there has to be more here than just endless relentless falling water.
Enthroned on Goat Island sits Nikola Tesla, aged arch-wizard, mad AC-Versus-DC man, three times life-size, before the entrance to the Cave of the Winds. Surrounding the statue now for decades: the hum of hidden powerhouses, flowing currents in secret subterranean channels, the vast invisible magnets spinning in darkness. Bronze Tesla sits with blueprints in his lap, limp pages, magic documents utterly effaced, smooth as the inner curve of a virgin’s thighs. The wordless book, like his hands and toes, is shiny-bright, rubbed clean, free of the black-green verdigris that coats the rest of the statue. Tesla wears a warlock’s gown – neck to ankles – and an involuted frown. He slumps forward, rapt in the silence of genius.
H.G. Wells visited the Power Capital of the World and left this description:
“These dynamos and turbines … impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of Winds … They are will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are clean, noiseless, and starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt at all … These are altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that engender irresistible forces in their sleep … a man goes to and fro quietly in the long clean hall of the dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket. Yet, the outer rim of the big generators is spinning at the pace of a hundred thousand miles an hour… All these great things are as silent, as wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body.”
Today thunder groans all around the electrical wizard, announcing that lightning will soon give birth to itself over Goat Island. Here, a cloud of roiling orgone over Niagara, a supernal god-white fist, rises without beginning or end, straight up from the Horseshoe, American, and Bridal Veil Falls. Thousands of tourists swarm Goat Island, gawking into the abyss – parents with their flocks of mewling kids, newlyweds making their pilgrimage of fertility, and young lovers now very old.
Behind Tesla stands all that remains of the original Power House Number One, the stone entrance, the triumphal archway to nowhere. Over the door is a crude bas relief medallion, showing an Indian (clearly no Iroquois) in a tiny canoe. He paddles for the Falls’ edge, weirdly distorted, seen through a haze of racial mist, a cartoon Red Man, full of brave suicidal impulse, straight toward his glorious doom.
More authentic to this place is Hé-no, the Iroquois thunder spirit, who was said to live in a cave under Niagara Falls. Another suicidal native is part of his legend: a young girl living above the falls who was engaged to marry a loathsome old man. Refusing to marry him, the maiden got into a canoe and fled down river, not unlike Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (“A ROARING TORRENT OF EMOTION!”) She and the canoe were swept over the falls. The canoe was seen falling to destruction, but the girl disappeared into the rising mist. Hé-no and his two helpers caught her in a blanket and brought her back to his cave. One of the assistants, much taken with her beauty, married her.
I turn toward the east and see a spectral ruin, The Hotel Niagara, honeymoon palace, one-time temple of wedding night glamor. It glows faintly in the haze, a twelve story brick bastion of long-ago love. Here, ten thousand virgins, shy or drunk-bold or both, removed their clothing and approached the altar of wedded bliss, accompanied by a perpetual background hum of electrical generation. For eight decades, night after night, the hotel – each of its two hundred rooms a charming orgone accumulator – soaked in the primal energies of newlyweds and couples returning to their special room, on the tenth, twentieth, fiftieth anniversary, to bathe in memory and lost eros-glow.
Here, ten thousand lovers stayed up until dawn, to see the sun’s rays pierce the pearly steam, then pulled the curtains tight, and fell back into bed, into the darkness of day. Now the hotel is condemned, “unfit for human habitation” the signs say. The doors are chained, the windows boarded up, the lights all out.
Here it was that I had attended the World Horror Convention. At the time I was writing fiction that fit loosely into the category called “Horror” by editors. I sold three novels that were absurdly mis-marketed and a few short stories to anthologies full of grue and cruelty. I attended a few science fiction conventions, hoping to make connections in the publishing world, but spent most of my time trying to escape pear-shaped people in cheap costumes. The only real exception was my brief ride in an elevator with a woman in a glittering outer space bikini. Her body was gorgeous but her face not improved by the effects of gravity, unfortunate piercings, and too much time in the sun. But at a convention of SF fans, not known for their elegance or glamor, she had star quality.
I did manage to get some schmoozing time in with the World Horror guest of honor. Poppy Z. Brite, at the time, was a writer of some note, and she was the first person I ever met who traveled with an entourage. I sold her one story, for an anthology of “erotic vampire fiction.” I had no interest in swishing capes and gothic booga-booga, so I did a story about fruit flies and humans who could somehow suck vision out of each others’ eyeballs. The pay was good – by the word – and I wrote right up to the limit.
The convention itself, set in a soon-to-be-condemned hotel, was wretched: a few panel discussions, a dealer’s room full of detritus I wouldn’t have wanted even when I was a twelve year old, and parties in dank little rooms where much defloration of virgins had occurred in the 1920s and ‘30s. “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” – sung by Ruby Keeler in a Busby Berkely musical – came to mind then and swims up from memory now.
Someday the stork may pay a visit
And leave a little souvenir
Just a little cute “what is it?”
But we’ll discuss that later, dear.
Downriver about four miles, past the Rainbow Bridge and Whirlpool State Park, I find the Devil’s Hole. By then, the electrical storm – threatening all day – has hit. Hé-no, the Iroquois thunder spirit, is moving in the heavens, preparing my downward path to the so-called “Cave of the Evil Spirit.” Blasts of lightning, hollow groans of thunder, pelting rain: something is being cleared away for my descent.
But there’s no rush. I wait in the parking lot, until the storm has passed and I can see again the far side of the gorge. Across the river is Canada, orderly, clean, and under control. On the American side things are not quite so well managed.
I have never, in all my trips to Niagara Falls, not gotten lost. I have a remarkably good sense of direction and truly need to know which way is north at all moments. I actually get dizzy if I can’t with certainty aim my thoughts toward the magnetic north pole. Perhaps it’s all that hydroelectric energy, all that man-made magnetism, buzzing in the air above the shabby, American side of the falls, but I always get turned around sideways and disoriented, drunk on the invisible radiation, when I’m near Niagara’s great spinning copper coils.
Climbing 398 slippery steps down to the base of the gorge, descending countless switchbacks steaming in the afternoon heat, my sense of direction is impaired, but not totally destroyed, because the river is always there below, a steady liquid roar heading due north. One fifth of all the fresh water in the planet earth is contained in the Great Lakes and it all flows past this narrow path below the rocky cliff edge.
A old guide book informed me that “overhanging the dark cavern is a perpendicular precipice from the top of which falls a small stream, usually dry in summer, named the ‘Bloody Run,’ made such during the historic ‘Devil’s Hole Massacre’ which occurred during the French and Indian War.” On that morning, a supply wagon train left Fort Schlosser, heading back empty toward Fort Niagara. Accompanied by a detachment of British regular troops, the convoy was ambushed as it passed by the Devil’s Hole. “Men and horses were driven over the precipitous cliffs. Some of the bodies caught in the trees and brush; others crashed three hundred feet below. the little creek ran red with blood and has ever since been called ‘Bloody Run.’ The massacre was done by a large party of Seneca braves.” Five officers and sixty-four privates were killed, beside the civilians who drove the wagons. Three men escaped, and a drummer boy.
I see no plummeting bodies, no evidence of the massacre today, though inside the Devil’s Hole, the rock has a distinctly reddish tinge. This is more likely from rusty iron ore than human blood, though it does give an organic feel to the cave, this wet shadowy infernal orifice.
The cave itself is not large: forty feet in and fifteen feet high. From a hole in the ceiling, cold subterranean air breathes downward. Here, supposedly, was the hiding place for Iroquois warriors – where they crouched waiting for the crunch and whine of wagon wheels, the harness creaks and chatter of the drivers, the drum beat that kept the soldiers marching in an orderly fashion. Then the Seneca poured out, screaming, from the infernal hole.
Alone in the cave, I do a little shouting of my own. I like to test underground places with my voice. I’ve done it at Indian Caverns in central PA, in the Widow Jane iron mine in the Catskills, and now the Devil’s Hole swallows my voice. I shout-sing a few phrases from a Sacred Harp hymn that was fifty years old when the massacre took place.
Broad is the road that leads to death.
And thousands walk together there.
But wisdom shows a narrow path.
With here and there a traveler.
As I climb the 398 wet, slick, twisted steps back to the surface, vapors rise with me. The sun is out now, and the stone stairway soaks in the heat, turning rainwater to curling ghosts of steam.