The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
East Aurora, NY at Christmastime is one of the loveliest places I know. We were just there the other day for lunch at one of our favorite restaurants and then some shopping at Vidler’s, a onetime five-and-dime store that is now a destination in itself. I took this photo, and then applied a Prisma filter. Doesn’t this look like the kind of place where a Hallmark Christmas movie would be filmed?
Have I mentioned Post 10 here before? Hang on, let me go look…here’s some 70s-quiz show music while I look through the archives….
OK, it does not appear that I’ve mentioned Post 10 yet! Or if I have, I’ve just linked or embedded one of his videos…anyway Post 10 is a YouTuber from New England who has a lot of varying and somewhat obscure, offbeat interests. He’s very knowledgeable about municipal water systems and water flow management, and he likes to strike out “into the field” to find what he might, and even deal with issues as he finds them. This is the very first video of his I ever watched, in which he addresses an impressively-flooded roadway armed only with a rake. More recently he’s done a lot of investigating drainage culverts in wilderness areas, clearing out beaver dams and the like; one time he actually camped inside a drainage culvert for 36 hours straight, just to see if he could do it. He also goes exploring in interesting backwoods areas, and he’s just generally the type of person who points at things very few people think about and says, “Isn’t that interesting!”
In short, Post 10 is a delight and more people should watch him.
Well, apparently last week he decided that he just had to come to Western New York from his New England stomping grounds to see what an apparent seven feet of snow on the ground looked like, and here’s his resulting video as he drives around Buffalo and the Southtowns! It’s fun listening to his commentary as he drives many streets and roads that I know; in fact, at several points in this video he’s very close to my own house. If I’d known, I would have rolled out the red carpet, or put up a banner reading “THE 716 WELCOMES POST-10!!!” or some such thing. Or, I could have given him some pointers to go see some cool stuff…but in the video he alludes to coming back next time, and if there’s one thing I can promise, there will be a next time. Sometime.
Hopefully not for a while, but sometime.
It’s nice to hear some outside perspective on our lovely region…particularly when he’s driving through Buffalo proper and notes with approval the city’s snow-removal efforts. Now that‘s something you don’t hear often!
Oof.
I don’t measure our snow, because…meh, I don’t need numbers. You reach a point where they’re not helpful…but here’s a sobering bit of numerical reflection. I just Googled Orchard Park’s average annual snowfall, and apparently it’s 114 inches, according to one site.
So, in the space of about 36 hours, we have received two-thirds of what we average for the entire year, in terms of snow.
Oof, indeed.
Luckily, we’re in good shape! I took the storm seriously as the forecasts started coming in. I loaded up on food and coffee and, yes, booze. We have power* and a comfortable house. We’re supposed to get another few inches overnight tonight as the weakening snow bands shift south again, and then this whole thing will be over sometime tomorrow. We’re forecast above freezing for the next bunch of days. Everything will be fine…eventually.
And that, combined with this from our County Executive, makes me think about something else:
There are problems in many streets and major roadways around here because people who insisted on attempting to drive someplace inevitably got stuck. Obviously this screws up all manner of important operations: plows, trucks moving the snow (when there’s this much, you really can’t just plow it to the side, it has to be trucked and dumped someplace), and the emergency vehicles that have to respond to calls. It’s not just people in regular cars; in advance of the storm, Governor Hochul closed major local expressways to commercial traffic, so now we have truckers getting stuck on major local boulevards as they attempt circumventing closed thruways. All of that can be partially chalked up to capitalism in some degree; we just can’t let business shut down for a day or two, can we?
But looking at County Executive Poloncarz’s tweet, I note his wording: “Please hunker down for a bit longer.”
This storm started in earnest around 8pm on Thursday night. It’s now Saturday morning as I write this, so we’ve been hunkered down for…not even two days yet.
So, my question is: Why do we as a society get cabin fever this quickly now? Is it “car culture” baked into our brains in 2022, where we get antsy to go out after just a few hours at home? Have we allowed our lives to become fast-paced to so great a degree that the very idea of spending a few days in our homes is somehow alien to us? I am by no means immune to this. I keep thinking, Wow, I really gotta suit up and get our cars dug out! I gotta get out there! And then I remind myself, Why? There’s no place that we have to be. We’re not even allowed to drive right now anyway. We have everything we need, right here, and we can go days without running into a NEED that has to be addressed. We’re good. Just take turns shoveling for a few minutes at a time, and meanwhile, just sit and be warm. Why own a personal library, if not in part for days like this!
So yeah, we really do need to do better as a society at living–really, actually living–in our own homes. We need to make our homes into less of a “base of operations” for our lives and more into actual homes. A home should not be a place where we find ourselves not wanting to be after just a short while. At least, that’s not what it seems to me a home should be.
* Oh, I didn’t mention that we lost power for about five hours yesterday morning! That sucked. Apparently a transformer at our local substation blew. Luckily, the NYSEG folks were almost dead accurate in their estimated restoration time: they forecasted power to come back on about 1pm, and it did, at 12:53pm. Nice. Our backup sump pump kept up just fine (though some work is needed in that department; more on that another time). It was fine, really…but a power outage on top of being in the middle of an epic snowstorm was more use of my brain-cycles than I really wanted to expend yesterday. When I finally crashed last night, around 10pm after my bedtime reading of about a page and a half, I crashed hard. Anyway, life marches on!
At last report, a trained weather-spotter in our town reported snowfall of 54 inches to one of the local news stations.
This is what it looked like out my front door this morning:
That was nearly twelve hours ago. It has been snowing continuously since, dumping multiple inches an hour. We’re not due for any relief for another five or six hours, apparently.
I’ve never seen anything like this. Not even “Snowvember”, the big event that socked us for a week back in 2014, was like this. Or maybe it was…but Snowvember unfolded over two or three days. This is like that entire event, packed into a single day. I have made no attempt at shoveling out front; all of my shoveling has been in back, to give Carla a place for relief and so I can get at the furnace vents and keep them clear. And even that feels like a losing battle, because I’ve run out of places to throw new snow.
But I’ll have to go out again, at least once more this evening.
After Sunday we have a week of temps in the high 30s and low 40s, so we’ll be able to melt some of this off. But for now…I’m rarely one to indulge thoughts of moving to places where it doesn’t snow. As natural hindrances (not sure I’d call it a ‘disaster’) go, I’ll still take snow over wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes, extreme heat, hurricanes, the likelihood of entire regions getting reclaimed by the sea as levels rise, and living in the company of many folks who vote for Ron DeSantis. But right now, all I want is for the snow to stop.
Just…stop.
I can take two days to dig, but only if it stops!
My friend Shaun Reiter, who puts up with more of my crap at work than he probably deserves to, was at a social function at Highmark Stadium the other night. When he left, darkness had fallen and the first flurries of snow were coming down, and he took a fantastic picture from outside the stadium on his way out. I saw the photo and asked if I could post it, and he graciously consented, so here it is.
If you’ve seen anything about the impending weather in this region, this particular vista may look very different in the next few days….
Today we went to the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens because in addition to their standard beautiful displays, they were also having an orchid show, courtesy the local orchid hobbyists’ association. Here are some of the many pictures I took! More available in this Flickr album.
I saw this on County Executive Mark Poloncarz’s Twitter feed this evening. It’s a beautiful shot of post-sunset over downtown Buffalo. Our city has sunsets over water. Just like Waikiki! (I know that this is a reach…but really, our sky does beautiful things.)
If the attitudes in Ancient Rome had anticipated attitudes on 21st century America, I suppose they would have razed the Coliseum after just a few decades because the rich and powerful–Brutus and Cassius, say–could have made more money on a newer venue farther out from the city core. But no, the Romans built a sports venue that would last them for centuries and whose stone guts would still be standing over 1500 years following the fall of their Empire.
Meanwhile, in the US we have absurd situations like the Atlanta Braves and Falcons, both of whom are playing in spiffy new stadiums built in the last couple of years, replacing aging venues built…in the 1990s. At least Chicago still has Wrigley and Boston still has Fenway…but here at home, in my neck of the woods, the Buffalo Bills are gearing up to start construction on their new stadium. (And this is literally my neck of the woods: we live less than two miles from Highmark Stadium, current home of the Bills, and the new facility is set to be built across the street from the current stadium, basically taking the stadium and the parking lots and flip-flopping them.)
Renderings for the New Bills Stadium (which I’m sure will sell naming rights to some local company so it’ll end up being a boring corporate-sounding name) were released the other day, all over news media and social media in the 716:
My reaction? Meh, whatever.
Look, it’s fine. It’s nice. Stadiums (stadia?) nowadays all tend to have this futuristic-shiny thing going on (exceptions exist–I do like the way Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium ended up), and architectural diagrams always make new buildings look shinier than they do in real life; that outside rendering up top looks less like a building and more like a Ralph McQuarrie concept-art painting for a 21st century remake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The field rendering? It’s fine. It’s a stadium. Inside, they all kind of look the same, because there’s really not a whole lot new you can do with a football field and 60-70,000 seats around it. It’s interesting that according to the scoreboard the Bills are beating the Jets 24-3, and according to the Gigantic Teevee Screen, the Bills are playing a home game in their white uniforms. Other than that, my basic reaction is “Yup, that’s a stadium.”
Do the Bills need a new stadium? Not exactly, in the sense that the current one is still perfectly capable of hosting games (they’re having one tomorrow night!), it’s not crumbling, et cetera. But in the sense of “Can the NFL, the Bills’ owners, and some others make a shit-ton more money than they already are if they rebuild?”, then the answer is, “HOLY SHIT YES, AND THEY CANNA BUILD IT FAST ENOUGH!!!” Which just happens to be what the answer always is, here in our era of Late-Stage Capitalism.
The worst part is the price tag that will be assessed not on the team’s owners, who are worth over 5 billion dollars, but on the public. This new stadium is supposed to cost well over 1 billion dollars, and it’s yet another example of the rich not being asked to pay entirely for the thing they want. So in a state and community with out-dated schools and infrastructure and loads of impoverished citizens, we’re spending over a billion dollars on a building that will help people who are already rich beyond comprehension get even richer.
I could rant about this, but at my vantage point of 51 years, I’ve given up on this sort of thing. If there is a point at which Americans become so sick of being fleeced by the rich that they start setting up the guillotines in the city squares, I’ve no idea what that point is. It’s tough shit, ’cause that’s just who we are as a country. We’ve equated “freedom” with “thank you sir, may I have another”, when it comes to the rich being showered with advantages they hardly need.
A while back the big debate around here wasn’t whether to build a new stadium, but where. Many people wanted it in downtown Buffalo, or as close to downtown as possible. The most frequently-mentioned site was a spot just off I-190, the main highway that accesses downtown Buffalo, where a bunch of mostly-abandoned buildings once used for public housing now stand. The arguments were that the stadium in that spot would benefit from downtown’s hotel availability and transit systems. Now, hotels I can maybe see, as there are a lot of new hotels in the downtown Buffalo area. (So much new hotel space that I often wonder why we have so much of it, given our city’s old, dilapidated, and entirely-too-small convention center that is in desperate need of replacing but probably won’t be for at least a decade now.) Transit, I’m not at all sure about. Yes, there are more bus lines in the city than all the way out to the suburbs, but that’s all there is, unless Buffalo’s Metro Rail system was somehow extended to the new stadium. (Our Metro Rail, built in the late 1980s, is literally a straight line. It was intended to be the start of a good regional light rail system, but nothing has ever been done to add to the original line.)
Building way out in Orchard Park isn’t awesome, but it makes sense on some other grounds. First, the site is shovel-ready; no demolition of existing property is needed at all. The new stadium is literally going onto the parking lot of the old one. There are lots of hotels kinda-nearby, but the area surrounding the stadium itself is not exactly a hotbed of lodging activity; just about any hotel is probably ten to fifteen minutes away. Public transit isn’t fantastic out here, either, with just a few stops that are meant more for commuters than for consistent access to and from the city. And sadly, neither of those is likely to change as long as the population of The 716 remains in its current neighborhood. Increased transit and lodging density aren’t going to happen unless this region starts growing its population in a major way again. (Which might happen longterm! Especially as climate change really starts digging it its heels. But it won’t happen fast enough to benefit the stadium.)
So, the new stadium will still be a place almost entirely accessible by car or bus or RV or whatever. It will still be a big building on a bigger piece of land with another big piece of land next door to house all the vehicles and such. In Buffalo, tailgating is a major part of the Bills’ fan experience; a downtown stadium would almost certainly have made tailgating mostly a thing of the past, at least as we know it now. Tailgating will survive now, so…yay. (This is the fanbase that drunkenly jumps through folding tables, so I won’t say that I was much swayed by nostalgic appeals to tailgating.)
The other big debate about the stadium was whether or not it should have a dome. As you can see by the renderings, the current design is not domed, which you might think a surprise given how the weather around here can be. Now, as always, it’s worth the eternal Buffalo-rejoinder about our weather: “On average it really isn’t that bad in winter here, you just hear about the few times it does get really bad, and anyway, it’s spring that’s massively unpleasant here, winter’s fine.” And yes, all of that is true. And while more teams play in enclosed stadiums now than ever before, there are still hold-outs that play in the open air in northern climes: the Packers, Steelers, Browns, Giants-Jets, and Patriots all play in open-air stadiums. It’ll be fine here, especially if, as built, it’s got a bit more cover than Highmark Stadium, which somehow manages to surround you with concrete and make you feel more exposed to the elements.
And with the “What, no dome?!” reactions come the real pie-in-the-sky dreamers, the ones who say (and yes, they really do say this), “But if it’s not a dome, then Buffalo can’t host a Super Bowl!”
Oy.
Look, folks. Buffalo could build the single-greatest domed stadium in the history of such venues. They could build it right downtown, and give it a Metro Rail spur with a station right there in the building. They could build it within walking distance of all those nice new downtown hotels…and Buffalo would still be unable to host a Super Bowl.
Like it or not, Buffalo for all its charms and all the work it’s doing to try to reverse its sixty-years of bad economic and demographic fortune is simply too small to host an event as big as a Super Bowl. One person actually said to me on Twitter, “How is Buffalo too small? Stadiums can only set 70000 people. It’s not like the stadium doubles its capacity for the game.” It’s almost like it comes as news to these folks that the Super Bowl brings quite a few times as many people to the host cities as can attend the game. I found an article indicating that when Atlanta hosted Super Bowl LIII in February 2019, more than half a million people flooded the city.
Buffalo, at this time, simply does not have the hotel stock or transportation infrastructure for a week-long influx of that many people. The most recent illustrative example is Jacksonville, FL, which hosted Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005. Jacksonville is often cited as the worst host city of the last couple decades; most famously, that city’s lack of hotel stock at the time was addressed by docking cruise ships in the city’s harbor to act as temporary hotels. And Jacksonville is a city that’s three times the size of Buffalo, in terms of population. (I think it’s obvious that docking cruise ships in Buffalo’s harbor in February is simply not gonna happen.)
So, summing up, my reaction to all this stadium talk is basically, “Sure, OK, looks fine, I’m sure it’ll be a lovely place to see a game if you can afford it, we shouldn’t have to pay for it but we will, and can we please knock off the Super Bowl-hosting talk? Anyway, Go Bills.”
Go Bills, indeed.
Today we took a fall train ride. There’s a train that does scenic rides out of the depot in Hamburg, NY. We did this a year ago and greatly enjoyed it, so we did it again today. It’s an out-and-back ride, covering maybe twenty miles out and twenty back, or maybe less; the train slows way down when going over two trestles that cross the two branches of Eighteen Mile Creek, mainly so people on board can go Ooooh and Aaaaah and take pictures.
First, when going on a train ride, one dresses appropriately. Bring on the hickory stripes!
It was also cool out, hence the scarf. First wearing of a scarf this season!
Also, a couple of the workers on the train complimented my outfit. So that’s two weekends in a row getting compliments on my overalls. Yay! (I really love the hickory stripe pattern, if you couldn’t tell.)
And now, photos. All of these were taken on the return trip, when I got the window seat; The Wife had the window on the way out. WNY is putting on a lovely show so far this fall, I must admit. The stream is Eighteen Mile Creek, which actually has two branches that meet in a confluence a mile or so downstream of each place where the train crosses. The creek is named by virtue of its mouth lying eighteen miles downshore from the beginning of the Niagara River.
I’m told there is lots of good hiking along Eighteen Mile Creek. Cane and I never made it down here. Alas….
If you want to see all of the photos from the ride, plus a video I culled together, it’s all in a Flickr album, here.
Now, photos:
One hundred twenty one years ago today, President William McKinley was shot by an anarchist while visiting the World’s Fair in Buffalo, NY. Eight days later, President McKinley died of his injuries, and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became President.
Being the scene of a Presidential assassin certainly colors a city’s local lore. Years ago the Buffalo News ran an annual short fiction contest, and in 2007 the contest theme was a story surrounding the events of the assassination. This is the story I submitted. And…it won!
***
Ernest Knight tried to conceal his wheezing as he pushed Hilda’s wheelchair up onto the sidewalk, but Hilda heard him all the same. Old and sick as she was, she still heard everything.
“Slow, Ern,” she said. “That heart of yours–“
“I’m fine,” Ernest replied. This eighty-six year old heart of mine is still strong enough to push my eighty-two year old wife.
Fifteen minutes later they arrived at a spot where the street sloped slightly downward toward the underpass. Ernest applied the chair’s brake.
“This spot all right, Dear?”
“Oh yes,” Hilda said as she opened an Agatha Christie book she hadn’t read in so long that she’d forgotten who did it. Ernest merely shuffled about.
“Lots of people already,” he said.
“Everybody loves to see a President,” Hilda replied.
Ernest took in a deep breath of November air, and let it out. Hilda was sick, and he was old. This will be our last President together, he thought; and then he turned his memory back to their first President together.
As the newest Lieutenant on the force, it fell to Knight to supervise the uniformed officers outside the Temple in their efforts to control the crowd. Next time a President’s in town, he thought, at least I’ll be one of those poppinjays on horseback.
“Stop pushing, folks,” he called out when the crowd got a bit too restless. “The line will move quickly enough.”
“Oh please,” came the voice of a young woman. Knight turned to face her. She wore a blue dress and a matching blue hat, but what held Knight’s gaze were her wide hazel eyes and the red hair she wore in a style that was more daring than he usually saw in Buffalo. “We’ve been standing here for two hours.” She dabbed at the sweat on her lip with a handkerchief from her handbag.
“It’s hot for everyone, Miss,” Lt. Knight replied, recovering himself. “You were pushing this gentleman.” He gestured to a young-looking man in a dark suit immediately in front of her in line.
“Oh, it is all right,” said the young-looking man. “I just want to congratulate the President.”
“Well, the line’s moving again,” Lt. Knight said. “Good day, Miss.” He tipped his hat to her, and she smiled in return. A mischievous smile.
“They put too much starch in your collar,” she said. “At least it fits you well.” She smiled again. Lt. Knight couldn’t help but watch her as she disappeared into the Temple of Music. He would always remember that look in her eyes, the first time they met.
He would also remember afterward how that young-looking man never used the handkerchief on his hand to dab at the copious sweat on his brow.
“Henry said this is a bad idea,” Ernest said. “He thinks we’re too old for this nonsense.”
“Henry always thinks we’re wrong,” Hilda replied, not looking up from her book.
Henry was the youngest of their three sons, and the most pig-headed. Born during the Wilson years – their fourth President – Henry had gone to war against the Germans in ’42 while his brothers, Walter and Joseph, had been sent to the Pacific. After the war, Henry had moved down south to follow the nurse he’d fallen in love with. Both Henry and Walter (born under Taft, Ernest and Hilda’s third President) were now nearing retirement themselves. (Joseph, their firstborn, had been buried in Arlington after Guadalcanal. He’d lived from Roosevelt to Roosevelt.)
“We should have voted for this one,” Hilda said. “He seems like a good man.”
Ernest nodded. So had McKinley.
Knight turned to his superior, Captain Hess, who’d just come from inside the Temple.
“Come inside,” Hess said. “Mr. Cortelyou’s nervous.”
That was George Cortelyou, personal secretary to the President, who’d been very nervous about security for this event.
“Yes, sir.”
Lt. Knight followed Captain Hess inside through the exit door, thinking incongruously that he’d get to see that young red-haired woman again. He shook that thought out of his head – and then he was in the same room as the President of the United States.
President McKinley was a big man, dressed in a black suit with a broad, white vest. At the moment he was greeting two children whose parents stood beaming behind them. The queue extended down the hallway opposite. There, third in line, was the young-looking man; behind him, the red-haired woman.
“Captain!” It was Mr. Cortelyou. He did look nervous. “We will close the doors in five minutes.”
“We’ll be ready,” Captain Hess replied. “Lt. Knight here will help clear the room.”
Nodding, Mr. Cortelyou moved back to the President’s right. Across the room from the President stood one of his personal bodyguards. It all looked perfectly in order. Lt. Knight caught the eye of the red-haired woman; she gave him a small smile. He chuckled, returned her smile, and turned his attention back to the line.
Next came the young-looking man, with his handkerchief still on his hand. He stepped up close to the President, who extended his right hand in greeting. But the young-looking man did not clasp Mr. McKinley’s outstretched hand. Instead–
Lt. Knight heard firecrackers.
“Henry never did like the snow,” Hilda replied.
“Well, we’re never leaving Buffalo again.”
“No, I suppose not, Dear.” Hilda touched Ernest’s hand. They’d lived in their current house, their second, since Truman’s defeat-turned-reelection. They’d moved after the boys had left, to a smaller place closer to little Anna’s grave. She’d been born, lived and died — of dysentery – all under Taft. Their only daughter.
Behind them a man with one of those new home movie cameras was climbing up onto the concrete balustrade to get a better view.
It would be about fifteen minutes now.
Blood, running scarlet across President McKinley’s white vest.
The guards, piling on top of the young-looking assassin.
The President, saying “Be careful of how you tell my wife.”
Mr. Cortelyou, shouting for assistance for the President.
“Knight!” Captain Hess, shouting. “Clear those people!”
The onlookers.
Lt. Knight sprang forward as the guards pummeled the assassin. “Don’t hurt him,” he heard the President say, but that would be the least of the President’s concerns.
Knight found that most of the onlookers had been ushered out by the other guards, but the red-haired woman just stood there, her hazel eyes wide with shock.
“Miss? Miss?”
“H-Hilda,” she stammered. “Hilda Watt.”
Lt. Knight put a hand on her arm.
“Let me take you home, Miss Watt.”
He could hear the sirens now. The President’s motorcade was almost here.
As darkness fell, he asked if he could call on her again. She said yes. And so it began, as President McKinley lingered. Their first President together.
The first night that Lt. Earnest Knight came to see Hilda Watt at her home, all proper-like, was the night that President McKinley died. Vice President Roosevelt was sworn in soon thereafter.
Their second.
Ernest looked down at Hilda, and found her eyes – still that beautiful hazel – turned up at him. Her hair was no longer red, but her eyes had never changed.
They both looked back to the street. There was the car, and in it, their eleventh President, and almost certainly their last. Neither expected to live to the 1964 elections. She was sick, and he didn’t see much point without her.
And as President Kennedy seemed to make eye contact with them, Earnest heard something he’d once heard before.
Something like…firecrackers.
The End