Strange towers and diverted disasters

 This weekend The Wife and I spent a bit of time driving on US 20A, from Orchard Park to Perry Center, where we hung a right for a day trip to Letchworth State Park. After Letchworth we went to Avon, NY where there's a good pizza place we like (they also do gluten-free!), and then we drove home, traveling south from Avon to Geneseo and then back home on 20A again. US 20A is one of my favorite drives for a number of reasons, all of which boil down to that it's just a beautiful road to drive, with its roughly 85 miles going from the flatness of the Buffalo area into the hills of eastern Erie County and then into the more rugged terrain of the western Finger Lakes region.

In addition to US 20A being a beautiful drive (and it's one of many gorgeous drives in autumn), it's also a bit less-traveled than its coast-to-coast parent road, US 20, which runs about twenty miles or so north of 20A (the A is for 'alternate'). Many farms dot its length, so you often have to be on the lookout for a tractor or a combine or hay wagon on its way from one part of one farm to another. US 20A runs east-west, which means lots of railroad crossings, and as you exit East Aurora and start encountering hills, you dip into small towns and up out of them on the other side. (Danger for leadfooted drivers: speed limits go from 55 to 35 immediately at the foot of the hills!)

US 20A is also an old road. It hasn't always been designed as 20A, but its route has existed since before World War II. It goes through old towns and old places. There are many long-closed businesses along its length, including restaurants that I've never known to be open that still carry signage. Restaurants out in the middle of nowhere...but at one point there was enough business for someone to make some money slinging hash or frying steaks. Each little town along the way has its own local hangout, located in very old big houses with fading paint jobs, and woodwork that's long been out of true, but with the current popular brands of beer advertised in neon (or whatever passes for neon these days).

There are two particular spots along US 20A that harken back to the road's, and the region's, younger days. Both are within sight of each other.

US 20A goes through a town called Warsaw, NY, which lies at the bottom of a steep-walled valley. The valley is actually so steep that trucks and other large vehicles (cars with trailers, campers, and buses) aren't even allowed to descend 20A into Warsaw, from either direction. Going either way, before you get to the steep descent into Warsaw, there are big signs and even a turn-off for large vehicles to figure out their alternate routes. Here's the signage at the turnaround west of Warsaw, for eastbound traffic:

Apparently this was all necessary because of a big fire that happened over fifty years ago:

It's a trucker's worst nightmare -- losing your brakes while traveling down a steep grade. 

That's exactly what happened to the driver of a large gasoline tanker on Warsaw's East Hill about 5:55 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 1969. The huge tanker careened out of control, smashed through a retaining wall and then crashed into a station wagon, rolling on top of it and bursting into flames. 

The station wagon driver, Thomas Drake of Elmira, was killed instantly. Tanker driver John M. Malatta of Macedon miraculously escaped serious injury, leaping from the cab before it became a giant fireball. 

Mr. and Mrs. Chester Kwiecen of Perry, driving up the hill behind the station wagon, narrowly escaped death by running to safety moments before their vehicle was overtaken by flames. 

Much of the East Hill area was transformed into a sea of fire, according to Daily News accounts. The explosion created a river of flames that engulfed four two-story homes within minutes, leaving 17 people homeless. All escaped safely, including an 83-year-old woman who was carried from her home by a neighbor. 

Still, the danger was far from over. 

Thousands of gallons of gasoline from the destroyed tanker leaked into village sewers, causing numerous explosions that blew manhole covers high into the air and caused a life-threatening situation for hours. 

As evening approached, the glow from the massive fire could be seen for miles around the Oatka Valley.

(quote from here)

In other areas around the country I've seen runaway truck piles, which are like exit lanes off the thruway except they go into a giant pile of sand, but 20A into Warsaw is too narrow for that sort of thing, so trucks have to just figure out a way around.

The truck entrance to Warsaw isn't the only interesting thing there! Just before that eastbound truck turnaround, on the opposite side of the road maybe a tenth of a mile away, is this building and structure:

Courtesy Google Maps street view.

As you come around a bend at the top of one of 20A's numerous hills and rises, the trees on the left end and then there's that structure, with the bunker beside it. I remember seeing a lot more of these towers at the tops of hills on our various drives (we road-tripped a lot when I was a kid); I remember one standing atop the big mountain that rises just south of Olean, NY, just before you crossed the line into Pennsylvania. I wouldn't learn for quite a few years just what these towers are, but they were once a crucial part of America's communications infrastructure. They are microwave transmission towers.

The website 99percentinvisible.com (which I just found as I was searching for information on microwave transmitter towers, and which has a book that I just happen to be reading now!) has an interesting and brief page explaining these things:

Between early wired networks and today’s fiber optics sat a system of microwave relay towers transmitting information from coast to coast across the United States. Built in the early 1950s, this line-of-sight network spanned the continent using zig-zag patterns to avoid signal overlap. It conveyed phone conversations and television signals from the era of the Kennedy assassination through the resignation of Nixon.

There's also a map of AT&T's once-extensive nationwide network of these towers, and lo, the Warsaw tower appears to be on it! As I read this map, it seems that the next one in the network is in Springville, NY, a town about 30 miles from Warsaw as the crow flies (or as the microwave beam transmits). These towers have to be placed in line-of-sight from one another, which is how it all works.

Courtesy 99percentinvisible.org

On one side of this road, a bit of old communications infrastructure; on the other, a construct built in response to an awful accident in the region's lore.

You can still drive through the old America. You just have to look for it and choose your roads carefully.

WNY Love Letter: The Dumas Bridge

 First things first: it's not a bridge. Also, I am quite literally the only person who calls it the Dumas Bridge.

Let's back up.

One of my favorite locations for nature walks in my neck o' the woods is Knox Farm State Park. This park is located in East Aurora, NY, and it constitutes the house, stables, farm buildings, and grounds of the old Knox Estate. The Knox family was, for a time, one of the richest families in the region (if not the richest family in the region). Seymour Knox was one of the founders of the famed Woolworth Company, the chain of five-and-dime stores that used to be prominent in American retail. Other members of the Knox family were high-ranking bank officers, and Seymour Knox III was the first owner of the Buffalo Sabres.

I honestly don't know where the Knox Family has gone since then. There may still be Knox descendents in the area, but if there are, they don't seem to be nearly as eminent in the community as they were "back in the day". The family's old country estate has since become a park, first a local park, and later part of New York's State Park system.

Knox Farm is itself a wonderful place, with the feel of an old English estate: the main house still stands and before COVID was the site of many wonderful events, including a craft sale where I used to go Christmas shopping each year. But there are also the outlying woods, surrounding the estate, through which well-maintained trails run. Walking in the Knox Farm woods is always a peaceful return to nature, and while there's enough variance in the topography to make different parts of the park feel differently from one another, it's not at all a demanding place to walk, like some of the other local nature parks located in the hillier regions.

I'll say more about Knox Farm in a future post, but for right now, I single out a single spot on one of its many trails:

It's not so much a bridge as an earthen embankment build to allow transit over a narrow bog through which the higher meadows drain into the lower ones. A culvert runs beneath the "bridge" to allow flow, but it's not like there's a stream there, just a slow occasional flow of dampness. Instead of a drop on either side, like you might expect from a bridge, there's a slope, so if you jumped you'd roll about six feet down on the northern side, and maybe ten feet on the southern side. The worst that might happen is a sprained ankle and you'd get muddy.

So no, it's not much of a bridge. But it has wooden fenceposts on either side that are of particularly rustic construction, and between those posts, and the fact that the bridge is far away from any visible buildings on the estate, and the wooded path that approaches it with its gentle S-curve, the bridge seems to me to always feel like something from a much earlier age. In fact, for me it suggests something quite specific: this bridge looks like a location out of The Three Musketeers, which is why I call it the Dumas Bridge. Every time I am here, I imagine our heroes--Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan--galloping around the bend and over the bridge on their way to thwart some scheme of Milady de Winter or Cardinal Richelieu.

Or perhaps D'Artagnan and Constance meet by moonlight on the bridge, for a secret tryst. Or perhaps Milady's agents meet on the bridge by torchlight to exchange secret information.

Who knows...but it's nice to have an imagination that I can bring to bear on my walks in the woods. I could as well think of this place as the Alexander Bridge, imagining Taran and Eilonwy and Fflewdur Fflam crossing the bridge on one of their adventures. Or maybe there's a place like this in The Shire, a place in the back woods that Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin pass as they make their way in secret to the Old Woods and Bree beyond whilst evading the mysterious Black Riders.

Or maybe young Aeric Seaflame finds a bridge like this on one of the back roads of Frobish Forest as he flees the agents of Lady Perris Winterborne...but to learn about that, you'll have to wait until I finish writing the book in which those exploits take place.

For now, we'll stick with Dumas.

All for one, and one for all!

Images from the Ridge

 From Chestnut Ridge Park yesterday.

It was a beautiful day. The stream was rather low for this point in the season; the deep pools should be about six inches deeper than they are and there should be more water flowing through there. But there was enough for the water skimmers!

Scenes from Recent Adventures....

 From our recent trip to the Lilac Festival in Rochester, NY:

And these, from a recent mini-trek down to Buffalo's Outer Harbor and Wilkeson Pointe:

I live in a wonderful area.

Images from an April

 April is a strange month around these parts. I've maintained for years that of Buffalo-Niagara's four seasons, spring is the worst. Summers can be too hot and humid, but are mild compared to the South or the Eastern Seaboard; our autumns are spectacular and frankly, our winters are fine. Really. I'll take the snow. But spring? It's always an unpleasant March and April, usually stubbornly cold and stubbornly cloudy and just persistently unpleasant until May.

This April, though, has been...not bad. Not bad at all. It's been mixed, certainly! But all in all? Not bad.

In baseball terms, May is on deck and warming up, but April has hit a solid single that it's stretched into a double with some deft baserunning.

Here are some images of April 2021.

Sprung?

 I've long been of the belief that as delightful as three of the four seasons in Buffalo Niagara are, the last one is usually just annoying. It might surprise you to learn that the one I don't like is not winter, but rather, spring. I stand by this! Spring in these parts is not a welcome return to warmth, but rather it is generally a two-month affair of temperatures remaining stubbornly in the mid-to-upper 40s. Spring in Buffalo Niagara is usually a pretty gray affair, as the clouds maintain their stranglehold over the sun until mid-May at the earliest. It takes forever for trees and bushes and everything else to come back to life, to the point that green isn't the dominant color here until Memorial Day at the earliest. The snowpiles in parking lots and at the ends of streets endure, in their dirty grayness, and it seems like mud is everywhere.

And yes, it usually snows in April around here. Last year it even snowed not near Mothers Day, but actually on Mothers Day.

But we do once in a while get to enjoy a day like today in springtime around here, a day when it is warm and sunny out, when we get to open windows and switch out the stuffy indoor air for fresh outdoor air, when we can walk the dogs multiple times, and when the sun shines from sunrise to sunset.

Geology and astronomy may be in agreement that it is spring here, but it's just not. Not yet. Not in a way that feels real.

That's not stopping nature from looking like it's embracing the early wake-up call....

That's Chestnut Ridge park, just this morning. It's one of my favorite places, where The Dee-oh-gee and I visit often on our weekly Sunday morning nature walks. That particular stream is a combination of two streams that tumble from the upper reaches of the park; this is at the park's northern, and lower, end. Here it tumbles down through what's left of a deep ravine, and under a steel-deck bridge before it flows on, winding its way toward Lake Erie before it finally empties into Eighteen Mile Creek, which then flows on to Lake Erie. A lot of that water will eventually flow out of Lake Erie, down the Niagara River, over the Falls, and out to Lake Ontario...and on and on, eventually to the sea.

There's still snow up there (Chestnut Ridge is in what the weather people call "the upper elevations" when they are threatening snowfall for some of us), and as of now there hasn't been enough warmth to cause the grass to really start greening or for dormant trees and bushes to start budding. But it's tempting to look for those things.

Spring in Buffalo Niagara. It's here...kind of.

Fall In WNY

 Autumn is turning out to be quite lovely this year. I remember a recent October--maybe last year's?--where it was just kind of rainy and unpleasant the whole month and then it was November and all the leaves fell at once and it felt like fall never actually happened. Anyhow, here's a photographic glimpse into how Autumn has been going in my neck of the woods. I hope yours is as lovely!

"Let's go to The Roxy"

I may not remember the first place I ate a lot of my favorite foods, but I remember a lot of early favorites. Pizza? The ones I remember are Pizza Caboose in Hillsboro, OR and Rocky Rococo's in La Crosse, WI. I have no clue at all when or where I tried my first cheeseburger, but it was probably McDonald's or a chain in the northwest called Burgerville USA. I do, however, recall my first chicken wing (other than as part of a KFC bucket). It was this place:

That's The Roxy, an old dive bar in Olean, NY.

The other day I was scrolling through a Facebook group I had found dedicated to old photos and memories of one of my hometowns, Olean, NY. It's fascinating to look at the town's history, even if I haven't lived there in almost twenty years. Olean is a city in New York State's "Southern Tier", although it really isn't much of a city anymore, as decades of population drain have taken their toll. While I grew up as a child in the town of Allegany, a smaller town just west of Olean, I eventually lived and worked in Olean when The Wife and I got married, and Olean was my home from 1997 to the end of 2000.

By the time my family and I moved to the Olean area in 1981, the region's decline had begun, though maybe at that time it wasn't quite obvious yet. Olean still had several factories and lots of shops and even its own shopping mall, though it was on the smallish side. There were three supermarkets and a well-regarded university, and there were a lot of bars. Lots of bars. I remember that a lot of those bars were not "possessively" named, meaning, a bunch weren't named as a person's name in the possessive. There was a place called Sullivan's, and another dive bar called Buzzy's, but mostly the bars in Olean as I recall were "The Something". The Burton. The Village Inn. The Other Place. The Royal Ednor (not to be confused with The Royal). The Edgewood. The Birdcage. And, The Roxy.

As I scrolled through that Facebook group, suddenly I stopped dead because I saw that photo. The Roxy.

When I say that I ate my first chicken wing at The Roxy, it was my first chicken wing in the "split-wing" way, with the wings cut at the joints and the wing tips discarded, so what you end up with are a little drumstick and a "flat" (which is basically the forearm of the wing). I knew none of this wing-prep lore when we were preparing to move from Oregon to Western New York in 1981; all I knew was that my father said cryptic things about how we'd be eating chicken wings soon. My father actually lived in Olean on his own for one full semester in spring 1981, while my mother, sister, and I finished out the school year in Hillsboro, OR. So by the time we came along, my father already knew Olean pretty well, and he'd found this bar where I'd have my first chicken wings.

Now, I don't really know how or why that first wing experience ended up happening at The Roxy. It didn't make a whole lot of sense, really; we lived in Allegany, west of Olean, where The Roxy was on Olean's East side. Now, in 1981, wings weren't quite as ubiquitous as they are now, but still, lots of places had decent wings. Why that bar, all the way on Olean's east side? No idea, then or now. But that place was pretty cool, and in all honesty, I do kind of miss it.

The Roxy had two rooms: a dining room to the right when you went in, and the bar on the left. It was a blue-collar type of joint, which makes sense since it was right across the street from one of the local factories (a tile factory, if I remember right). Sometimes we'd sit in the dining area, other times in the bar, and I think they had other food there--maybe they even had a menu!--but for me, The Roxy was all about the wings.

And yet...I would soon discover, when I tried wings at other places, that what The Roxy served weren't actual "Buffalo" wings at all.

There are a great many ways to prepare chicken wings, but only one way to prepare Buffalo wings: They are fried unbreaded and then tossed in a sauce that is made of hot sauce and melted butter. To serve them, you dump them into a bowl or bucket or basket lined with wax paper. The Roxy's wings were breaded, though, and they came with the sauce on the side, not smothered on the wings themselves. And they were arranged nicely on a plate, like wheel spokes, around the little paper ramekin that had the sauce in it. You dipped the wings in the sauce to taste as you went. I want to say that a regular order of wings had fifteen in it, but I might be misremembering on that point.

When I discovered actual Buffalo wings later that same summer, I actually didn't like them as much as The Roxy's. At some point we stopped going out all that far for wings; maybe the place changed ownership or even closed. The bartender was a crusty old woman with a three-packs-a-day voice who had a wicked sense of humor, as I recall. Good times!

I looked at Google Earth the other day to see if the building still existed. I knew that it stopped being The Roxy at some point in the 1980s, and as of the last time the Google Mobile rolled through there, at least the building itself was still standing. It's a Hibernian Lodge now, though. I have no idea what the Hibernians are or what their thing is.

If anyone affiliated with The Roxy ever reads this, thanks for the wings! Oh, and for the pinball machine that gave out free games like candy. That was fun, too.

Letchworth in Spring

The other day we traveled to Letchworth State Park, a stunning place where the Genesee River flows through a massive, deep canyon and over three cliffs on its way north to Lake Ontario. It was a stunning, perfect day to be in one of the most beautiful places I know.

Here's what Letchworth looks like in spring.