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High Falls on the Genesee River
Saturday, July 1 2023
location: Mulberry Street, Rochester, NY
I slept very well in the upstairs bedroom at Mariann's house, which is apparently situated in an uncommonly quiet neighborhood. You would think with all that single-family-house-density there would be someone playing loud music or a monotonously yappy dog somewhere nearby. But this wasn't the case. Instead, all I initially heard were the sounds of birds. They were familiar but their songs were a little different. I could hear a call that I identified as a cardinal, but the song was noticeably different from the cardinals back in Hurley, 200 miles to the southeast as a cardinal could fly.
[REDACTED]
Gretchen went off to a vegan bakery this morning to get various things, including a cream puff that she later characterized as the "best pastry" she had ever had. Meanwhile, I eventually came downstairs and joined Mariann, who had made coffee and set out a bowl of unusually flavorless cherries. We had a fairly long conversation about trying to live sustainably (or as close to it as possible). She told me about how both she and Jasmin and Moore had invested a lot in the energy efficiency of their respective Rochester houses. Mariann had had the wall insulated from the outside and even had foam applied to the inside of her foundation wall (the opposite of what I'm doing at the cabin, which I told Mariann about). Unfortunately, there wasn't enough room in the yard to get a drilling rig in there to install a geothermal system, and her Victorian roof is too complicated to accept many solar panels, so she wasn't able to install any of that. She also told me about an environmentally-conscious development in Geneva (at the north end of Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes) that she, Jasmin, and Moore had considered, but when the business model there switched to rent-only, they decided to look in Rochester instead.
Later Moore rolled up in the E6 (which sounds like a space ship when it stops) to take Gretchen, Mariann, and me to the radio station where Jasmin has been working for the last seven months. She met us at the door in the basement parking garage and gave us a tour of the facility. I've been in radio stations before, and there was nothing particularly unusual about this one (aside from its size, as it can be heard throughout all of Rochester). What blew my mind was all the technical knowledge Jasmin had mastered in order to work at the station. Involved lots of real-time juggling of sound clips and plenty of her real-time use of a microphone to introduce them. I would be riddled with anxiety to have to perform such complex tasks in real time, but Jasmin is a natural performer, so she has mastered it all. The kicker was how little she gets paid. She gets an hourly wage that is only 60% of what I get as a salary for much less effort. I understand there is a lot of demand for my skills and that Jasmin is working in the depressed economy of Rochester. But even so, it's hard to imagine it would be able to find someone with her combination of technical skills and on-air personality. "They were really happy to find her," Moore observed. But evidently it wouldn't be all that hard for them to find a replacement.
For lunch, the five of us met up with "the thruple," the two women and one man who live together as a three-person married unit. Gretchen and I had met the two thirds of the thruple who are women last summer, when Jasmin brought them to visit us at the cabin. But we'd never met the man, a quiet gentleman with a nerdy job named Ahmed. He was there with the rest of the thruple as Moore parked the E6 in front of Polska Chata, a Polish restaurant with lots of vegan options. I'd found the female two-thirds of the thruple to be so loud, boisterous, and positively grating last time I'd seen them, that I'd had to retreat in a noticeable way from them. So today I did my best to act like they weren't irritating me even as they sat at the end of the table with mostly just me between them and the rest of our party at a large table in Polska Chata's upstairs.
The women of the thruple ordered a bunch of things, particularly salads, stuffed cabbages, and two different kinds of pierogi. I was the only person at the table to order an alcoholic drink, which I was sure I would need if I was going to be sitting anywhere near those big loud women.
Our waitress was a very competant young woman who made sure we were well taken care of, and the food came out quickly and there was plenty of it. Unfortunately it was not very good. Everything needed salt, and there isn't much beyond salt in the Polish flavor portfolio to begin with.
To my surprise, Gretchen actually likes the two women in the thruple. Later when I was telling her about how hard they are to take, she mentioned an incident that happened in the parking lot out in front of Polska Chata after lunch. I'd found a beautiful flower that turned out to be a snapdragon coming up in the crack between the pavement and a piece of concrete. One of the women in the thruple saw it and the car that was right above it and suggested that we plug up the exhaust pipe for that car so the snapdragon could breathe cleaner air. Gretchen seemed to think this was an awesome idea, but to me, it was just more of that grating cheerfulness that I just cannot stand.
After lunch, the non-thruple five of us drove out to a beach on Lake Ontario, where the plan was to walk along the sand and thrill to existence of an American north coast. I waded a little ways into the water and found it colder than expected, probably because the lake is fairly deep and takes longer to warm in the summer than the smaller and shallower lakes I am more familiar with. (Lake Ontario might actually be the deepest lake I've ever waded into.) Meanwhile, ominous dark clouds were rolling in from the north. Today the air was mostly smoke-free, so what we were seeing was a real potential for rain. And suddenly that rain began to fall. It came down in surprisingly big droplets, and it sent the humans scurrying away "like cockroaches from a flicked-on light" (as someone among us observed).
We got back in the EV6 and Moore drove us to the next place on our agenda.
It was a little town southeast of Rochester called Pittsford [I would later learn that it's a typical white-flight community that these days is a major MAGA stronghold]. Our destination there was a vegan clothes & knick knack store called Cleo & Kin. I have no interest in such stores, but even the butchiest of the ladies all went apeshit in there about various cottage-core clothes and fibrearts while I tried to find an out-of-the-way place to sit and fuck around with my phone. Meanwhile, the skies opened up outside, making a continuous roar.
There was a little downtime for me this afternoon before dinner, which was at a place called the Red Fern, where I ordered an excellent sandwich called the Steak Bomb (it was, like many things I was eating on this trip, something of a "bread sandwich," as the meat was seitan, which is basically just bread dough with all the non-gluten washed away). Meanwhile, Gretchen was giving the third installment of a story catching up the others about the psychological collapse and marriage-ending events that had befallen a very close member of her family. The others were very interested, and their questions than ranged into questions about the family members of others at the table. This led me to tell the tale of the situation my brother presently finds himself in.
Another interesting story was one Moore told about her work to get a man who had committed sexual assault against her kicked out of Brown University. Her efforts rose to such a level that even George Will wrote an article about it (this was back before he worked for the Washington Post, and, yes, he took the side of the man accused of sexual assault).
Meanwhile, Gretchen wasn't much liking whatever it was she'd ordered from the Red Fern menu. The pattern we were getting about vegan food in Rochester, at least according to Gretchen, was that it wasn't very good. But perhaps, she allowed, the problem was our hosts. Maybe Jasmin just doesn't like the same sort of food that Gretchen does. For my part, though, I thought the Steak Bomb was about as good as vegan sandwich can get.
After dinner, our hosts decided to take us to High Falls, a place on the Genesee River where the river plunges nearly 100 feet on its way to Lake Ontario. At the top of the falls is the Genesee Brewery, which is something of a tourist trap. (Gretchen and I remember Genesee beer from our college days, when sixteen ounce bottles of Genesee Cream Ale were popular at Oberlin.) There is a pedestrian bridge several hundred feet below the falls that crosses a wide basin carved in the rock (it looks like shale), and we crossed over to the other side, where fountains and lights had been added to an old mill race that had once powered Rochester's mill-based economy (this was before Kodak came along).
After we'd crossed the pedestrian bridge and come back, we all went into the Genesee brewery for some reason. There was a lot of Genesee-branded merch in there, none of which I was interested in (despite my collegiate connection to that brand). But then Gretchen suggested we get a "flight" of samples, which somewhat surprised me (given how little interest the others, with the exception of Mariann, have in alcoholic beverages). So we went back to a little bar and got a flight of four samples, two of which were fruity "girly" brews, and two of which were IPAs (this was the first I'd heard that Genesee makes an IPA, or really anything but boring American macrobrews). Of course, I ended up drinking most of the beer in this flight, and, with the exception of the IPA made with "experimental hops," they were good. While we were sitting around and I (and to a lesser extent Mariann and Gretchen, the last of whom liked the girly flavors) drank the flight, Jasmin was gossping about [REDACTED].
Our evening ended early, as it had yesterday, because Jasmin has to get up at 4:00am to begin her shift at the radio station. I'm also a early-to-bed kind of guy, although back at Mariann's house Mariann and Gretchen stayed up again watching episodes of Deadloch.
High Falls on the Genesee River.
Click to enlarge.
The slate-walled sides of the gouged-out basin below the falls.
Click to enlarge.
The four ladies I've been hanging out with. From left: Moore, Gretchen, Jasmin, and Mariann. Gretchen is wearing a "cottage core" blouse she'd bought earlier at Cleo & Kin, whereas Moore is wearing one of the several jumpsuits I'd see her wearing this weekend.
Click to enlarge.
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