Niagara Falls, NY

When I returned everything was gray, like a welcoming party. It was a familiar gray of Winter. Winter makes people feel like rainbows, I'll bet. Winter is great for self-esteem.

I always drive through Niagara Falls, NY to get home. Niagara Falls is gray even when there are no clouds up in the sky. There are large pieces of plywood nailed up over cracked glass, and dusty signs with the names and phone numbers of realtors on them, and untended cobwebs. There are ungentle men casting glances from side to side before grabbing undisclosed items out of parked SUV windows, from parked SUV window sentinels. There is a wonder of the world and a thousand tourists three blocks too far away to be of any consequence at all. They provide a very soft white noise soundtrack for all of the gray to float around to.

The streets are mostly vacant and creepy and quiet, but there is always a large gray newspaper page tumbling across the road, back and forth. It always seems like a friendly newspaper, just checking things out over here and then over there. If you drive through Niagara Falls, NY three or four times, you might be of the opinion that these are unique and distinct newspaper pages, rolling across town like ephemeral tumbleweeds. But once you drive through Niagara Falls, NY ten times or more, you realize that it is the same piece of newspaper. The newspaper does cartwheels in a gust of wind, then rests, then another cartwheel, then another rest, back and forth across the dirty gray streets, into and out of storm drains and gutters and abandoned doorways. The newspaper hides beneath overpasses during rainstorms.

The newspaper page is the first, second, last and second-to-last pages of an edition of the Niagara Gazette from April 11th 1978. It features Michael Brown's first article about how there are twenty-thousand tons of toxic wastes beneath the 99th Street Elementary School and surrounding neighborhood.

The gray newspaper page rolls across 3rd Street, and Lois Gibbs forms the Love Canal Homeowner's Association.

The gray newspaper page tumbleweeds back towards Buffalo Avenue, and Jimmy Carter declares a state of emergency.

The gray newspaper page is kicked into a doorway on Memorial Parkway and the last of the bits and pieces of demolished abandoned contaminated houses are hauled away in big trucks. They probably put the bits and pieces in new landfills where nobody is paying any attention, but the rolling newspaper does not say for sure.

The gray newspaper shivers under the snow on Rainbow Boulevard and for the last time, a large downtown building blinks a colorful array of its Festival-of-Lights windows in perfect synchronization with "Jump" by Van Halen.

Might as well jump.

The very gray newspaper page is rolling down Main Street when I drive through. Right down the middle of the road. But then it moves towards the shoulder because it must see me coming up behind. It must be tired of crossing streets all of the time, being perpendicular to the intention. I make a slow swerve around the gray newspaper page from April 11th 1978. I give it an empathizing look as I pass by. The gray newspaper page doesn't look back at me. It is twenty-nine and its persnickety days are long gone, and so are all of the other kinds of days.

Its second page is calling for plentiful sunshine, only a few clouds.