ADAM ROVNER

Grand Island, NY

Beaver Island State Park

1 November 2007

 

I arrive in Buffalo two hours later than expected. Thank you, Amtrak. So I tear off in my rented cherry-red Mustang towards the meeting of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society at RiverLea, an old farmhouse on the southern tip of Beaver Island Park—land once purchased for Noah’s Jewish “city of refuge.” They’ve been expecting me and I’m embarrassed to turn up so late. The park is deserted, it’s pitch black, and the road is a spaghetti of one way access, parking lots, and grass medians.

 

A Jack o’Lantern leads to the otherwise obscured entranceway to RiverLea, a white Victorian squarely sitting on a grassy lot. Fallen leaves are underfoot and the air is crisp. I squeeze my way through the double doors that squeak and announce my arrival to a roomful of older women. They turn to stare at me as if I’ve just burst in with a chainsaw revving in my hand. I take a seat in the back,  avoiding the precious needlepoint chairs. Next to me a gaunt nonagenarian wearing cords and a cable-knit cardigan slouches over. He’s asleep, or nearly so.

 

The woman at the front of the room speaks earnestly about Hummel figurines. She once had hundreds them and explains that she had to clean them one at a time and “wash their little faces with 409.” The history, as much as I got, is that a nun, Sister Hummel, created the porcelain keepsakes because she “loved children and loved God very, very much.” When asked whether her convent kept producing the figurines during WWII, the Hummel-lady explains that the Nazis only allowed them to be produced for export. Hitler made it difficult for the nuns to make the figurines by billeting soldiers in the convent. She adds in the sternest language she knows, “Hitler was a hateful, hateful man.”

 

Ararat & Love Canal

3 November 2007

 

This is Noah’s “city of refuge” today: a Holiday Inn, a golf course, a small cemetery, a retirement community, a weed-covered lot.  Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of a historical marker, so I pull my Mustang over, climb out and hop over a drainage channel. It’s the marker for Ararat.

 

I hear someone in the condos nearby and head across a landscaped yard to meet the occupant, Helen, an older woman dressed church proper. She cannot remember what the marker is for, or what the whole business was about. I ask her how she feels to be living on land once proposed for a Jewish state. Helen simply says that she’s lived on Grand Island for seventy years and that “it’s a nice place.” Her friend pulls up in the driveway and is naturally suspicious of me. I explain what I’m doing, and then a cop arrives to see what’s going on. He’s also never heard of Ararat or of Noah, and he never noticed the historical marker. “Interesting,” he says and cocks his chin towards the sign. Then he asks me to move my car from the side of the road.

 

I head off to nearby Love Canal, the location of another failed utopian scheme. In the late nineteenth century, William Love hoped to build a “Model City” along the canal he envisioned would run from Lake Ontario to the Niagara River.  By the 1970s, Love Canal was a by-word for chemical pollution and corporate rapaciousness. Today the gutted town limps along, home to  small working class houses with carports. A tall chain-link fence protects an unbroken grass sea—about 100 feet wide and several times as long. This is the exclusion zone, site of the most toxic pollutants dumped by Hooker Chemical. Nearby are the remains of a neighborhood that had been leveled, but which was not included in the exclusion zone. Driveways run to nowhere. Concrete slabs mark the filled-in foundations of what were once homes. Weeds grow high around rusting fireplugs and battered light poles. I can think of no more ironic end for Love’s dreams.