New York Uniqueness   A small island sailed past my windows up the Hudson the other day. A while later it sailed downstream. Dwell on that image for a moment.

Things happen in New York that people take in stride here, but that would raise eyebrows elsewhere. That moving island, for one. How about 150 presidents? Maybe a celebrity at a nearby table? How about a cabaret performance in a genuine Viennese Café all this distance from Wien?

Let’s get back to that island. I was having coffee and reading the Times recently, but for some reason, walked over to the window. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and right in the middle of the Hudson was this small barge, about the side of someone’s back yard. It had maybe 9-10 trees on it, of several varities, all planted on a rich, green lawn, with three largish, artfully placed boulders. Actually, it could actually have been someone’s back yard. Pulling the barge via two cables was a rather cute, red tugboat, quite petite. It was sort of the tugboat you’d see in a children’s book, rather than one of the workhorse tugs.

Now I did stare for a few moments, but then accepted it and went on with my day. Then, as if planned, when I turned to the front page of the next section of the Times, there was an article about the island, and the accompanying picture showed pretty much what I had just seen going live past my windows. It seems that an artist named Robert Smithson, who died in 1973, had planned this island as a 150-ton piece of conceptual art, an island sailing around Manhattan island, sort of as a tribute to how this whole area looked almost four centuries ago. Only recently, the artist’s wife was able to get the funding together to execute the project. It has been, and will be, circling Manhattan for several weeks, making a number of scheduled stops. It occasionally stops in the river right in front of my building. I would presume the tugboat captain finds aimless circling rather boring. Later it came quite close to the esplanade below my windows, and I could look right down on it. Sail on, sail on.

Recently the United Nations celebrated its 60th birthday, and over 150 presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs came to New York, including Bush. I knew that the local streets around the UN, in the east Fifties, would be jammed, as would hotels in midtown. I figured: not to worry. How would that affect me. But as it turns out, the previous week I had set up an appointment to have the Lexus serviced, and I go to a place in the east Eighties. Even then I didn’t feel there would be any problem. But when I drove around the Battery and started up the FDR Drive along the East River, flashing signs were warning that the Drive would be closed between 1 and 3PM, and here it was 1:20. Then I understood. The Drive goes in an underpass directly beneath the UN Building. But as it turns out, I was in luck. The schedule must have been delayed, and the road hadn’t been closed yet, so I made it to my appointment.

But then, after dinner and the theater, my schedule finally was disrupted. At about 11 PM, after I had driven down Lower Broadway and was just a few blocks from home, the police stopped me and asked where I was planning to drive. If it was ahead and past the Ritz-Carlton Hotel (three blocks from me), only traffic to the hotel could pass. Apparently a president and I prime minister (I wonder who?) were at the hotel and thru traffic was being diverted. No problem. Going a bit up West Street only added a couple of minutes. But the special UN day finally caught me. Actually, the street near the hotel was closed through the weekend.

The show I went to was Spamalot. Very late the previous night I had decided it was time to get out a bit, phoned Telecharge, and was able to get a single ticket to the hottest show in town for the very next evening. Yet I was wary, because Beverly and I had never appreciated the whole Monty Python thing, even though we had met John Cleese twice, because its surreal humor was just too over-the-top. But it’s directed by Mike Nichols and stars Tim Curry and David Hyde Pierce (Niles on “Frasier”), so I was ready to try it. On arriving at the theater and finding that an understudy was replacing David Hyde Pierce, that seemed like another strike against it. I remember the last time we went to a play and one of the leads was out, and that was luckily a very long time ago. But not to worry. The show was worth everything they say about it. By the curtain call, the whole audience was standing and singing along and clapping to a song the cast was singing.

46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues is called Restaurant Row, and there are three places there that Beverly and I have always liked to go to, but I decided to look up a new one in Zagat. Orso serves Italian food, and Zagat suggested that you might very easily spot celebrities there, even possibly the stars of a show you’re just about to go see. Well, Orso wins on both counts. I had the best linguini and (New Zealand) clams there I’ve ever had, and shortly after I sat down, who walks in with a gentleman guest and sits down just two tables away but Mike Nichols. There wasn’t the slightest stir, or even hint that anyone noticed, even though the small room was full. When my waiter stopped by after serving him, I asked, and found that Nichols was indeed a regular.

Four years ago I read that a German/Austrian museum, the Neue Galerie/New Gallery, had opened on the stretch of 5th Avenue known as the Museum Mile, at 86th Street, in a jewel box of a building, and I felt as a Germanist I had an obligation to visit it. Also, we have a favorite Austrian restaurant in Greenwich Village, whose owner/chef is Kurt Gutenbrunner. He comes from Wallsee near Linz, and likes to spell the name of his restaurant Wallsé. Anyway, he advertised at Wallsé that he also runs the Café Sabarsky in the Neue Galerie, which sounded like a good recommendation. I went recently. And then I went back a week later.

Let me describe the experience as to the building, the collection, and the café. The building is what is called in English a mansion, but that word doesn’t do it justice. This type of building in Europe would simply be referred to as a palace, or a town palace. It was built in 1914 by the same architects who designed the New York Public Library, and was occupied for many years by the Vanderbilts. It’s a jewel box, outside and in.

As for the art collection itself, I’m afraid I have to pass. Above the entrance level, there are two exhibition floors. One is German art, but it’s all 20th C German expressionism, and that’s not my cup of tea. The other floor is Austrian, and I do like Gustav Klimt and others, but there’s really not enough of what I like. I did like the exhibit on the Wiener Werkstätte/Vienna Workshop, which designed Art Nouveau jewelry and household objects in the first three decades of the 20C.

But the winning feature is Café Sabarsky. It’s head and shoulders above what you may envision as a museum café. It’s named after an Austrian art dealer who fled the country in the Thirties. It takes up the most magnificent room in the building, a huge corner room right at street level with windows looking out either to Fifth Avenue or 86th Street. All the walls are covered with deeply carved walnut paneling. At one end is an intracately carved white marble fireplace. At the entrance, a pianist plays the Bösendorfer. As in Vienna, Austrian newspapers such as Der Kurier and Der Standard hang on racks for customers to read, which I did. There are booths, and black lacquer bentwood tables and chairs. A sideboard is lined with Viennese pastries, Sacher Torte, Apfelstrudel, and all the others. The Sabarsky has a limited restaurant menu as well. Gutenbrunner has said he wanted to recreate a Viennese Café of the highest order, and he has. It gives Demel in Vienna a run for its money.

When I saw that on Thursday evenings there is a cabaret (at extra charge), I went back for dinner again the following week. The young man singing did songs of Marlene Dietrich and Zarah Leander, giving biographical sketches in between. He explained how they both struggled with the Nazi government, Dietrich finally being successful in denouncing her German citizenship and Leander, popular singer as she was at the time, explaining to Goebbels that she couldn’t possibly become a German citizen, since she had to retain her Swedish citizenship along with the rest of her family. I presume Zarah Leander never became known outside of Germany because she never left it, as Dietrich had done. I knew Dietrich’s Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (1930) was an early German talkie, but I never knew it was the very first German talkie. Also, every scene was shot twice, first in German, then in English, so versions in either language are equally original and authentic.

The the custom of the coffee house originated in Vienna after the Turkish siege in the early 1600’s ended, when the departing Turks abandoned bags of coffee beans. An entire German vocabulary developed around the names of coffee drinks. I knew some of the names, but never learned what was what. It’s curious that when the custom of the coffee house hit the US with full force, largely due to the Starbucks phenomenon (I saw a Starbucks in Vienna!), an Italian vocabulary was imported to the US rather than using English names. So, in the US you have to use Italian names to recognize coffee drinks, such as latte (“milk”, for steamed milk and espresso), or macchiato (“spotted”, for espresso with a spot of milk in the middle. At Café Sabarsky my Viennese coffee vocabulary improved. I learned to order a Wiener Melange on one visit (“Viennese Melange”), which was essentially a latte. I had always heard, and liked, the term Einspänner (EINshpenner) as the name of a coffee drink. An Einspänner is a carriage pulled by one horse, a “One Spanner”. I learned at Café Sabarsky that it’s a double espresso with whipped cream on top, served in a glass.

Two blocks north of the Neue Galerie on Museum Mile is Frank Lloyd Wright’s unique spiral-shaped Guggenheim Museum. The papers have been announcing the new exhibit of Russian art on loan from Russia, appropriately called Russia!!!, and I walked up and took a look at the building for the first time in a long time. I’ll have to consider seeing the exhibit sometime. Vladimir Putin opened the exhibit when he was in town for the UN meeting. Coming home that first night from the Neue Galerie a Russian-American woman who had just been to the Guggenheim struck up a conversation with me on the subway about the two museums. Only in New York.

Cataclysmic Inundation Trilogy: Part I   I’ve been preparing a trilogy on vast movements of water for some time, and with the news from New Orleans, it’s appropriate to discuss the topic now.

All three events in the trilogy, and the New Orleans event as well, are made easier to understand by imagining bowls of water. I’ve also used that imagery to explain the operation of the Panama Canal, where the Chagres River was dammed to form Gatún Lake up between the mountains. Locks bring ships up to this “bowl of water” in the mountains, ships sail across, and locks then bring the ships down on the other side.

For discussions of inundation, picture either a bowl of water that leaks, or, alternatively, an empty bowl that gets filled. New Orleans is under sea level, and its levees form the sides of the bowl. With the breaching of levees, the bowl fills.

I’ve also pointed out that one should always get suspicious of geographic oddities. In political geography, panhandles almost always tell an interesting story, such as Alaska’s panhandle (“Southeast Alaska”), indicating the direction the Russians were settling in. But that’s equally true about physical geography.

Visualize (or take a look at) the map of the Netherlands. Its northwest coast would form a perfectly rounded arc, except for the obvious breach and all that water in the middle of the country, which makes the map of the country look like a mitten, with thumb reaching to forefinger. Doesn’t that look suspicious? Well, thereby hangs a tale.

A good part of the Netherlands lies notoriously under sea level. If you never thought about the name, recall that “nether” means “low”, so the name of the country essentially celebrates its depth by meaning “Lowlands”, or even perhaps “Lowlandia”. To this day, Amsterdam and other areas lie below sea level.

Originally, the entire central portion of the country was dry, but low, and the northwest coast formed a solid arc. Now, while most cataclysmic inundations happened in pre-history, the Netherlands one only took place less than five centuries ago, in the early 1600’s. After severe storms, the North Sea breached the natural coastline protection of dunes and somewhat higher ground, and the entire “punchbowl” of the central Netherlands was flooded. From then on, the map of the country looked like a mitten.

It’s a guess, but it was probably in a fit of black humor, because the North Sea flooded southward into the country, that the inland sea was called the Zuider Zee. “Zuid” is the Dutch word for “South”, as in Zuid-Afrika, and the name seems to mean the Southern Sea. Perhaps the black humor is over, because what’s left of it is now called the IJsselmeer after the IJ river near Amsterdam. [Remember, IJ, pronounced “ay” as in “hay”, is a single letter; when capitalized, all of it gets capitalized. To practice recognizing IJ, put it into English words: the rijn in Spijn stijs mijnly on the plijn.]

Probably because recorded Dutch history remembers the center of the country being dry, the decision was made to reclaim the land. The avsluitsdijk (enclosure dike) first closed the gap between thumb and forefinger. It, too, is an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark (2005 Series 12). Beverly and I once years ago drove along the highway on top of it, and halfway across, climbed the tower that gives views both inland and out to the North Sea. Eventually, the waters were pumped out of the Zuider Zee, one polder at a time. These polders are now dry land. Instead of draining the final polder, public opinion was to keep it as a lake, so the IJsselmeer remains to this day. What had been originally a dry bowl then flooded to a full bowl, but now the bowl has partitions and is about ¾ dry and ¼ wet.

Cataclysmic Inundation Trilogy: Part II   If you weren’t aware before of the following cataclysmic inundation, it’ll really be an eye-opener. Think of filling a bathtub some 3000 kilometers/2000 miles in length.

In the discussion of how many continents there are (2005 Series 2) the point was made that, although geographically there are really six, by custom we split up Eurasia to make the total seven. Although Africa clusters quite close to Eurasia, it is clearly separated from it by the Mediterranean, only being attached to West Asia (Middle East) in the area of the Sinai Peninsula, so Africa is clearly a separate continent.

But let’s look at a few seas. They almost always have multiple connections to the open ocean. The Caribbean Sea connects to the Atlantic between multiple islands. The Baltic Sea connects between several Danish islands to the North Sea, which then itself connects to the Atlantic both north of the British Isles, and south of them, through the English Channel.

Take another, very careful, look at the Mediterranean Sea. Other than a man-made, back-door connection via the Suez Canal, the Mediterrean-Black Sea complex connects naturally to the Atlantic only at one point, and a quite narrow one at that: the Strait of Gibraltar. Think about it. Doesn’t that look awfully suspicious?

Language helps here as well. French says Mer Méditerranée, Spanish Mar Mediterraneo. Medi- is “middle” as in “mid”; terran- is “land” as in “terrain”. German comes right out and says Mittelmeer/Middle Sea. English borrows from the Latinate languages to say Mediterranean Sea, but a more home-grown Germanic version could really be “Midland Sea”. All these languages point out in their names that it’s so odd for a sea to be surrounded by land to this extent, with barely an ocean connection. Should we be even more suspicious?

Precisely. The Mediterranean Sea used to be the Mediterranean Basin, a huge valley lying below sea level. It was flooded by the Atlantic, in a cataclysmic inundation, about 10,000 or more years ago, quite a bit earlier than when the Zuider Zee had a similar run-in with the Atlantic. Take a look on a map of that southernmost point in mainland Spain, called Punto de Europa/ Point of Europe, which faces a similar point across in Morocco. Beverly and I stood on the Punto de Europa trying to look across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Moroccan side, barely visible in the haze. [The Rock of Gibraltar is not located quite at the Strait of Gibraltar, but maybe an hour’s drive further east along the Spanish Mediterranean coast.]

Looking at these two points, you have to visualize the original land bridge that connected them, with the Atlantic safely held back to the west of it. To the east was the huge basin (and of course, a basin is a bowl, following through on our metaphor), extending across to where Israel, Lebanon, and Syria are today. The entire basin/bowl was obviously below sea level or it wouldn’t have filled, just like New Orleans and the Zuider Zee, but much, much larger. Clearly at this point, Africa could not have been considered a separate continent, and the tally would have been one continent fewer. What could we name this “triple” continent? Afeurasia? Animal life could clearly migrate between what is now Africa and Europe; plant life, too. The Black Sea at this point was not totally dry. I understand it was swampland.

What cataclysm could have started the leak at the land bridge. An earthquake? A storm? Most likely both, and repeatedly. Did the leak go, over it, or through it, or both? Who knows. In any case a growing waterfall developed at what is now the Strait of Gibraltar. The waterfall had to have existed for centuries, maybe many centuries. After all, this is a large area to have to fill. It would be interesting to see how a filmmaker would depict the breaching of the land bridge, and then, the waterfall.

As water slowly filled the basin, it’s clear that sea level around the earth would have gradually dropped correspondingly, extending shorelines on all continents. Lower mountains in the basin would have been covered over, but higher mountains became the islands of the Mediterranean, the Balearics, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, the Greek islands, and many others. The Appenine mountains running the length of what is now Italy kept it from being swamped, as the “boot” of Italy was being formed. Flood waters proceeded through the Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara, and Bosporus, to turn that swampy area into the Black Sea, and all this area became a distant branch of the Atlantic. Only when the entire area finally filled, and equalled the (slowly dropping) level of the Atlantic, did the waterfall slowly disappear.

Only if you know this story when you go to Spain and visit the Punto de Europa can you visualize the immense waterfall that existed there between Spain and Morocco for such a long time, so very long ago.

Cataclysmic Inundation Trilogy: Part III   We now do a reversal. If you can picture a bowl filling, you can also picture a bowl emptying, either completely or partially. Filling bowls are below sea level, and emptying ones lie above.

We need to talk about the destiny of surface water on land. It runs downhill, forming streams and rivers, since its destiny is to reach the ocean. [The only exception would be a situation like the Jordan River running down into the Dead Sea, which is below sea level, and not connected to the ocean.]

There can be man-made (or beaver-made) obstructions to this flow: dams forming artifical lakes, but when removed, the water continues to follow its downhill destiny. There can be natural obstructions, such as a depression in the land. A river would fill this depression, forming a natural lake, then flow out the other end. But even natural lakes have been known to empty, fully or partially, after geologic interruptions, such as earthquakes. Here we finally see the empty-bowl syndrome, above sea level.

A final opening remark has to be made about the phenomenon known as a chain of lakes, caused by more than one natural depression that a river or stream goes through. In the chain-of-lakes situation, it has to be realized that water flowing out of the first lake continues downhill, so the second lake in a chain is logically lower, as would all following lakes continue sequentially to be, until the river again flows freely to the ocean.

Given the understanding that lakes in chains are each subsequently lower, and given the understanding that natural forces can cause a lake to empty, we can now discuss our third cataclysmic inundation, one in reverse—not water leaking from the ocean downward filling a bowl, but water in a bowl already well above sea level that in turn leaks downward into the ocean. The filling of the Zuider Zee and Mediterranean are historic, and are completed events. The leak to be discussed going down into the ocean is, yes, partially finished, but still ongoing. You can go watch this leak and its continuing aftermath happening yet today. Actually, maybe you already have, but didn’t fully realize what it was you were seeing, like someone who doesn’t fully realize what the Punto de Europa is all about.

The Great lakes of North America are a chain of lakes, whether you’ve ever thought about it or not. They are clearly the most spectacular chain of lakes in the world. There are other large, historic, or interesting lakes in the world, such as Lake Baikal, the Great Salt Lake, the Caspian Sea, the Dead Sea, and many others, but they are individual lakes, not chains. [Note that a sea has to connect with an ocean, while lakes are inland. Also, some lakes are misnamed seas, such as the Caspian Sea. Further note that the other name for the Dead Sea is Lake Kinnaret.]

All the Great Lakes have Indian names, except for the first, Lake Superior. You may misunderstand why it’s called Superior, thinking it’s its size that’s being referred to, but in reality it’s its height of 600 feet above sea level. Superior means highest, and as the first lake in the chain, that’s just what it is. As a matter of fact, the drop along the Saint Mary’s River between Superior and the next lake, Huron, is 21 feet, the biggest natural drop between all the lakes. Because of this drop, to allow shipping to go through, a canal with the famous Soo Locks had to be built.

We then come to Lake Huron, which is the oddest lake of all. The others have distinctive shapes, but the shape of Huron on the map is totally chaotic. Islands and a peninsula on its east side separate it from its east branch, the very large Georgian Bay, and to the West, through the Straits of Mackinac, lies its west branch, referred to as Lake Michigan.

This might be a surprise. Huron and Michigan are at the same level, 579 feet. There is no river connecting them, just the strait. In reality, they are one single lake, with Michigan clearly being an appendage off to the side of the actual chain. Should we call this complex Lake Hurigan? Just like there are only six continents, but we yield to convention and call Eurasia two, convention says that we call Michigan and Huron two lakes as well, so the four actual lakes shall continue to be referred to as five.

Huron drops just 9 feet along the Detroit River to Lake Erie at 570 feet. Now follow this scenario.

We go along Lake Erie to its far side, leaving to the north along the Niagara River. This flows smoothly and gently, mostly northward but making a short zig west, before promptly zagging north again. It then calmly flows into the rather large Lake Iroquois.

The outlet from Lake Iroquois is on its eastern end, towards the southeast. It flows diagonally past the site of Rome NY, and then, north of the site of Albany, flows south as the Hudson, past the site of New York City, and into the Atlantic. All the heights of the lakes mentioned are consistant, gradually sloping naturally to the ocean without any sudden drops.

All these lakes, like the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers (2003 Series 2), are the children of the polar ice cap that covered northern North America during the Ice Age. But the ice cap that gave birth to the five lakes also included the seed of their destruction.

Lake Iroquois was the last lake in the chain, and the ice-cap mother supported its last child by remaining along the northern shore of the lake. But then the ice cap started to melt and recede about 12,000-13,000 years ago. Without its damming affect of the ice cap on its north shore, Lake Iroquois started to leak.

One can imagine that it started as a waterfall in that northeast corner, flowing into what is now the Saint Lawrence River, which then became the natural outlet of all the Great Lakes. I would assume that the river was not formed by this outflow, but had pre-existed as a natural drain for other water from the now disappearing ice cap, and Lake Iroquois water just added to the flow. And we now have our draining bowl.

The bowl didn’t drain out entirely. Some water was left in the bottom of the bowl. We now call that Lake Ontario.

So we’ve lost most of one lake. All that bulk of water has accepted its destiny and has reached the ocean. Now, instead of all the lakes being high-level (600, 579, 570 feet), gradually draining to the ocean through New York State, we we now have one of the lakes being low-level. Lake Ontario is 245 feet above sea level, only 43% the altitude of Lake Erie. West of Niagara, in Ontario, the Welland Canal had to be dug, with eight locks, to allow shipping to go between the now low-level Lake Ontario and still high-level Lake Erie.

Obviously, as soon as Lake Iroquois sprung a leak in the northeast, the natural drain out the southeast became high and dry, and the Hudson was no longer the natural outlet of the Great Lakes. If you look at a map, it’s possible that Lake Oneida in New York State could be a remnant of the connection. Also, it may be my imagination, but the Hudson south of Albany looks like a much broader river than north of it. This is conjecture, but could what had been originally a tributary of the original connection now be what is considered the source of the Hudson?

There is a dual irony. First, when a canal was built in the early 1800’s to connect New York City with the Great Lakes, it was almost re-doing the original connection that had existed. But the second irony is that exact duplication would have to have been an Ontario Canal, since, on the map, that connection is closer. But Since Lake Ontario is now a low-level lake, that made no sense, so instead the Erie Canal traipsed all across the length of the state to connect with Lake Erie, still at high-level.

If a bowl gets a crack down one side, and almost, but not completely, drains out, shouldn’t you still be able to see the upper, empty part of the bowl? Of course. You just have to know what to look for, and recognize what you’re looking at when you see it. If you go north of Niagara Falls on the Canadian side, just before you come to Queenston at the bottom of a hill, there’s a beautiful park at Queenston Heights. The name gives it away. At this point you are on the Niagara Escarpment, a ridge that is actually the shore of Lake Iroquois. You are on the top edge of the bowl. (We also saw the Escarpment somewhat to the east of here, just south of Lockport.)

Up on the Escarpment at Queenston Heights, you look down the grassy slope of the bowl to Lake Ontario in the distance, which lies at the bottom of the bowl. You see what is actually the extension of the Niagara River beyond the Escarpment going north to the lake. But you are at the most interesting part of the Escarpment. When the level of Lake Iroquois started to drop, the Niagara River, which had flowed gently into it, suddenly was higher than lake level, and—once again—a falls ensued. The original location of Niagara Falls is at the Escarpment just to the right of the park.

As an example of not knowing, or fully understanding, what you’re seeing, let me cite this. Across Lake Ontario, Toronto lies right on its shore. If Lake Iroquois were still there, Toronto would be under water. That means that the Escarpment on that side must be north of Toronto. When I stopped in Toronto in May going across Canada, it struck me that I’d like to see the Escarpment, but didn’t have time to. I was reviewing the sights to see in the city when I read about Casa Loma. Beverly and I had visited this historic mansion north of the city years ago, and enjoyed both the house and its view. Casa Loma is Spanish for Hill House. Reviewing its background this summer, I discovered there’s no hill involved at all. Casa Loma is on the Escarpment. So we had seen the northern side of the Escarpment years ago, and didn’t realize exactly what it was we were seeing.

When I said earlier that this cataclysmic inundation was partially complete, but was still ongoing, I was of course referring to Niagara Falls. The falls are a continuation of the leakage that started with the loss of Lake Iroquois. Most people who see the falls, beautiful as they are, are also unaware that they are seeing an event in progress. From where it started at the Escarpment, the falls have over time eroded the rock below, and have continuously backed up 11 kilometers/7 miles, and are presently located halfway to Lake Erie. After cutting their way south, the falls have reached the zag, made the turn, and are now backing up to the east. Because of the bend, the falls are particularly attractive, forming the curved shape of Horseshoe Falls. As the falls rounded the bend, they reached an island in the Niagara River, Goat Island, so the falls are now in two parts. South of Goat Island is the Horseshoe Falls, and the small strip of water north of the island are the American Falls.

Up to 75% of the water is diverted to generate electricity on both the American and Canadian sides, and more at night just to illuminate the falls. It seems unfortunate to interrupt, or at least slow down, the progress of the falls moving backward, creating the gorge in front of them, that has been going on for milennia. If this water diversion doesn’t permanently hold back the falls, they should continue to the zig, then turn south again, reaching Lake Erie in another 25,000 years.

Some think that the falls would then disappear, but I don’t understand why they say that. If this gorge reaches Lake Erie, wouldn’t that much more water flow out of Lake Erie down the deep gorge than flowed along the high-level Niagara River? Couldn’t that possibly start draining Lake Erie, if not totally, then at least partially, living a mini-Erie? Couldn’t there be a domino effect backing up all the lakes? If it ever reached that far, the water in the entire chain of lakes would have fulfilled its destiny to reach the ocean.

Obviously, the whole purpose of this exercise is for people to understand what Niagara Falls is really about. The first time Beverly and I visited it many years ago, we enjoyed it, but it was hard to get oriented. In 1999 we visited it again as part of a series of smaller trips that convinced me that I could take Beverly to Europe again in 2000. This time I had a Michelin at the falls, and I knew exactly what I was doing.

I would like to be rah-rah and say the New York/USA side is better than the Ontario/Canadian side, but that would be a lie. Ontario wins hands down. I’ve driven between Lakes Ontario and Erie on both sides of the Niagara River. The New York drive has nothing to see, and rates a zero in my book. The Ontario side is easily a 9. As for the two cities named Niagara Falls, they both are touristy, but the views and sights from the Ontario one rate a 10. One should visit Niagara Falls NY to get close to the American Falls and to visit Goat Island, but that experience rates maybe a 5.

If anyone is going to visit the falls, either again or for the first time, I would highly recommend you approach them this way. See the Niagara River first, both south and north of the falls, and only then go and spend time at the falls. Try this, which is what we did, and is what I would do again if I went back.

At Buffalo, cross the Peace Bridge into Canada. From the bridge, you can see the expanse of Lake Erie, with the Niagara River below you. After customs, get onto the Niagara Parkway northbound. This is a beautiful, parklike road, right on the river’s edge. There are pleasant residential neighborhoods all along it. After a short while, the river seems to get tense, as though it knows what’s coming. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to stop for very long on this drive, so much has to be seen from the car. You reach the zig and the road turns left. The water gets choppy, as you see Goat Island on the other side. Then you see the river disappear. It’s gone over the falls, and all you see from here is space where the water used to be. This back-door approach to the falls is to me the most exciting. After rounding the zag again at the Horseshoe Falls, you’re there. If you can fight the urge to stop and park in a pay lot (or if you’ve seen the falls before), keep going up the Niagara Gorge to get the lay of the land. You can come back later to stop. In a little while you reach Queenston Heights, and can enjoy the view from the Escarpment, knowing as you now do that the falls used to be right there. Continue downhill towards Lake Ontario, and stop at the end of the road to visit the charming village of Niagara-on-the-Lake. Then go back and enjoy the falls and whatever else you’ve passed by, but don’t forget to eventually go see at least part of the Welland Canal, not to far to the west. From Lake Ontario, it needs six locks right at the beginning to come up the Escarpment, but only needs two more afterwards to go all the rest of its distance to the height of Lake Erie.