This is the third in a series of articles by Staff Writer Chuck Haga, who is retracing the route taken by author John Steinbeck in 1960 that led to the book “Travels With Charley.”
John Steinbeck and Charley the dog have been good guides so far, reliable and entertaining. But as I followed their route across Lake Champlain from Vermont into New York, I wanted to deviate.
Exotic, foreign Montreal lay just an hour to the north, advertised by French baliads on the radio.
And to the south stretched the long, famous lake, Ethan Allen’s lake, guarded at its tip by the fort with the name that wants to be spoken out loud: Ticonderoga. I could see the fort and then swing back through the Adirondacks.
But I was a day behind schedule already. And I wanted to play bingo with the Mohawks.
Charley’s path brought me into New York at Rouses Point, just south of the Canadian border. The course was west toward the St. Lawrence, the lakes and Niagara Falls, and maybe it was the thought of all that water that reminded me it was wash day.
Steinbeck rigged a bucket onto the back of his truck and sloshed his laundry as he traveled, a wash cycle and then a rinse. Not sure how to do that with a rental car, I’m stopping at coin laundries. The one in New Hampshire the week before was a broad, spotless place with coin machines and magazines and a supervisor who sang along, nicely, with James Taylor, who was on tape. But in Mooers, N.Y., away from monied campers and leaf-lookers, the village laundry was a dark and dingy room in the back of a shuttered building that used to be a market.
Laurie Faubert was there with a big bundle of wash and four kids, who ranged in age from 6 months to 8 years. Her husband just got work as a carpet installer with the furniture store on the corner. They live in a small apartment across the street. “It’s pretty good,” she said. “There’s a store there, and we can walk pretty much wherever we want.”
How does she see the election?
“Well, we haven’t voted in about four years,” she said. Why? “Never get around to registering.” Why not? She shrugged.
Two of the kids were fighting. She ordered a stop and the kids put on looks of innocence and outraged honor, the sort that carries nations into war.
“A woman at the store wanted us to register so we could vote for her husband,” she said. “He’s running for judge.” Did they? She shrugged a no.
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Travel the back roads and back streets of America and the people you meet may be as proud and hopeful and happy as anybody with money and power. But it’s sobering to see how vulnerable so many of them are, how near to failure, how dependent on a windfall or a timely minimum-wage job.
There are about 75 new jobs in Altona, where the Mohawk Indians have opened a high-stakes bingo parlor.
But the state of New York told the Mohawks not to open the hall because it’s on state land and illegal. On opening day last week, the state sent a man with a restraining order signed by a judge of the state Supreme Court.
The Mohawks’ response was indirect but clear: “Under the G, 51.” (If you haven’t played for a while, that’s bingo talk for “let the games begin.”)
One of the Five Nations of the Iroquois confederation, the Mohawks have had trouble with the United States since they picked the losing side in the American Revolution. After the war, most of the tribe retired to Canada. They live today on a few thousand acres straddling the border, including this little piece of northeastern New York.
The state says the land was leased. The Indians say it’s sovereign Mohawk territory and they can do whatever they like on it. They can hunt and fish by their own rules, sell untaxed cigarettes and bring big money into the territory by offering high-stakes bingo.
“And nobody really owns the land, you know,” said George Deer, 39, one of the Indians working security outside the hall. He wore boots and fatigues and a camouflage cap, but not because he expected state troopers. “Looks like rain,” he said.
His assignment was to show the bus drivers from Albany and Montreal and Toronto where to unload and park. But it’s more than a job. It means Deer can live in the territory, which the Mohawks call Ganienkeh.
“I always wanted to live here, but I had to find some work.” he said. “I worked in the garment district in the city, in New York, you know? I lived in Brooklyn, in the slums. I was going to make some money and come back here. There was money, but it was like watching the moon get full, you know?”
Money from bingo will go into Indian projects, he said, and that will mean more work. “We have a sawmill, a carpentry project, building houses for the people. A lot of the Indian people are on welfare, but they don’t want to be. It’s like the steelworkers, you know? Those people are workers and they don’t want to be on welfare.
“This is helping the people. It’s already helped me. It got me out of the urban life.”
People won pots of $500 to $1,500 and jumped up and hollered. A woman won a trip for two to Bermuda and danced in the aisle. And Steve Akers, a convenience store clerk from Albany, won the final jackpot of $5,500, paid out in crisp $100 bills. He shook so hard he could barely speak, but as he stuffed the money into a pocket he said that it would cover some debts and maybe pay for a vacation.
I didn’t win, which kept my record intact. So far, I haven’t won bingo with the Mohawks or the lotteries in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Ohio, and I didn’t catch a salmon in Michigan, although I almost caught a salmon fisherman as he splashed upstream in hip boots after a big chinook.
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Back on the trail in New York, a thin drizzle fell and created a murky fog that turned everything by the road pastel – barns, pastures, even Holsteins.
In Potsdam, Catholics gathered for mass in a huge and beautiful brown sandstone church named for St. Mary. “We are called to care,” the banner at the front said, and on the bulletin board in the entryway were notices of many things to care about: alcoholism, child abuse, mental illness, hunger.
Job security is the issue that matters most to his parishioners, the Rev. William Argy said later, “but they’re skeptical about politicians and their promises. They’re rapidly tiring of this criticism of each other. And I’d have to say there’s a rising antipathy toward the media. They wonder, ‘Am I getting the truth of it all?’”
I turned northwest and crossed Oswiegatchie River and the land rose and became more rugged. Maples gave way to sumac, and the air smelled of corn and apples, cattle and new-cut hay and wildflowers. There were small patches of sunflowers, more ornamental than crop. The barns were dark and weathered, so different from the red beauties of Vermont, but straight and sturdy.
Off Jacques Cartier State Park by the seaway, the Canadian freighter Federal Calumet slipped upriver as the Irwin Clymer, a self-unloading grain ship flying the U.S. flag, moved down. They saluted each other with deep hoots.
The Great Lakes. There are war memorials everywhere in this country, but here in upstate New York and along Lake Erie are monuments to the fallen heroes of an obscure war we read about in junior high and then forget, the War of 1812. The marker in Pultneyville, reached after a drive through orchards of ripening Ida Reds, Romes and McIntoshes, is to a General Swift, who on May 15, 1814, assembled the militia and volunteers to defend homes, kin and the northern frontier from the British.
Wanting to know more about Swift and his volunteers, I stopped at a bookstore in Rochester. It was called the Village Green Bookstore but it was surrounded by concrete, and it carried no regional histones, not even a general history of the United States.
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Niagara Falls is a pretty and awesome place and would be even if they didn’t bathe it in pink and blue light at night and surround it, especially on the Canadian side, with such as the Castle Dracula and the Elvis Museum.
Jerry and Ginger Ibanez came to the falls on their honeymoon 27 years ago, and they were back for their anniversary last week. They’re fine, but not so happy with the scene. “Too many wax museums and stuff that’s got nothing to do with the falls,” he said. “It’s like Vegas.”
They are in their late 40s, not rich but comfortable. He’s in construction, a union member. She works in a food store. Both will vote for Bush.
“I’m a Reagan man,” he said. “Since he got in, I’ve worked every week. I’ve had my pick of jobs. And I sincerely believe that if it had been a Democrat in office these last seven years, we wouldn’t have been able to make this trip.”
There is hate and fear in the country, and some of every other sentiment. But what I hear more than anything is resentment. Laborers resent the closed factories and the tax-dodging rich. And people who have something resent anyone who might take it away. “Inflation is under control and I feel good about our defense,” said Don Porter of Florida, visiting Niagara Falls with his wife, Lois. “Now if those knuckleheads would just pinch off some of their giveaway programs and do something about the deficit, I’d feel real good.”
“They have people who have been on social aid for generations,” Lois Porter said. “I saw an interview on TV once. The interviewer asked this woman what her goal in life was. You know what she said? She said her goal was to have her own social worker.”
And listen to Elzada Schrader, who waitressed for two decades until her family persuaded her to “go live my dream” and run a cafe by the road outside Buffalo. She makes the meatloaf and whips the potatoes and keeps the books, working 12 hours or more a day.
“Sure, it’s tough on the wage-earner today, but not any tougher than it is on the person who’s trying to run a small business.” she said. “Everybody wants to work 20 hours a week and come home with $300. People are lazy, absolutely lazy. Pride goes down the drain with all these helpy-selfy programs.”
Does she ever think about asking for something? She said maybe she will, a grant to buy the cafe building, which she leases.
“And do you know how I feel? I feel I’m entitled to it. I’ve worked hard all my life and paid taxes. And I see those multimillionaires get their grants to put up their buildings.”
Sitting with her, nodding in agreement, was waitress Rhonda Heppel, 21. She went to the welfare office to ask for help paying for an apartment. “But they turned me down. They said I could afford an apartment.”
She makes $2.35 an hour, plus tips. On a good day, tips add up to $10. On weekends, she works a second job, clerking at auctions.
Can she make it on that?
“Do I have a choice?”
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Still hugging the coast of Lake Erie, I left New York and entered Pennsylvania. I would be there only a few hours and i wanted something to remember, so I asked a middle-age man working a gas pump what the city of Erie had to offer.
“You just missed the big barbecue,” he said. “Folks came from Australia, Louisiana, all over.”
Was it a good time?
“Don’t know. I didn’t make it down there.”
Any other attractions?
“Well, they’re restoring Perry’s ship down at the harbor. Putting new guns in her, too, so she’ll fire.”
That must be something to see.
“I guess. Haven’t been down yet myself.”
The Niagara, flagship of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry in the Battle of Lake Erie, fought and won on Sept. 10, 1813, saving the Northwest for the republic. I found the berth but not the ship. Out for tests and maneuvers, perhaps, or for someone to fire a gun and pretend he is a commodore. So my memory of Pennsylvania is of a man who lives in a city but doesn’t.
Much of northern Ohio’s lake country is pretty, with lush smells coming from the orchards and vineyards. I stopped at a farm stand and bought a peach, a pear and an apple, and each was as it should be, and a sack of concord grapes that were extravagantly good.
But I’m feeling resentment, too, at the commercial and industrial litter that makes so much of the land tedious to drive through, the abandoned motels and discarded pizza shops and all the garish yellow-red signs selling Shell and Sunoco, Marilyn’s Home Cooking and Mosicki for Sheriff. “American cities are like badger holes,” Steinbeck wrote, “ringed with trash,” and that hasn’t changed much.
I skirted Cleveland and Toledo and turned north into Michigan but gave Detroit wide berth. I wanted countryside again, and it felt good to glide into the flatlands of central Michigan, to see cabbages growing.
In much of the country, we don’t have back roads anymore. You may find one that goes roughly in your direction for a while, but then it becomes improved and suddenly busy and there are signs insisting that you choose a lane. You choose and another sign says you must turn, and there you are on a superhighway, going somewhere you don’t want to go, flanked by mighty trucks and needing to concentrate as narrowly as a precision jet pilot. You can’t see where you are, and neither can you smell the peaches.