Whenever we make the drive from Toronto to Buffalo, I immediately get a completely different feeling as soon as we cross the border into the States. There are billboards advertising insurance companies and lawyers, and elderly people often man the tollbooths. Abandoned Ferris wheels and cranes, rusted, loom over territories they once ruled. American flags, some the size of city blocks, flap over car dealerships.
We always pass by a massive, fenced-in waste site. From a distance it almost looks attractive. Covered in green grass it’s carefully landscaped, dotted with shrubs and trees it rolls beside the highway like a golf course. But as you get closer you notice vents protruding from unnatural spots, escape valves for the toxic gases oozing from the waste heaving beneath.
Less than a mile away there are three diamonds full of men playing baseball, not softball. It’s raining lightly, and just down the street you can see the bar some of them will drink in after the game. Heroes–a flat, white bunker just off the highway, it has neon signs in the window and looks like the sort of place that Aerosmith might have thought to shoot a video.
In a suburb outside of Buffalo we stopped at a restaurant called Protocol. Linen napkins, décor from the 80’s and a scattering of Canadian businessmen waiting for flights out of Buffalo. Jazz music, the middle of the road type that somehow belongs to the 1970’s played and a woman who had to have been there since the place opened, led us to our table. The waitress, who had a late summer tam, introduced herself as Kristy and told us about the specials, blaming the economy for the slow business on this Tuesday night. The food was good, and as we left the bartender, a 50 year-old woman in a tube top, scolded one of the men drinking at the bar, “Now, I don’t know you well enough for that,” she said, the devil in her eyes.