Five days late, Juraj and friends finally showed up to start the new year, and not a moment too soon while I’ve had it up to here and then some with Laura to the point that even she understood I could use a day doing what I want. I was supposed to help them out with a zombie movie for someone’s film study class, but with only a day free I only got to do the location scouting and run through a few of my favorite Buffalo sites.
I spent a lot of time waiting at the bottom of the grain elevators taking pictures of columns while everyone else climbed around the top, but I just didn’t feel good about the 39 missing steps.
So I went looking for even more columns, and heard a tremendous BOOM! and clatter from somewhere above. And went back to taking pictures of columns because it was all I could reach.
The source of the noise turned out to be another stair step falling, and Theo with it, somehow saving himself on a rickety railing. Just more proof I shouldn’t climb, I thought. Next up was the Hall of Machines, especially considering that we were a carload of engineers and Tesla geeks. So up we went again, straight to the top. Does this roof look safe to you?
No? Me either. Theo, of course, went out to test for himself. This roof had a weight capacity of about 0.8 Theos, a unit of mass roughly equivalent to a volumetric Smoot. Somehow, the pair of freshly created leg-holes happened to land right across an I-beam. Theo lived again. The hole still lives.
And so we took in the hulks of rotting machinery, the behemoths that once powered a city of industry.
I’m not much of a climber but these at least were pretty manageable. And easily worth the view from the top.
The machines weren’t enough for Theo though… he disappeared again, and as we began to search, sure enough there was another enormous crash and clatter. And out of the ruckus, yet again, the legend appeared, scraped up, shaken and stirred.
Our third place, and only new one, was the Dunlop factory on Grand Island. The most notable thing about it was its featureless, flat Cleveland architecture.
Being one for completeness, Theo created yet another racket. At least he was only joking this time; nothing fell, he just started throwing bricks at the sheet metal in the windows, knocking out a perfect opening for the setting sun
True to form, we spent the rest of the night on the piss, going back to Iola with a handle of Jack and staying out well past the sunrise. Somehow, I lost my house key somewhere along the way, but… at least to me it was still so worth it!