Tourist Stop

I couldn’t remember if we had ever taken Steve to the Genesee Brewery. He’s been to Rochester many times, and we usually just carry on like no time has elapsed instead of running around town.

But Steve got fascinated by a story in our local paper about two women who had tried to rescue a dog—I didn’t read the article, but as I understand it, the dog was dead and it had been stuffed into a bag. One of those grisly stories I don’t pay any attention to. They saw someone throw the bag into the river gorge from Maplewood Park, and they climbed down the gorge and had to be rescued by helicopter. Steve wanted to see the site, so we had an outing.

We started by orienting Steve as to how the Genesee River runs through the city, indeed formed the city as one of America’s early boom towns. The Genesee Brewery is a comfortable vantage point.

We ordered three Twelve Horse Ales and sat outside on the third-floor deck of the brewery with this view. A guy sitting next to us had a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt on with Hendrix’s 1969 tour stops listed on the back. I saw Hendrix in 1969 with Kim in Indianapolis, so I had to ask him to lean forward so I could study his shirt.

The dog incident happened at Maplewood Park, another of Frederick Law Olmsted’s, near the Lower Falls, north of the High Falls (pictured above) and closer to where the river flows into Lake Ontario. The last time we were here was with Peggi’s mom when we toured the rose garden.

The park is a little seedy and was the scene of a shooting a few years back. We parked next to a car in which the occupants were enjoying some skunky weed. And before we walked down the steps to the gorge, we had to wait for a bicyclist to finish taking a piss. There was a couple making out down there, and the guard rails along the gorge had long ago crumbled into it.

When we got back, we heard Steve talking to Brad on the phone and telling him where we had gone. In his telling, people were shooting up down there and the couple was fucking out in the open.

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