Like most of the kids he knew in Fort Erie, Bird spent a lot of time in the Niagara River during the summer. That was the river that connected Fort Erie to Niagara Falls, Niagara-On-The-Lake, and eventually Lake Ontario.
There were a few places to swim in the river in Fort Erie. There was a place called the Pumphouse, which had a roped-off area for the smaller kids. The bigger kids would swim out and catch the current and either stop at the International Bridge, where all the trains crossed into or out of Canada, or they could catch one of the ladders a little further down at a place called the Coal Docks. After that, there were a series of private docks called The Red, The Yellow, and Williams Dock. Once you passed those, you were pretty much on your way to Niagara Falls.
The Niagara is one of the few rivers in North America that flow north, and it did so at a steady current of 8 or 9 knots, which was pretty damn fast.
Bird’s friends and he all had inner tubes that they could blow up and float down the river in town. Usually, it was from the Pumphouse to Williams Dock. Then they would walk back, rolling their tubes, along the side of the road. Sometimes someone in a pickup would stop and they would pile in the back.
Because Bird and his friends were young and stupid, they believed, the river was their friend and grew up without any real sense of just how dangerous that fast-flowing water could be. There was no shortage of undertows, and they used to hear stories about them, but they always believed getting caught in one of them would never happen to them. There was even a small beach in the south end of the town that was called The Baby Hole because a long time ago a baby had been pulled into one of the undertows and drowned.
One day, Bird told his friend about this idea he had to see if they could float their inner tubes the entire length of the upper part of the river, down to just before the white water where the rapids started about a mile south of the Falls, then paddle into the town of Chippewa and hitchhike back home.
It sounded kind of crazy but a week later there were eight of them, 5 boys and 3 girls who were interested in doing it, They met at Crescent Beach, about two miles from the mouth of the river, and talked strategy.
They figured they would need inner tubes, of course, and bungee cords to fasten them to each other. They would also need good trash bags for their clothes and flip flops and some way to tie them all together to their inner tubes. They would also need hats t-shirts and sunglasses because the sun reflecting off the water would be quite intense.
They were a resourceful bunch and it only took a day or two for them, to get organized. So on a sunny day in July, they waded out into the shallow waters of Lake Erie and fastened the tubes in a circle formation. They used shoelaces to attach all the trash bags which were sealed with a lot of air in them so they would stay afloat.
One kid even talked his older brother (who thought they were crazy), into driving his pickup truck to Chippewa and picking them up when they were done, providing of course they weren’t turned into hamburger floating in the Niagara Gorge.
They all tied up their bikes at Crescent Beach, then pumped up their inner tubes, tied them all together in the shallows, and pushed out into the lake until they caught the current that would take them to the river. drawing them down toward the Peace Bridge, at the far south end of the town. And away they went.
Bird and another kid named Roy were designated navigators. One on each side of the inner tube cluster. Whenever they started moving too close to the centre of the river or too close to the shore, Bird and Roy would slide off their tubes, kick real hard and push the cluster back on course.
The object was to stay fairly close to shore as they could because they knew that when they got close to Chippewa, the speed of the river would accelerate dramatically. If they were too far from shore, they would stand a pretty good chance of going over the Falls.
The trip took the better part of three hours, and for the most part, it was just a bunch of kids floating on the water, risking being grounded for the rest of the summer if they were ever found out.
The ride itself was really quite enjoyable. The Niagara Parkway, which ran alongside the river between Fort Erie and Chippewa is one of the nicest areas in Ontario. They chatted and ate the chocolate bars they had stuffed in their pockets and generally watched the world go by.
Never having been on the water that far down the river, they were actually quite surprised at how quickly the placid water turned to the foamy faster rushing stuff in various places. A little calling card for the rapids ahead. But the team was dauntless and they rode it placidly until they saw the town of Chippewa.
Then four of them got out and pushed their flotilla like crazy until the churning water flattened out. The kids inside the tubes stretched out on their backs to get their butts out of the water to lessen the drag.
All this time they could hear the thunderous sound of Niagara Falls in their ears, so you might say they were highly incentivized.
By the time they got to the place on shore where Bird’s friend’s brother, Tom, was waiting for them, they were exhausted. Tom just sat there on the tailgate of his truck with his arms folded a smile on his face and his head slightly shaking. “Well, you guys are gonna have a story to tell your kids, aren’t you?”
But they never told anybody, and Bird never wrote about it or even mentioned it at all until he told his own kids about many years later, when they were coming home, along the Parkway, from visiting his sister and her husband in Fort Erie.
A couple summers ago Bird and his wife were down in Fort Erie having dinner at a Chinese restaurant on the river with his sister and his brother-in-law. After dinner, he and his sister were standing on the bank of the river and he was astonished at just how fast, that water was flowing.
His sister knew the story and she turned to Bird and said: “Look at that river. You were such an asshole when you were younger.”
Bird seldom argued with my sister because she was a lot smarter than he was. He just stared out at the rushing water and thought, ‘Yeah, but I’m still here.’
(Part 4 of 6 …. To be continued)
