The Falls

As I remember, it wasn’t the cell phones not working that scared us the most. It was something else.

The cell phone outage occurred before we arrived at Niagara Falls. Even hours into the blackout, Lilly couldn’t understand it. She’d shake her cell, muttering curses under her breath. I think she believed that the more attention she paid to it, the more likely it was to work. This happened every time she took it out of her pocket, more times than I could count.

Lilly’s actions reminded me of a psychology lecture on “magical thinking.” It was Mad Max, as we called him — otherwise known as Professor Marvin Glass — who introduced me to this concept. With his woolly beard speckled with silver and a sly look for every pretty face, he was lecturing on how people tend to behave irrationally in challenging situations:

Humans are creatures of habit. Remove them from their carefully controlled environment, and almost anything can happen. We believe we could never act like a Nazi or commit crimes against humanity, but consider, for example, the famous 1961 study on human behavior, the Milgram experiment. College students like yourselves were electrically shocked until they collapsed and became unresponsive. This continued because authority figures—the scientists running the experiment—insisted it go on despite clear evidence that laws were being broken.

I had to interrupt at that point. “But it was all fake, wasn’t it? The students who were supposedly being shocked were acting. The whole point was to see how sadistic people could be if the environment allowed them to act in abhorrent ways.”

“Why yes, you’ve been reading ahead in the assigned readings, have you?”

“High school sociology.”

There was a ripple of laughter in the hall, and I realized I had stood up to speak to Marvin for some reason. Lilly grabbed my arm, and I sat down. Marvin was bemused, but only for a few seconds.

To conclude, as I have shown in this lecture, people are influenced by their surroundings far more than they realize. And when we no longer have what we depend upon in our lives, we become magical and irrational in our thinking.

I definitely was influenced by my environment. As a freshman, I enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere in the lecture hall. The magic of being at college was still with me. People had moved on from that first-month excitement, but they still hadn’t started to take their work seriously. I shouldn’t have been surprised when someone else followed my lead and stood up while we were all beginning to gather our things to go to our next class.

“So I’m going to fail this course because my environment has programmed me that way?” he yelled out.

There was quite a bit of laughter, and old Marvin joined in. He took a quick sip of water from a glass as his eyes narrowed, taking the measure of the student who challenged him.

“Look around you. Who gains when you fail? Everyone else in this room. There will be one fewer job applicant to compete with. The system is set up for this to happen.”

“All I see is people grinning at me,” the student answered.

“Exactly.” Marvin rejoined, whereupon he closed his laptop and began gathering his things, too. “Enjoy your magical moment. Don’t forget midterms next week, everyone!”

The lecture having ended, I approached this guy, who had been sitting near us and was now high-fiving a few of his friends.

“The very word ‘failure’ implies that you have the freedom to act,” I said to him. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t attach any sort of value to the choices we make. In fact, the word “choice” assumes you have the freedom to fail or succeed…”

“Yeah?” he replied. “Who are you to say?” Whereupon he turned on his heel and sauntered away in the direction of the campus pub.

Lilly was by my side then. She shook her head. “Why would you bother to speak to such a loser?”

“Because the environment has not conditioned us for failure.”

Lilly smiled. “Spoken like someone who always succeeds?”

I couldn’t answer her, although the following lecture that Marvin gave after midterms was a real eye-opener.

#

We were now a world away from any campus anywhere.

“Aren’t we going to do something?” Lilly now practically screamed at me. I must have been so exhausted that I hadn’t realized I was daydreaming. Here we were in a bus terminal, soaked through, with all we could carry. Lilly hadn’t even set her backpack on the floor; she was nervously twisting her straps as her eyes scanned around us.

We went to Niagara Falls to escape everything. I chose it from a real map—a paper one. I even used a wax pencil to circle it, just like in movies. What drew my attention was the Sir Adam Beck Hydroelectric Generating Station. New generating stations usually don’t have the word “Sir” in their names. It had to be an old one. And that was precisely what we were looking for.

Lilly put her pack down and sighed. I wondered why the bus terminal wasn’t crowded. But at this late hour, it was almost empty. There were no taxis. No one else was waiting for a ride.

“We can’t stay here!” Lilly moaned. Then she looked more hopeful. “Look, Michael, the real lights are on here, not the emergency ones.”

So we had made the right choice after all, I thought. I squeezed Lilly’s hand and gave her a reassuring look.

”The Sir Adam Beck Hydroelectric Generating Station produces electricity from water,” I said. “Long tunnels direct water to the generators. Niagara Falls has snapped back from the power outage because it has its own circuit independent from the North American power grid.”

“So, everything is normal here?” she asked.

“We need old tech. It's as simple as that.”

“Old tech,” Lilly echoed. She fetched her cell out of her pocket for the umpteenth time, staring at it. “It still doesn’t work.”

“Never mind that. We also need a place to stay.”

But Lilly didn’t want to go out in the rain. Not yet anyway. We got to talking about Marvin Glass, seeing that he was a lot on my mind anyway, given the circumstances.

“Did that loser end up passing the course?” she asked me. “I don’t remember what happened to him.”

“Funny you should mention that,” I replied. “Mad Max insisted upon meeting with him regularly during office hours. He passed with a “C.”

“What was the point of that course?” Lilly sighed.

That comment caught me off guard. “The point? Well, it's simple, really. It’s the quality of our relationships with others that helps us get through tough times and prevents us from being overwhelmed by our surroundings. Sort of like how we stick together?”

Lilly smiled, which meant the world to me.

#

I could see through the windows of the bus terminal that the hotels could be reached by following River Road, which, as it happened, followed the Niagara River. We set out on foot.

“If the power is back, why is everything so quiet and dark?” asked Lilly as she stepped around a fallen tree blocking the sidewalk we were on.

“You mean who turned out all the lights?” I joked as I turned up my collar against the rain still falling. “It's not like there are bodies in the streets, you know.”

My attempt at humor, however, was lost on Lilly. “There aren’t even any cars around!” she continued.

I wanted to say that there were lots of cars everywhere, in driveways and parked neatly on River Road. But there was no point.

“The hotel that wants our business will have plenty of lights,” I prophesied, which turned out to be true.

Then about that time, it stopped raining. The hotel wasn’t one of the tall ones. It wasn’t even near the gorge with that famous view everyone looks forward to. No, it looked like a Mom-and-Pop, more a motel than a hotel—a throwback to the twentieth century, past its prime. A man with a liquor bottle hung around the office. As we approached the motel, he would raise it to his lips and curse at unseen things.

“Are you the proprietor of this place?” I asked in my best educated voice as we drew near.

“No!” he huffed, seemingly annoyed that we had spoken to him. Then, blocking our way, he wiped his rather bulbous nose on his sleeve and scratched one ear with the hand that wasn’t holding the bottle. Some idea had come to him.

“Say you know what is going on!”

“Say what?” I answered.

“You know!”

I looked at Lilly. This strange man’s antics were a mystery to her, too.

I tried again. “You must know who runs this place. We need a room for two.”

“Three, you mean,” he answered, swaying slightly from side to side.

“You miscount. You can’t stay with us.” I said.

Lilly stepped closer to him. She tried smiling.

“I believe my husband, Michael, means that when a newlywed husband and wife visit Niagara Falls, it's usually for romantic reasons. A third person is rarely with them. It’s a honeymoon for us.”

“I once had a honey,” he replied.

Now he was positively blocking our access to the building with one hand on the door jamb.

I looked around. There were plenty of hotels in Niagara Falls, most of which were far better than this dive with its cheap “rooms rented by the week” sign. But most of them were dark and quiet. I tried peeking into the office to see if anyone else was there.

“Don’t you try getting past me!” the man shouted. “Damn AI’s screwing everything up! Next thing we’ll see is war, famine, destruction, the end of everything!”

Lilly tried smiling again. It was a brave attempt, more a grimace than anything else. “What’s your name if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Patrick McAllister.”

“Patrick, do you know a place in Niagara Falls where we could go?”

“It’s the Falls! No one calls it anything else here! Tell me what is going on!”

So I got some folding chairs from where they had been strewn about near the side of the office and set them up —three in all. If there were refreshments, I would have served them. We sat down. Patrick kept drinking, so it became a waiting game. I didn’t have to tell Lilly what would come next.

Lilly's phone buzzed a few times. But she didn’t answer it. I had turned mine off some time ago. Patrick fell asleep, his head bobbing off his chest. I took his bottle and laid it at his feet, being careful to put the top on.

“We can’t tell him or anyone else, can we, Michael?” Lilly said.

“Would it make a difference if we did?” I answered.

I looked into her eyes, which were starting to tear up. “We’ll try to help Patrick when he sobers up.”

Then, Lilly and I stood up and walked hand in hand into the motel. So many things had been abandoned that we knew we had a place to stay.

"I wonder how Mad Max is making out?" I asked as we hit the sack.

"Oh, I wouldn't be asking that right now," Lilly answered.

Sleep came easily. Really.