When Pride got in my way

This week, I’m sharing something a little different. It’s not directly related to Scouting, but it’s about a recent experience I had a Pride event, and I thought y’all might enjoy hearing about it.

I was biking through an enormous crowd of LGBTQ+ people. And I was mad about it.

As far as the eye could see, people were draped in rainbow flags, their skin shimmering and glittering in the late afternoon sun. It was like a rock concert, except these fans weren’t lined up to see a musical act: They were eagerly waiting to see performances by some of the country’s most famous drag queens.

Normally, I would revel in this type of crowd. These are my people, after all. But as I tried to weave my bike through this Pride festival in downtown Buffalo, I was frustrated. Because I had come to Buffalo for an entirely different reason.

Over the previous nine days, I had biked nearly 400 miles from my home in Troy, across the entire state of New York, to reach this point. On this day alone, I had biked 50 miles. My map told me that the finish line to this arduous journey — the official trailhead — was just a couple hundred feet in front of me, but I couldn’t reach it. At every turn I was thwarted by a crowd or a security barricade.

Forty-five minutes of this circling and re-routing went by before I gave up. My friend and I decided to pick a random spot along the waterfront that wasn’t mobbed, jump off our bikes and take our victory pictures. Trailhead or not, we had made it Buffalo.

The next day, after we had rested and recovered, and the Pride crowds disappeared, we set out to explore the city. One thing I wanted to do while I was in town was hunt down another elusive spot in Buffalo. It was an address my mom gave me: The location where my great-grandfather lived in Buffalo as an Italian immigrant in 1902.

Google Maps couldn’t seem to find it, and to my surprise, the street didn’t seem to even exist. I thought maybe it was renamed, so I resolved to stop by the Buffalo library and ask an expert.

When I walked in, I was soon shepherded to the library’s map room, and within minutes, a librarian was pulling out dusty, table-sized maps from the early 1900s. They displayed Buffalos original street grid, and in particular, a densely-packed immigrant neighborhood along the city’s waterfront. The librarian pointed to an intersection, and there it was: My great-grandfather’s old address.

I leaned in and started snapping pictures of the map, and asked the librarian: Can we approximate where this location is in today’s city? She explained that much of this area had been demolished in the 1960s for the construction of a highway, and another map confirmed this fate: Swooping ramps took the place of what was once a rectangular street grid.

A few more maps later, something dawned on me. There was a small body of water next to my great-grandfather’s former home called a “commercial slip.” It was something of a loading dock, an offshoot of the Erie Canal. My friend mentioned that the name was familiar — he thought he had seen a sign for the commercial slip when we were traversing Buffalo’s canalside Pride festival the day before.

We pulled out Google Maps and zoomed in and it hit us: This “commercial slip” still existed. And it was exactly where we had randomly chosen to end our bike journey the day prior.

I got chills. What were the chances? In our frustration and exhaustion, we had ended our journey along the Erie Canal at the precise spot where my great-grandfather did the same, 120 years prior.

And if it weren’t for that beautifully maddening crowd of LGBTQ+ people, we would have zoomed right by it.