Friday we saw a movie, in the theater, for the first time since March 2020. Not without hesitation and uncertainty, of course. But we got our bivalent boosters about three weeks ago, and we were going to a matinee, and to a movie we figured would have a small audience even at its peak. So, wearing our N95s except to toss popcorn in our mouths seemed like a tolerable risk.
The movie drawing us out of our protective shells was a documentary. Boblo Boats: A Ferry Tale, which subtitle did not quite shake bunnyhugger away. It was about the steam ferries which used to shuttle people between Detroit and the Boblo Island Amusement Park, from the 1910s through to the park's death in the 90s. And, particularly, about the small group of true believers who think they can salvage the boats and return them to service.
As you'd imagine it's not easy to repair two very large boats that are out of service and their story was largely one of little bits of progress halted by hassles and occasionally catastrophe. Mostly shortages of money or volunteers. Sometimes of space; getting a cheap dock for a 200-foot-long boat that draws 16 feet of water is not easy. And sometimes actual catastrophe, as in a couple years ago when one of the ferries caught fire and all the wood structures burned. (The hull and the engine, metal pieces, survived, allowing the documentary to ask the Ship-of-Theseus question without saying Ship-of-Theseus.) Also they had some part in the movie Transformers: Age of Extinction, not mentioned in the documentary.
This focus --- on the ferries, and particularly the vexed restoration efforts --- and the shortness of the film created some lacunae. I don't remember any mention of the commissioning of the ferry boats in 1910(L), for example, or why two large ships were built rather than, say, six medium-size ones. (I'm guessing saving on staffing.) Nor was any mention made of the boats' unsafe reputation, or the near-riot that was one of Boblo Island's late-80s/early-90s curses. Or of Boblo Island's decay; I think the only mention of the park's decline was an interviewee talking about the last year, where under new management people started coming again because they heard the park had been cleaned up.
Getting some very welcome attention was the Boblo Ferries' role in civil rights history: in June 1945 war worker Sarah Elizabeth Ray was kicked off the company-sponsored trip to the amusement park, and (through the NAACP) sued the transportation company for racial discrimination. The transportation company (registered in Canada) sued Michigan on the grounds that anti-discrimination laws shouldn't apply to them. The Supreme Court was in its brief window of seeking to expand civil rights, and it set a precedent against discrimination. It's credited, not just by the documentary-makers, as a precedent for Brown vs the Board of Education.
THe serious focus ends up being the people behind the project. As you'd imagine they're a quirky set. They're mostly interviewed separately and as the narrative unfolds we hear about people leaving the project abruptly. It's hard not to suppose that someone who would buy a hundred-year-old ferry with the plan to restore it and do a something might be difficult to get along with. We don't learn that directly, though, I imagine because the documentary-makers have to not be slugged (or sued) by any of the participants.
Afterwards bunnyhugger came to understand the real story --- since the boats' story is as yet unresolved, both struggling to be restored --- was of one of the participants, someone who was strangely her. The man --- sharing her brother K's name --- was not just an amusement park, and specifically Boblo Island fan. He had an elaborate HO model set of an idealized Boblo Island, with working toy models packed far beyond what the actual park could ever be. Somewhere in the background --- unexamined in the documentary --- were carousel animals. In his backyard he had the children's Turtle ride from Boblo Island. And ... he had a fursuit. A mascot costume, representing the Boblo Island Bear. I wasn't clear whether this was the original costume or a modern reconstruction; it looked quote good. But anyway the real narrative of the documentary seemed to be more about whether he would return to Boblo Island, to see what remained of the park (not much) or the McMansions built over its corpse.
It was all quite interesting and we're glad we were able to see it. If I seem to be harping on lapses in the documentary it's because I got to thinking about it, and what it did and didn't say. It's a good documentary that has you thinking over what you've learned afterwards.
And now we're coming to the end of the Lake Ontario Loop. We drove from Rochester to, first, Niagara Falls, since we hoped to spend some time on the Ontario side and we weren't committed yet to just what we'd do but you probably have an accurate idea what we did. But compare your idea to the pictures, if you don't remember what I already described a couple months back.

The curious strip mall in which our hotel resided. Bon-Ton's been gone for years and Sears? Who has a Sears anymore? There was also an Arthur Treacher's somewhere in town, but I didn't get a picture of it.

Here's Niagara Falls, Ontario, and particularly Clifton Hill. We only had a couple hours to not get home too riotously late, but the spectacle was grand to see.

Oh, now, what's the significance of a roller coaster on top of a building? Hmmm ...

And here we are looking over the falls. I loved the look of the procession of people walking up the long trail into the sea foam.

More people seen on the United States side of the falls, at the bottom of the elevator.

There's some of those hikers enjoying being wrapped up in dampness.
Trivia: The legate Robert de Courçon, who in 1215 gave the new University of Paris its first statues, proposed establishing a council to eliminate usury from the Christian world. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, Jean Favier.
Currently Reading: Squaring the Circle: The War Between Hobbes and Wallis, Douglas M Jesseph. Have the strangest feeling I've read this already but the last checkout date is before I moved to Lansing so it's probably nothing?