Michael Torsell
It was not as if I set out to spend my Saturday night on a hill in Amherst. I set out to spend my Saturday night on a hill in Amherst in a dinosaur costume.
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This hill, on Saratoga Road, behind Amherst Middle School, was not always a hill; it was once a basin, a manmade rise in the ground topped off with a large concrete dome. The town eventually built a large water tower, which you can probably see sometimes (it is that sky blue thing that juts out in the sky from various points in Amherst, UB and even – on particularly clear days—from the 33[1]), and the basin was no longer necessary. Still, concrete dome remained for some time.
Even while the dome was there, this hill was used as a sledding destination for local kids during the winter. I would often go to the top, just before the concrete dome started and sled down. The braver kids, of whom I was decidedly not one, would go to the very top and slide off the lip of the concrete, briefly airborne before continuing down the snow covered grass. It looked fun, but I found it too terrifying to ever attempt.
Eventually, and probably at the behest of some parent(s), the town took down the concrete basin, leaving just a grassy hill. In recent years, they have done more to make it into a park, cutting a more defined path through the field, planting some trees and adding a few benches. It is in this new, more park-like, version that I am now standing, in 2008, in a purple dinosaur costume.
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Your first question is probably, why is there something instead of nothing? What is the meaning of our existence? I apologize but I cannot answer that, you have to figure that out on your own. I also apologize for how cheap a joke I just made. Now, your next question might be why I am in a park dressed like a dinosaur, and I can definitely answer you[2]. In 2008, my brother and his friends would put together and compete in scavenger hunts. They were planning one and I, bored and with a lot of free time after recently getting out of a long term relationship, decided to participate as one of the clues. After shooting ideas back and forth, we somehow came up with the idea of having the opposing team deliver an “offering to the King of the Dinosaurs atop his hill.”[3] This translated into standing around a public park, dressed as a dinosaur at 10pm on a Saturday night in July. It was, obviously, a logical result of all the decisions I had made in my then 24 years of existence.[4]
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My initial assumption was that I would be the only one in the small park at 10pm. This made me feel slightly less vulnerable; at least no one would see the tail I now possessed. In retrospect, I am not entirely sure how I knew when to show up or if the teams were following a strict schedule. It could have been a guess on my part and I may have set myself up to sit on that hill for some time. The weather was nice, so this would not be too bad, but I did not want to scare anyone walking through the park that night. The last thing I needed was to be arrested as a suspicious reptile. I don’t think the police would appreciate the fact that I was not just any dinosaur, but the King of the Dinosaurs.
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While I am waiting for the participants to show up, I thought back to another moment in that small park. Behind the hill is a patch of woods. Since this is in Snyder, it was not really anything substantial but a patch of trees with a trail running through from one side of the hill to the other. Now when I was 11, for whatever reason, I found myself running through the trail and I came upon a set of discarded furniture, arranged to look like a room in the middle of the trees. There was something inherently spooky about the whole thing and I remember quickly dashing out of the woods. I don’t really remember ever seeing anything like that again.
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13 years later and I was probably spooking someone else. A random of assortment of dog walkers passed through the park every few minutes. I was not really prepared for this (the park was supposed to be empty, who is out this late in Snyder?!) and I sheepishly milled around avoiding eye contact with each new passer by. I was, for whatever reason, trying to maintain an air of guilt or at least awareness that this was very weird. Hopefully, by doing this, I signaled I was not normally a person to wander parks in costume. I paced the area for 15 minutes, debating on where to stand. The clue said I would be on the top of the hill but I was concerned no one would see me; however, I felt like just staying at the foot of the hill would be strangely lacking in the desired dramatic effect[1]. As time went on, the absurdity of the whole thing became increasingly apparent (somehow not as bad initially) and I began to wonder what I was doing and why I was spending my Saturday in Snyder, on a hill, in a dinosaur costume.
Luckily, the team showed up just when I was beginning to become melodramatic about the whole thing. They immediately asked who I was and how I ended up doing this. I tried my best to explain why but really could only stammer out some awkward half-explanation. They gave me my prize, leaving me with a bowl I had to wash and somehow return to whoevers mom it belonged to. The sundae…was awful. Absolutely awful. No idea what was it in or why it was so bad, but I clearly remember how terrible it was. I took off the costume and walked to my car.
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This takes place weeks before I began to call the city my home and in a way is the last of the strange solitary adventures I had before moving to West Ferry in 2008. It stands, geographically, on the edge of Buffalo and, in my life, on the edge of two very distinct periods of my twenties. A few weeks later, on one of the last nights I would sleep in my parents’ house (I found an apartment on West Ferry and was moving at the end of the month), I walked back to the park in normal clothing. It was an empty, friendless Saturday, one of the many I had back then. I sat, no longer having a tail, on a bench, a little further from the hill and looked up at the few stars shining through the light polluted sky. Sitting there, I reviewed how much had changed that summer and how much everything would continue to change once I moved. Sitting in silence, in a small park in Snyder, the King of the Dinosaurs sat and wondered what was next.
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[1] At some point, I stopped calling the 33 the Kensington Expressway. I am not entirely sure why it was called that in the first place. At no point does the 33 intersect with Kensington. I might be wrong though, I am often wrong about these types of things.
[2] I have some guesses on your weightier question, but I would need some more space to flesh out a full and complete meaning of life.
[3] My brother now claims that this was all his idea and I just went along with it. However, I still claim this was more or less my idea.
[4] Since the events of this story, I have found myself in equally bizarre places based upon my continued series of life choices, but none in such a ridiculous getup. Ok, I wore a fedora a few times but we all make mistakes.
Impractical Cartography 