奥拉AURA

有很多人来自布法罗，主要是因为他们中的很多人都离开了。那是铁锈地带。我好久没去那儿了。西内可能比我更了解现在那里的情况，比如电池工厂就在伯利恒钢铁公司曾经的一小块地方。我们过去常常把车窗摇起来，因为那里的空气几英里外都散发着恶臭。那时我还是个孩子，很难理解为什么人们住在那里，但是……当时我们正要去拉什福德湖过独立日。我听说拉克万纳附近的伊利湖有很多风车，那里曾经是钢铁厂。与我记忆中大船在那里卸载铁矿石的情景完全不同。我记得的最后一件事是在某个节日，那里主街上的很多商店都停业了。市中心的一家电影院，除了门面什么都没有留下来。那时我已经是一个十几岁的少年了，这让我怀疑他们是否为了主街的感觉而保留下来一些，以帮助剩下的商家。总之，那是在六七十年代，很多人为了躲避搬过来的黑人而搬到郊区去了。嗯，你总得找个地方住，我希望他们喜欢我们的社区。它在主街的右边，当我在谷歌的地图上看到它时，一切看起来都那么熟悉，除了我们老房子的一个排水沟垂下来了。事情是这样的:如果你不是伴随着这些东西长大的，你就不会一直这样做下去。我看了一下最近的统计数据，人们还没有放弃离开，也就是说，自从我离开后，这个城市的人口一直在减少，尽管它所在的伊利县的人口多年来一直在增长。所以我想他们要么搬到佛罗里达或其它一些地方去了，要么搬到郊区去了。
There are a lot of people from Buffalo, mostly because a lot of them left. Rust belt. I haven’t been there in ages. Sine probably knows more about the way it is now than I do, like the battery factory that’s on a little tiny bit of where Bethlehem Steel used to be. We used to roll up the windows in the car because the air around there stunk for miles. I was just a kid then and it was hard to understand why people lived around there, but . . . . That was just when we passed by to go to Rushford Lake for Fourth of July. I hear there are a bunch of windmills in Lake Erie near Lackawanna where the steel plant was. Quite a different scene than I remember with big boats unloading iron ore there. The last thing I remember was some festival on Main Street where so many stores were abandoned. A downtown movie theater where there was nothing left but the front of it. By then I was a teenager, and it made me wonder if they’d had to leave it up to preserve some sense of Main Street to help the remaining merchants. Anyway, that was after a lot of people had moved to the suburbs in the 60’s and 70’s, getting away from the blacks who were moving in. Well, you’ve got to live somewhere, and I hope they’re enjoying our neighborhood. It was on the right side of Main Street, and when I saw it on google maps, things looked pretty familiar, except one of the gutters on our old house was hanging down. That’s the thing: If you haven’t grown up with that kind of stuff you don’t get into keeping it up. I looked at recent stats to round out this note, and people haven’t quit leaving yet, which is to say the population of the city has been decreasing ever since I left, though the population of Erie County that it’s in has been increasing for years. So I guess if they don’t move to Florida or wherever, they’re still going to the suburbs.