City Living: No Condo Needed

When Val came home from work Sunday, she was tired but energetic, and when I got home from grocery shopping a few minutes later, she said she wanted to go take photographs of a few things she had planned to shoot for a while. I put the last load of laundry in the dryer, saddled up Walker Evans and off we went.
Our first stop was to be the ship tied up at the Cargill grain elevator (which was planned/hoped to be turned into a floating casino at one time); as you may know, our timing was awful, because either Saturday or early Sunday, the ship was moved. Val was pissed, and after she took a few photos of the Lackawanna windmills, we headed back to Buffalo for some other destinations.
On our way back, Val suggested we take the Tifft Street/U.S. Coast Guard base exit to take photos of another grain elevator. After going around once and up to the Coast Guard base gates, we went around and got back on the exit ramp, which went past some thick woods that may be part of the Tifft Nature Preserve. Because where we hit the ramp was a bit forward of one building, I drove in reverse to go back.
After about 50 feet of this, Val and I watched as about an eighth-mile in front of us, first one, then two, then three young dear came out of the forest and fields and came onto the roadway. They tentatively looked all around as they slowly proceeded across the road, and I put the car's gears into drive and crept toward them. While they seemed to see the car, they did not react to us; but when an 18-wheel truck drove over them on the Skyway, they all reacted. The young deer in the lead bounded once to fully cross the street, bounded once again away from us and then with two more mighty bounds, made it back across the street and into the fields; he or she was closely followed by the other two, who combined bounding with scrambling.
We continued to slowly drive up to the point we saw the deer go back into the woods/fields; I wondered out loud if the mother deer was nearby. As we came up to a tree, we saw an opening and, all of a sudden, there was the mother deer, staring at us for a few seconds before she turned around and walked into the heavier tree growth. For the next few minutes, we slowly drove the car to the end of the forested area, and then in reverse we drove back, first seeing two and then all three young deer for a moment, then all three moving back and to our right. We went back a bit further, and through a tunnel-like opening of trampled high grass, the mother deer was there, and we stopped so Val could get some better photos.
All this time, Walker Evans was in a very excited state, but except for one or two whines, he was silent save for his copious sniffing; it was obvious that Walker Evans smelled the deer, and you could also tell that the mother deer smelled Walker Evans, too, and she did not take her eyes off of us for minutes on end.
Eventually, with the time nearing 8 p.m. and neither Val nor I having eaten dinner, and the deer and her offspring seeming to get bored with us, we left to take one more series of photos, of the demolition and construction across from City Hall near the Elmwood/Niagara intersection. This went off without as much excitement.