Falls

“I was disappointed in Niagara--most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.”

-- Oscar Wilde

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Was not disappointed in Niagara. Took a total of five photos for foreigners, all of them pointing excited at the picture-taking button. One man wanted it zoomed in and I cranked the nozzle of the lens (don't know the technical term) and retook it and he liked it and thanked me.

Took a total of 287 pictures for myself, and forty-two videos. Few of them contain people. Mostly it's the falls themselves, the water falling in unending rushes like heavy eternal curtains that rumble the earth rather than float in the breeze.

They say the falls recede a half-inch every year, and that 20,000 years ago it was several hundred feet downstream. In 1969 the US Army diverted the river to the Canadian side because the "racks" beneath the "wooter" were eroded and unstable. They literally dried up Niagara. I got the story from a man who has walked the park and loved the falls his whole life, a funny thin old man with a wispy white combover who was trying to explain to an Arabic family what a "refreshment shanty" was and why they would have built some on the cliff.

Another cool old guy from the trip: A crisply bearded sage stood beside me on the boat and wind blew our blue ponchos and he stared hard into the wind with squinted eyelids and looked like a fisherman brazen, defiant, against an ocean gale. He gripped the railing with hands that have known water. His hair blew back from his rough face, but it did not fly and his beard was like the crest of a wave frozen in time.

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The first woman to go over the falls in a barrel did so for fame and fortune. She ended up fairly famous, but died poor: To avoid starving, she had to sell the barrel on the streets of New York. I don't remember her name. She was wickedly mad when they sawed her out of the wooden hovel, mumbling things and chattering with hypothermia, and she had a bruise on her forehead.

I'm sort of at a loss, too, after seeing this wonder of the world, but not for words. After all, I'm writing right now. I feel at a loss for something else. Romantic idyllic idealization, perhaps, or the greedy traveler's awe.

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Two last things that struck me.

One: They have black squirrels in Niagara Falls, of the same ilk as southern Michigan. There was a wooden plaque that explained their color and intimidating demeanor.

Two: On one of the nature trails lining the river, I saw a three-foot-tall dandelion. The stem no thicker than a pencil, it had surpassed grass and an iron rail beside the path. Biggest fucking dandelion I've ever seen, man.