When you walk down to Canyon Falls
on the Sturgeon River off Highway 41 just south of Alberta, you walk down the temperature curve. You walk down to coolness and ferns.
You wonder if what you hear is the sound of distant water falls, of wind in the trees, or of the creek beside you. It seems to be water talking to rock in the creek where I cross a bridge on the path. Yet, farther on, the sound clearly belongs to the trees.
The path here is graveled where the ground is firm. Where there is not firm ground, there is wooden walkway two and a half inches thick, eight inches wide, four foot long.
Farther on, the river runs its rapids. I can step out onto rocks and watch the river do its business. The water is dark with tannin.
The river falls in steps. It's not a grand rush all at once, but a drop of a foot here, then a couple feet. Fifty yards farther, water runs off a ledge or table. The ledge is so sharp and straight as to seem man-made. But no - this rock breaks in sharp, straight pieces, large ones. Another stream comes in along the other bank. Where the waters meet, they discuss their differences for a bit, then get along.
Forty yards on, another drop, V-shaped. The water is two or three feet closer to sea-level.
I get back to the trail and move on. Here the trees have made friends with the rocks. I hear another rush of rapids. The sound of water and rock. Or is that me, talking to myself? Alongside the trail there's a boulder big as a Buick. Even back from the river's edge, a little cooling breeze.
Water falls over rock and water and rock, falls another few feet towards sea level, falls off another small table in sunlight. The sheen of the water, the shimmer and shine. The water cannot collect itself before it has to fall again, two feet more. You feel yourself being pulled downriver by the rush of the water, its urgency. The sound of the rapids grabs you and wants to take you along.
Where the river narrows, the sloosh and rush of another drop. The water turns back on itself momentarily, as if heading back upstream. What will be is inevitable, however, and it moves on. I am standing on a quarter-acre slab of rock just a foot from the water. Perhaps "quarter-acre" is a bit of an exaggeration, but they've got rock here, that's what I'm trying to say.
As it approaches the falls, the water looks like a curtain in the breeze - ruffled, hesitant. From this vantage, it looks so gentle.
I move on and see the falls from the other angle. The water drops fifteen or twenty feet. It has a kind of terrible power, raw and unforgiving. It looks gilded as it comes over the lip of the falls, then spun and beaten and foamed and fiercen'd heading towards the thirty-foot rock wall across the way. Between here and there - the roar. Cry of the river's pain. Beneath the sound of it, a deep bass note, like the earth's moan. Oh, what a world we inhabit!
There is another drop of a few feet at the narrow point ahead. The water takes itself serious there. It pushes on.
"Trail Ends," the sign says. The water pushes on.
Some might say, "If you've seen one water fall, you've seen them all." I might say, "If you've seen one water fall, you ain't seen nothing yet." The earth is a modest woman, keeps her clothes on, suggests more by its absence.
Oh, the tumble and roar of the falls could tell us more if we lived with it through all its seasons and moods. For now, I listen to the variation in pitch - half a pitch in the high range where the water sings; nearly a full pitch in the bass notes, BOOM boom BOOM boom, rhythmic, like a bluegrass bassist keeping time to a song you can't hear the words to.
The river doesn't say "Run away." It says "Embrace me."
I enjoy the spray of sound. I am in no hurry to go away.
*
It's never as far back as it is coming in. Why is that? It happens even when we know it.
Now I can hear the distinct notes - the wind in the trees, the babble of brook, the roar of the falls. Here, near the bridge again, I can hear each distinctly. I have gained a certain knowledge.
Heading back up the trail I again cross what looks like an old logging road. Then I remember - this is the snowmobile trail I rode with Tom Larson last February when he groomed it. Yes, we crossed the trail to the falls here, just before the snowmobile trail passes beneath Highway 41.
*
"You cannot take this with you," the river says. "All you can take is a tinny reproduction in words. Words, ha! They are insufficient to the meaning of water and rock.
*
Duh! The reason they call it Prison Camp Road is that there's been a prison camp along it. It is no longer used to house prisoners, yet the tall fence around it is still topped with razor wire. I should buy the camp and turn it into a poets' retreat. Poets would understand the razor wire.
*
THAT'S how they get the logs on those log trucks to look as if they have been loaded with such care! I see a fellow atop his load, sawing the logs to an even length along the driver's side.
If my wife were with me, I suppose she'd say "I knew they did that." Well, I didn't know. She understands the world far better than I do. I think when poets like me are born, they're not given the same program that everyone else gets. We don't get a program coming in; we don't get a score card; hell, they don't even tell us what the game is.
One of the best evocations of a waterfall I've ever read. (I also identified with the last paragraph.)
Posted by: dave | September 22, 2004 at 06:05 PM
Thanks, Dave. I never really know what's in my journals until I type a section up and throw it to the light of day. Yes, this one is true to that waterfall; and that paragraph about being a poet is true to our experience, eh?
Posted by: Tom Montag | September 23, 2004 at 04:49 AM