The Waterfall

I do not remember my first trip to the Waterfall. Looking back now, through the blurry window of reflection each visit has melded together into a single eternally elusive composite of a blissful, memory.

Most trips started the same.

Climbing into the old aluminum boat with the big black motor at the rear, my childhood mind anxious and barely contained. Speeding our way along the coast, past the various coves and rocky outcropped harbors, until we rounded that last curve, that last bend, and the train-track bridge came into view in the distance.

Pulling into the cove, past the sunken boxcar way down at the bottom of the bay where giant fish swam in the dark with big lidless eyes through its murky interiors. Cutting the motor, anxious and coasting the last few feet to the sandy shore. Hopping out over the sides of the boat into the chilly knee-deep waters, the grown-up who ferried us pulling the boat ashore as we kids ran up the beach, heading straight for the trail through the woods hop-skipping over the trinkling moutain water stream. On the beach there you could hear the faint roar of falls ahead, a faint sound that to us was a siren call to our pubescent ears.

Racing up the path, through the woods, jockeying to be the first one. Heedless of the adult at our backs imploring us to slow down and wait up- as we each wanted to be first.

There, up ahead, rounding the last bend, the roar deafening now, was the Waterfall. As I think back, it was a large fall only to our young bodies but to us, it was big as life, loud, dangerous and all-consuming. And we ran straight for it.

Dashing the last few steps, over the rocks and cogs that marked the borders of the small pool where the falls emptied into. The size of the fall was small enough so that only one of us kids could stand or sit beneath her cascading fingertips. Tilting our head back and losing ourselves to the roar of the water in our ears, laughing, pushing and pulling each other; taking turns was an idea we had abandoned on the beach.

But even if we were not submerged in the blissful rushing of the falls, where the only thoughts one had were the sensations of happiness, the coolness of the water and the serenity of meer being, the others found more wonders above, where ever higher an even larger, better and off-limits waterfall fell from the brownish train-track bridge. But, in our youth we were content, if only because the young too are innately aware of the dangers life has to offer, laughing within our child-sized waterfall.

For the bridge above that seemed so far off from below had given up her secrets to us as well on more than on occassion. When, in our invincible childhood bravado, we'd crossed her tracks. Listening, our ears to the rails for the tell-tale hum of an approaching train, our youthtful invincibilities had been tested by the dares to cross that bridge, whose sides were a drop to our little waterfall below, and whose trains bore down from around blind curves as quickly as our childhood abandon.

And so, beneath those danger-filled tracks, and past the murky boxcar sentinels, up the cold sand beach and through the forested path we always found simple, childhood happiness on those sunny, summery days- basking in the roar of our little Waterfall.