Virgin Falls

Virgin Falls
Originally uploaded by FreeManWalking

     He bid them to have a good time and walked on up to the falls. Spectacular for their uniqueness of seemingly having no beginning and no end, he marveled at the sheet of water that fell, still impressive despite the reduced rain of late June. Humid Tennessee wrapped her green loving arms around the falling water, embracing the slippery wet rocks with algae and liverwort, Virginia and trumpet creepers, and a myriad of weeds (including the showy but poisonous Indian pink) and grasses under the great canopy of hemlocks and poplar. He sensed he was seeing the falls at their peak of beauty. In the coming weeks the water table would drop the falls to half of what flashed before him now. The vegetation would dry and shrink, and in the coming years all these hemlocks would die off under the slow but relentless attack of the tiny wooly adelgid which had already killed most of these grand, giant evergreens in the mountains of North Carolina. This creeping, invasive death was heading this way and in time all these wonderful trees would be 100-foot tall dead snags. But for today the adelgid wasn’t here and the majestic hemlocks lent a Grimm’s fairytale aspect to the wilderness around him.

     Walking across slippery rocks he took pictures of the falls at different angles. His dog jumped across the old fallen rocks of long ago, threading her way down to a small gushing channel of water where she licked up her fill of cold refreshment before the water stealthily sank over any of numerous rocks to fall into an unseen cavern below. He walked all the way around the falls, eventually standing behind them to look out on the curtain veiled world at the little amphitheater nature had patiently carved in this remote spot.

       Looking through a waterfall is like Alice peering into the looking glass: the refraction from the mists and droplets of water falling from a great height can give the dreamer a peek into the world as they sometimes imagine it, a world of reveries, with no hard edges and an occasional rainbow. That’s all he was looking for in Nature, a chance to see the life he could live. Clean and pure, unpolluted and unadulterated by all the distractions and self-defeating urges that accompany those distractions. Looking through the waterfall was far removed from the world he saw every night in the dead, floating smoke of barrooms and the smudged tint of stained vision that comes from looking at the world through brown beer bottles.