Wednesday, June 25, 2025

A Really Big Waterfalls

Here we are on Chapter 5 of my Journal of our Journeys. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the really big waterfall from that trip. This snapshot of my favorite falls, O-Kun-de-Kun, will have to do.  

The first big trip we took in the new camper was to New York State. We visited my brother Tom, who was stationed as an MP at West Point, and then we went to see Niagara Falls. It was June 1967. I never realized until many years later how close this journey took us to New York City.

As a kid, I was wildly in love with the Trixie Beldon mystery series. I thought the coolest thing would be to live where the Beldons, Wheelers, and all their friends lived in the Hudson Valley north of the Big Apple. I never knew that I had actually been through the area where my childhood fictitious heroine lived. I’m sure this information would have freaked me out when I was twelve and reading about another girl’s adventures. Now, I’m just amazed that I was that geographically challenged. Didn’t my parents ever show me an atlas?

Anyway, the trip took us through Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. I remember next to nothing of West Point and absolutely nothing of my brother’s role there. He was 21; I was just a kid, a punk, not even in kindergarten.

A lifetime later, when I mentioned it to my husband, he was impressed that my brother had gone to West Point. I had never thought much about it. So what? Tom was at the prestigious military academy. As a kid, I didn’t know what West Point was and never thought more about it.

Well, no, he wasn’t a cadet there. Heavens, no. He’d been sent to Fort Bragg for basic training and then to the Dominican Republic to drive around important officers and deliver the payroll. From there, he worked for the military police on the West Point campus.

But I knew none of that at the time.

I do remember Niagara Falls, though. I can still hear the thunder of millions of gallons of water rushing over the edge of rock eons old. The ground underfoot shook from the power of it. I can see the lights they turned on at night, illuminating the falls in a rainbow of color.

Dad took my sister Pat on a trip under the falls; I was too little to go. The story of my life was being left behind with Mom while Pat did something cool with Dad. Pat was all excited about it, but she never admitted until 20 years later that it had scared the wits out of her.

We returned via Canada, crossing into Ontario at Niagara Falls and coming back through Michigan and its Upper Peninsula.

It became a quest during the 1980s and 1990s for my sisters and me to visit every waterfall within a two-hundred-mile radius of where we lived. Even the tiniest trickle of water tumbling downstream was a fascination and a photo op. The smaller waterfalls were usually the better ones, with fewer people, often no people, just lots of peace and stillness, except for the hypnotic sound of water. If we had to climb a treacherous trail or slide down a slippery slope to get to that waterfall, all the better. We were always game.

Niagara Falls was certainly the biggest waterfall I’ve ever seen, but would I return there? With all the congestion and commercialism? I will take a ten-foot waterfall in the woods in the middle of nowhere. But the passion of it all may have begun for me at that New York state tourist trap.

No comments: