On going where you’re not supposed to

transcribed from my notebook on May 3, 2024

all these pics were taken by me this time, on my dad’s old camera (a Canon Rebel G with Portra 400), as all things should be

There’s a scene near the end of North By Northwest, a personal favorite of the Hitchcock pantheon, that scares me to death: Eve Saint Marie and Cary Grant are trying to rappel down the faces of Mount Rushmore free hand, with no support or line but the will to live and the will to finally escape and the will to win. It’s one of those scenes that causes me to suspend my disbelief, because there’s a large part of me that’s sure that nobody would be able to survive navigating those crevices and faults, especially while suited goons bare down your neck. A literal cliffhanger would have been a shitty way to end a movie, and Hitchcock agreed with me, but the ending (which results in the realization of love and trust dominating all other forces once again) is not the thing I care about at this moment. 

It’s the very act of seeing a last resort, a mountainside as your slimmest chance at surviving, yet it’s your only solace, and thinking, “Well, here we go.” When I think of that scene, I like to picture myself already at the bottom of the rock structure, peering up to glimpse at the ant-sized version of my compatriots, glad to be on the ground with my two feet, while somehow also thinking, “I wish I could do that.” Not to be hunted with my life on the line, but to stare imminent and almost certain death in the face and thrust yourself into its arms. To not only think, “Here goes nothing,” but to decide that there’s nothing else to do but feel the height of freedom in search of a last grasp of it. A stupidity and bravery that I can only admire from afar. 

Being cautious in childhood had its merits, sure. For a long time, my “fun fact” to others was that I had never broken a bone (I guess that isn’t very fun). While my friends were racking up casts and crutches from throwing themselves across creeks and into caves and over cars, my feet seemed to be firmly magnetized to the ground. Well, maybe that’s not fair. But I was adept at minimizing the opportunities for cataclysmic bodily harm. I ran hard, played hard, and fought hard, but when it came time to fall, I fell with grace and reduced velocity, like a trained stuntman who had perfected the art of crashing for years. It was if there was an invisible forcefield that slowed my body before the moment of impact, as if the existential question of “What happens next?” extended to the five minutes after my body hit the pavement. Pain, it turns out, is an effective teacher. Or guiding hand. Or a reminder that the endless possibilities of a moment involve a hell of a lot of heartbreak, more than one person could be able to handle. 

I feel as though yellow is a more effective stopper than red. Environmental and evolutionary proof be damned. Every time I’ve seen a yellow sign, of any type, I’ve stopped to look. And it breaks through the haze and malaise in an instant. Red only seems to add to the confusion of an environment, making a moment scan more so like a bad dream than a foreboding sign. So, the sign at the edge of the waterfall was rightfully yellow, and it did its job at informing people of the impending doom that lay feet away. I guess it didn’t stop people from filing towards the edge. It depends on the person’s capacity to tempt fate, and how they feel about the color yellow, it seems. 

It seems as though it’s time to reveal another one of my quirks, maybe it’s more of a fear. It’s of heights. You know when people say, “Oh, no. I’m scared of falling.” That feels like a total lie. Because I’m scared of it all. I won’t reveal how long it took me to conquer rollercoasters, not because I’m ashamed, but because I don’t believe I will find brotherhood in this particular fraternity. 

But in this moment I find myself in, I think I could find it. The top of a waterfall really does feel like the end of the Earth. I can’t blame the ancestors for the myths that had millions of gallons of water towering into the abyss with no end in sight. Even though I know what a waterfall is, and how it acts, I can’t help but give into some sort of base fear and wonder as I approach the summit. It sort of feels like an actual tipping point, where the scales falling one way or the other is a true difference between life and death. But when I look around, it kind of feels as though people know the true mortality of the moment because the small yellow sign said that there have been deaths here before. I do think that the death at the edge of a waterfall is the result of a choice, which is somewhat comforting to the randomness of the world. (There’s a part of me that believes that this would be a perfect place to go -- with the sound of rushing water interrupting the quietness of the world, there would be few final sounds more suited to fill your eardrums for the final time. It’s intoxicating, watching the murky stream rush past the reddish sandstone with perpetual force. You struggle to find a section of rock dry and close enough to let you feel the water’s power with submerging yourself underneath.) You’ve brought yourself to the brink of finality, where one craves a proximity to the freedom of the very end, chasing that feeling of suspended weightlessness at its highest intensity, to imagine what it’s like to run straight off the edge without the fear of what awaits at the bottom. You’ve reached the moment before something magical, let the rest sort itself out. And I can see others agree, getting as close to the cliff of the waterfall as their evolutionary sensibilities can handle, letting their feet hang over the edge of the Earth. Yellow sign be damned.

That damned yellow sign was at the bottom of the waterfall, as well. If you weren’t a believer at the summit, then I think that your mind could be changed once you’ve reached the end. It wouldn’t be too late, either. Part of my interest in Joan Didion’s writing deals with her hyperfixations on the man-made actions and efforts to wield the Earth’s greatest natural resource. Her earnest care for dams, levees, and canals that direct and redirect water across vast distances is ripe with wonder and intellectual desire at a microscopic level. Her explanations of the processes are laid out with such precision and clarity that a child could even understand how humans have worked to harness water for their own gain. But each time I come into close contact with the power of water in the wild, out in the open, I have the sneaking suspicion that the liquid is just letting us believe that we’re in control for a moment, to maintain the illusion of choice at the feet of an all-powerful force. I can tell by the way people flock to the bottom, to stand in the shadow of the wall, to sink their hands and feet in the frigid pool collecting in the oval, to put their ears at the source of the crashing sound emanating from nature taking its course. The towering walls of rock have been carved out by eons of wind and rock, shaping each ledge into a Socratic seminar, where the only goal is to witness to the final moments of a million-year journey, no matter the danger. Even at the bottom, I watched people scale the rock formation, hoping to get a chance to reach out and interrupt the water’s path with their hands, just for a brief moment, or let the mist of the splash back coat their visages, craving a literal taste under the overcast skies. 

I could watch people try to get closer under those overcast skies for hours. I never tire of writing about love, or witnessing its tenderness in action. And in watching people venture where they’re not supposed to go, dare to inch a tad closer to the denouement of a water molecule’s journey as part of a river, to feel the power of the end of their skin, I see love surviving in real time. As people scale the face of the cavern, crawling and placing their hands and feet in the exact crevice needed to keep from careening into the drink, I see that they’re rarely alone. They’re in pairs, sometimes trios, maybe even groups of four, five, or fifteen -- but, rarely alone. There’s always someone next to them, ensuring that if they sleep, there’s a loving hand to grab their wrist. That if they are unsure about their next step, they have a guiding voice to dissuade their indecision, to give them the confidence to take one more step upward. That if their nerves feel them when it comes time to take that leap, when the fear of falling overrides their own belief, that there is another to remind them that it’s just a fall, and that they will be there to pick them back up. It’s lovely to see someone pushed to inch closer to their dream of touching the cascading wall of water by someone who just wants to see their happiness grow. Rarely do people go where they’re not supposed to alone. Because it takes the love of someone else to make you believe that it will be OK, even if you feel it in your bones that it won’t be. It’s how I imagine that Cary Grant and Eve Saint Marie felt, facing impending doom on the faces of Mount Rushmore. I feel the same from the base of the waterfall, knowing that I’m seeing love and joy survive against insurmountable odds, even though it’s on a much smaller scale, admittedly. It has to happen somewhere, though.