We Play In Graveyards — Valhalla Hikes

The memory feels vague nowadays. I remember hiking down to Rainbow Falls through the old access trail to watch the flood. The only thing I liked more than swimming in the rivers on hot Summer days was waiting for the storms to come in so the water would swell and rise. We had so much rain that Turtleback Falls, which normally stands about twelve feet high, completely disappeared in murky bubbling whitewater. The rock I used to jump off of into the pool was now underwater itself, and the power that came with the water crashing into the mountainside would make it roar so powerfully the gentleman who was also down by the river couldn’t hear me yell if I tried.

We crossed paths once, but I didn’t try to speak to him. Whatever internal force drew me to watching the floods was also in him. We stood in awe of the sheer power of the world around us, and so I left him to appreciate it on his own terms and I on mine. I would walk down to the few rocks that still stood above the river, knowing very well that if I let so much as a few toes drag in that water it would be strong enough to grab me and catapult me off the ‘hundred-and-fifty foot ledge by Rainbow Falls. I wouldn’t even have enough time to realize I was dying before I was dead. I would be thrown into the boulder-choked river below where the waters would pound me against earth until I resembled not a boy but some crude rendition of what a boy used to be. My legs would likely get stuck in the rocks as I plummetted with such momentum that my bones would snap instantaneously. If I wasn’t yet unconscious, though I would pray to be, my torso would then get chucked back and forth between cold, black shards of fractured boulders that would impale and beat me in equal measure. I wouldn’t survive the beatings, but the river would certainly take the extra precaution of drowning me just in case I hadn’t yet learned my place in her world. I wouldn’t have so much as a moment to scream for help before I was swept away, not that my fellow flumophile would’ve heard me over the flood anyway.

I didn’t fall in, however. My childhood curiosities would be satiated by skipping rocks against the wakes which resembled the comb of some magnanimous white chicken and waiting for trees or large boulders to fall into the flood so I could watch them launch off the top of Rainbow Falls. They would slide into the river and fly off the cliff with the force of a school bus crashing into a wall. The splash would rise some twenty feet into the air with the faintest thud that I could barely make out over the cry of the river. Heavy rains always weakened the trees’ root systems because the ground would soften and they would lose the strong base they had to brace themselves against when the winds came roaring through. Those were just things you knew growing up here, and I was adamant about investigating the root-wads of every tree I’d stand under out of concern it may have fallen on me.

The mighty waters lifted stones the size of cars as if they weighed nothing and would hurl them over the cliff’s edge for my entertainment. Rocks I would jump across during normal times when the river was down were now being scattered into oblivion and the whole locale was reshaped in a new image. Truly, the only thing you can count on to remain at Turtleback Falls was the water itself and the large boulder we would always jump off of, though I imagine his day to swim downstream will come too. That was the fun thing about being somewhere so powerful. As I grew and changed so did the river itself, and some years I more enjoyed where the fallen trees had landed than others. Sometimes they made amazing bridges for me to walk or climb across and sometimes they became snags entrenched in the river. They were traps waiting for an unassuming visitor to float into its grasp where it would yank them under the water and hold them there if it could.

Nope. I suppose that day wasn’t my time to die. Maybe I had gotten really good at reading the river or maybe my explorations near the floods only appeared dangerous to the uninformed eye. While I very well may have slipped and slid down the bank into the water’s grasp, I always had plans for the limbs I would reach for or the rock I would steer myself into before I reached the water’s edge. I always planned where I would walk to and where I could comfortably watch the floods in peace. Perhaps I’ve just gotten lucky too many times. Either way, two of us were down by the river, but only one of us went home that night.

It wasn’t my day to die, but it was his. The river claimed him as her own. A fee he paid to witness her in all her glory.

Truly, we play in graveyards.