Ann’s Falls Revisited

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For months, this minor cataract,  obscured above the daily loop trail by Rhododendrons, was silent.

But yesterday, encouraged by the rumble of rushing water (and with full knowledge of how very much of it has fallen on this hillside over the past week) we bushwacked our way up-slope through a “laurel hell” to Ann’s Falls for the first time in a long while.

In such places where flowing water has cut through the thin soil to the very bone of this place, I try to imagine what you would see, standing in the middle of our pasture, if only those bare bones were visible.

Take away what little soil there is on these impossibly-steep spines of rock. Remove the ground cover of mosses, grasses, sedges and annual flowering things. Peel away under-story spicebush, witch hazel, brambles, vines. Finally, throw back the blanket over-story second-growth deciduous cove hardwood forest to leave only the core of a  mountain. Strip our ridges of their living skin, down to the bare essential inorganic skeleton of bedrock as far as the eye can see.

Look around you. Water has made this place–its shape and slope, its soil and those of us, green and otherwise, that depend on it.

It comes in excess in the flood. It comes not at all in the drought.

That it comes at all, and that it is “just right” so much of the time and keeps its place in rivers and rock, oceans and lakes and living cells–that is a cosmic wonder. There’s no place like home on the Water Planet.