“There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
This is a well-worn quote from Wendell Berry, and I am contemplating it after a week at Niagara Falls for our SDI annual conference. The first thing I did upon arrival was to run down to see the Falls. They are amazing; 75000 gallons of water per second pouring over. The Niagara River is huge – very wide, but not very long (36 miles connecting Lake Erie to Lake Ontario). It is a wonder. And, it is surrounded by casinos, souvenir shops, and cheap eats. The tour boats take tourists right up to the Falls (a couple hundred at a time decked out in disposable plastic ponchos – I presume thrown in a landfill for the next thousand years just to keep one from getting a little damp). At night, giant colored LED lights fill the area, and a fireworks show booms at 10pm – every. damn. night. 365 days a year. Tourists fill the area, commingling all kinds of colognes and graphic t-shirts. It appears nobody actually lives there – other than the tourist areas it’s a ghost town – parking lots, scattered buildings, and an occasional old church.
What a strange place! I guess this is known as culture shock. I remember seeing the Ken Burns National Parks documentary, highlighting what happened at Niagara Falls. When advocates began working with Congress on establishing a National Park system, they pointed to this place, basically saying “Yeah we fucked that one up. Let’s maybe not do that again.”
I don’t think of Niagara Falls as desecrated, exactly. And I understand that wilderness is essentially a myth and a construct in our age. But it’s a bit like taking a lion out of his habitat, and putting him in a circus. Degraded. Tamed but not tame. The song ‘She’s a River’ by Simple Minds keeps playing through my heart, “The voice of Mother Nature says all things must pass, nothing here can remain.” I suppose a part of me looks forward to the vengeance She will enact on us for the harm we do. Hopefully (and I mean that word very strongly), a new collective humility and respect will emerge from what remains.
Reverence.
While there, I wrote a poem called Same Water. I recorded a reading of it after coming back from a run so I’m a bit disheveled, but inspiration struck so I went for it.
Same water
All the tourists flitter
to the Falls
like moths to a bulb
but it’s the same water, everywhere.
75,000 gallons per second
over the edge
or a quarter mile upriver
Same water.
You’re all down there
but I am here
sitting on a park bench
next to the same water.
From Erie on to Ontario,
north-eastward to Saint Lawrence
out to the North Atlantic
Same water.
Tomorrow the forecast is for rain.
If I make it to then
I’ll be breathing
and flowing
with the Same Water.