Ashley is Canadian, a teacher, and the first person I would describe as a genuine friend made through the specific mechanism of travelling: we met in the Philippines in 2011, spent a week and a half travelling together through Batangas and Boracay, and had kept in intermittent contact across the years and countries that followed. When she sent a message suggesting she come to Niagara Falls with me, the answer was immediate. She arrived at the car hire place with coffee and breakfast, which is the kind of friend she is.
Niagara Falls is the collective name for three waterfalls at the international border between the United States and Canada, of which the Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side is by far the largest, carrying roughly ninety percent of the water that flows from Lake Erie over the escarpment into the gorge below. The falls have been dropping at this rate for roughly twelve thousand years, since the glacial retreat that created the Great Lakes system, and the erosion of the underlying shale has been moving the lip of the falls upstream at roughly one metre per year, a process that will eventually result, in roughly fifty thousand years, in the complete erosion of the escarpment and the drainage of the lakes, though the various engineering interventions of the twentieth century have reduced the erosion rate considerably. The facts about Niagara are facts about water in very large quantities doing what water does over geological time, which is a category of fact that is difficult to make feel vivid.
My first view of the falls, at the railing of the overlook closest to the car park, produced the response that I suspect many first-time...
Share