Three Fall

Is it just a ghoulish fascination? Or am I touched more deeply in some inarticulate way, that I continue to think about and read the accounts of the three young people who were swept over Vernal Falls on the weekend?

Well, it's just as self-centered to wonder about my reactions, as to write about them and share a few thoughts, or feelings, or whatever they are, so why not.

Why did this one affect me so? I do not know and can only list out points.

I've been atop Vernal Falls a few times, and Nevada Falls as well. Both are indescribable focus points of the power of nature. As you stand a few yards away, behind the railing, tons of water are plummeting over the edge, roaring so that you have to shout to be heard, shaking the ground continually. The air, even on a warm day, swirls in a cold wind pulled along by the running waters.

When I stand upon a great height, I feel drawn to it, as if beckoned by some impish ghost to shed my worries in one graceful flight. At the top of these falls, however, the rushing waters promise nothing but a quick, horrible destruction. It's a wonderfully terrible place to be.

I was immediately interested in the victims as people, and was drawn in by their names: Ramina, Ninos, Hormiz. I have Iranian-American friends, that country having shed some of its best and brightest about the time I was starting college (~1980), and thought of that community. But it turned out they were part of a church group from an Assyrian Catholic community down the valley. When I was a church-going family man, one of my best church friends grew up in Baghdad's Assyrian community, and so again I felt a connection, however tenuous.

Of course, we all remember what it was like to be young and exceptional, less likely than others to succumb to danger.

And it's not hard to imagine falling into the water and being pulled screaming towards eternity.

No more points. No need to explain. I do dislike the news-site comments that wax so superior over these folks' foolishness. Of course they courted death as surely as if they had lain down to sleep on a railroad track. But everyone suffers a lapse of judgment. They were just unluckier than some of us. Makes me sad.