The place, Huntington Gorge, being one of those
locations you research as a result of the prospect of having fun, initially
took on the air of innocence and escape, somewhere offering a much needed
natural respite from the chaos of society. For the first few visits, times in
which the murky water held our youthful bodies throughout all of their giddy motions,
the gorge maintained this patina of untainted escapism, and not even the sign
standing sentinel above it listing the number of people that had died alongside
corresponding years of death served to dishearten.
It was during the third visit then that a faint
sense of wrongness found it’s way into the warrens of the subconscious,
tentatively testing the stale air for the scent of potential victims. No awareness of the feeling’s source
was present during the ride up, but you could detect its vibrations in the
subsurface language of the group, in the way conversations and laughter felt
weak and stillborn, like dead leaves floating through the radioactive air of
Chernobyl. In retrospect, though no one directly acknowledged the difference in
energy between the current undertaking and past trips, everyone was acutely
aware of it, and only the fear of being alone in our convictions kept us
cavorting about in feigned security.
So, as we turned onto the poorly maintained dirt road and started
catching glimpses of deep pools lingering within the stream to our right, we
continued to banter and make light.
It being somewhat late in the season as denoted by
slight discoloration among some of the oaks and maples lining the banks, we had
no issue finding parking near our usual spot, which was directly below that
reaper’s record of a sign as it turns out. It seemed as if that slab of
decaying wood was deliberately turned toward me as I exited the car, demanding
my attention like a little kid desperately wanting to show off a new trick, and
it took no mean amount of will power to direct thought and action toward the
trail that my friends were already starting to advance down in single
file. One foot in front of the other and tear misgivings asunder, the
mantra went.
The
short decent to pools waiting in green solitude made me recall patterns in
incidents of past trips that hadn’t struck as abnormal at the time but now fit only
too well into waiting niches of my new outlook. That is, the amount of near
falls experienced by the group as we descended were statistically deviant this
time and, if memory serves, the times before. Every root and slick slab of
shale offered purchase that would betray you with unapologetic impulsiveness,
for the land had seemingly adopted a borderline personality disorder with
whimsical delight. A change in the lighting also occurred that made the
striated granite carved by the falls into edgeless pinnacles and channels wax
as a secondary liquid entity, a river encasing the first one that moved
infinitely slower. I suppose that this was the case scientifically, but
thinking about it in poetic terms held way more appeal. In their zealous
adherence to edicts of science, others in the group would disagree, their
thoughts turning to more obvious instances of the same concept, such as the
terrain formed by water ice interwoven with colder CO2 ice on the polar ice
caps of Mars.
Miraculously,
no injuries were sustained, and there was almost a palpable sense of relief as
we shed our clothes in preparation for indulgence in Neptune’s libation, his
green, sediment filled, libation that some twenty plus recorded bodies had been
hauled out of by stone faced EMTS courting professional distance and grief
wracked loved ones incapable of any semblance of distance over the course of
twenty years. Still, it was an abnormally hot day in the autumn of September, a
time for nakedness, laughter, and fond memory formation.
