Chasing Waterfalls: My Pandemic Year
By: Eric Solomon
Tags: Nature Writing, LGBTQ, Pandemic Diaries, Creative Non Fiction, Travel Writing

Chasing Waterfalls: My Pandemic Year

knowing… that there was no time left, that I had to go the rest of the way without you. - Brent Calderwood, “Elegy”

Hiking the Base of the Falls trail at Fall Creek Falls State Park felt like a metaphor for these pandemic times. Two friends and I traveled to Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau on Thanksgiving Saturday (admittedly not the best time to experience the serenity and solitude of nature). The trail was overcrowded. Some wore masks. Many did not. Many wore professional gear, hiking with purpose. Others felt unprepared for the steep descent and perhaps even more difficult ascent of the mile-long round-trip trail. Many had to stop and rest along the way. One of my friends, a young woman in her late twenties, could not complete the trail to the base of the Falls, stopping three-fourths of the way down to rest on a natural stone bench to catch her breath and recover. We had to continue on without her.

As we approached Fall Creek Falls, the highest free-falling waterfall East of the Mississippi River, a man on the trail just ahead of us (who we would learn was of Cherokee descent) mentioned to my friend and I that there was a more impressive path, unmarked by park guides and less traveled by visitors. As we followed him, we began to understand what he meant. Approaching the Falls from below (instead of the official trail’s approach from above) allowed us to encounter the full and awesome scale of the free-falling water. As my friend and I stood in the mist produced by the water’s unfurling — what naturalist John Muir called the “waftings of waterfall spray” in his recollections of Yosemite — I could tell the man who showed us the way smiled beneath his mask. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked rhetorically.

On the hike up, we retrieved our friend who continued to struggle over the rocks and steps, stopping several times as she listened to the needs and limitations of her body. I walked ahead, waiting close to the top at an overlook where across the gorge I noticed a person barely visible suspended in a red hammock on the promontory. I thought of this person as Rip Van Winkle, hoping to awaken when we have moved collectively away from the pandemic precipice. My friends joined me at the overlook summit, and we continued to hike the less strenuous Woodland Trail three-fourths of a mile back to where we parked the car. The trail ends at a suspension bridge that traverses Cane Creek to arrive at the Nature Center. On the hike in, we easily crossed the bridge as it swung beneath our weight, the most difficult task being maintaining our balance as we walked along. As we approached on the way back, however, we noticed the bridge was blocked on both sides with yellow caution tape. Our most direct and efficient exit closed to us. Two park rangers walked across the bridge, notifying us that a small hole had developed at the bottom of the mesh siding at the bridge’s middle — large enough for a child or dog to slip through in passing. The group of us that gathered were allowed to cross, but I wondered about those still on the trail behind us: would park guides meet them to decode the caution tape blocking their one exit across the creek toward home?

Multnomah Falls, Oregon, January 2020. Photograph by Eric Solomon.

I began 2020 hiking a waterfall, and I’ve spent the year unexpectedly chasing them.

There’s an old folk superstition that claims whatever you do on New Year’s Day determines the shape of your year to come. I began 2020 hiking a waterfall, and I’ve spent the year unexpectedly chasing them. First, on a quick trip to the Pacific Northwest in January, I rented a car to drive I-84 through the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area in Oregon, stopping at Multnomah Falls, Wahkenna Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, Latourell Falls, and Horsetail Falls. Multnomah, the most visited in the Pacific Northwest, is a spiritual encounter; its 611-foot expanse is visible as you arrive, and the park’s pathway pulls you into the lower fall’s vanishing point before ascending to Benson Bridge, the midpoint viewing platform where you can view the full cascade of the upper fall’s 542 feet. While not as monumental as Multnomah, nearby Latourell Falls descend against a vibrant chartreuse lichen clinging to the rock beside it, a natural juxtaposition made more vibrant in the cool winter light.

Between January’s Oregon five-waterfall adventure and my next waterfall excursion, the pandemic took root and altered the composition of our days. Only at this point did my waterfall chasing become conscious, deliberate. To quote Henry David Thoreau’s famous rationale for his time at Walden Pond: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” By June, longing for mindful moments beyond the Zoom screen, I turned to the open road to remind myself to live deliberately. And yet, ponds are by definition static, still, contained. Unlike Thoreau’s deliberate choice of Walden pond, the violence and cacophony, the disarray and chaotic beauty of waterfalls appealed to me: the rupture which they represent in the natural world felt analogous to the necessary rupturing of our pre-pandemic routines. Of course, the natural world has neither innate capability nor obligation to grant us perspective or introspection even as we remain obligated to preserve and protect the ecosystems of which we are a part. Still, trees and tundra, woods and waterfalls, ponds and plateaus all serve to remind us, as Mary Oliver writes, of our “place / in the family of things.” And such reminders — however fleeting or unexpected — can alter, extend, and deepen our commitments.

In June, during a solitary fellowship residence in the North Georgia mountains, I resumed chasing waterfalls. To break up the monotony of writing and to cope with cabin fever, I visited Hidden Falls at Oconee State Park in Sumter National Forest (South Carolina), where I hiked the six-mile round trip on the Foothills Trail, High Shoals and Blue Hole Falls in Georgia, where I saw a dachshund swim across a riverbed, Minnehaha Falls, where a woman yelled after an adventurous dog named Stella, Panther and Angel Falls, where I found a young couple crafting cairns to guide their way back. At Tallulah Falls, I hiked across the suspension bridge in the sprinkling rain, afraid to look down as a young boy nearby giggled at my trepidation. Later in June, with my best friend by my side, sprinkling rain accompanied us as we hiked Cloudland Canyon State Park in northwest Georgia, viewing Cherokee and Hemlock Falls together. From there, we took Flarity Road across the Alabama state line, visiting DeSoto Falls, hiking to the base of the falls, twice passing a broken canoe flecked with remnants of green paint.

DeSoto Falls, Alabama, June 2020. Photograph by Eric Solomon.

Hiking solo at Warwoman Dell near Clayton, Georgia, where the Cherokee Warwoman met with the tribal council to discuss war, peace, and the fate of captives, I stepped on a rusty nail that failed to penetrate my foot due to the thick soles of my hiking shoes. I wondered out loud if such a nail had been on the grounds since the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was stationed there in the 1930s or still earlier when a passage through the dell for the Blue Ridge railroad was begun before and abandoned during the Civil War. As I walked the Dell, I encountered a couple looking for nearby Becky Branch Falls: “we’re lost,” they said from a distance. I told them the way: “the trail leads up across from the William Bartram historic marker.” The woman was white, and the man was black. Later, I thought: what did, indeed what could, William Bartram’s unimpeded eighteenth-century travels mean to him?

In reflection, I am reminded that during my month-long waterfall chasing, protests across the country developed in response to the murders of black men and women at the hands of both police and armed civilians: Ahmaud Arbery in February, Breonna Taylor in March, George Floyd in May: this perennial calendar of unnecessary loss, failures of accountability, lack of transparency, and insistent injustice. As my time in the mountains came to a close, my mixed-race partner joined me on a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, where we spent two days celebrating my birthday, another year that I, as a white man, live beyond what Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and too many others will ever live. In downtown Asheville, we watched as an artist painted a mural of Maya Angelou surrounded by verdant foliage atop the boarded-up windows of her business. When we passed the mural days later, after completion, it read Angelou’s words: “Nothing will work unless you do.” I thought:

H ow can I protect this man I love in a country that still refuses to work for him?

On our ride home, I convinced my partner — decidedly not the outdoorsy type — to stop in Pisgah National Forest in southwest North Carolina to see Looking Glass Falls, easily accessible down a set of steps off highway 276. Unexpectedly, he took off his shoes and walked through the plunge pool. Twenty minutes later, we got back in the car to head home. Although he had been ready to drive straight home from Asheville, he thanked me for the waterfall detour. “Through the looking glass, may we find wonderland,” I said jokingly to him. He laughed. “As long as we find it together. I love you, goob,” he said.

Looking Glass Falls, North Carolina, June 2020. Photograph by Eric Solomon.

In “The Slow Road to Sudden Change,” Rebecca Solnit reminds us that we are “in a waterfall moment” when “the movement from margin to center accelerates.” A moment, as Solnit quotes Michelle Alexander, when “a solidarity rooted in love” can push us beyond where we have been, beyond the recurrent eddies of the past to a more equal and socially just present. Solnit writes:

The metaphor of the river of time is often used to suggest that history flows at a steady pace, but real rivers have rapids and shallows, eddies and droughts. They freeze over and get dammed and their water gets diverted. And sometimes the river comes to the precipice and we’re all in the waterfall. Time accelerates, things change faster than anyone expected, water clear as glass becomes churning whitewater, what was thought to be impossible or the work of years is accomplished in a flash.

In 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic and continued racist injustice, “We’re all in the waterfall.” In many ways, things have changed faster this year than any of us could have predicted. If this year has taught us anything it’s that time is elastic. Yet, the pendulum oscillates, and the cascade cuts quickly from cliff through air to plunge pool and sluggish flow. What will the future bring? Further solidarity rooted in love? Sudden changes for the good? Individual commitment to social responsibility for collective well-being? To resignify and riff off the meaning of TLC’s 1995 megahit “Waterfalls”: will we be chasing waterfalls or sticking to the rivers and the lakes that we’re used to?

I remain hopeful because I am alive (to paraphrase James Baldwin) even as I know it has been more than 189 days since George Floyd’s murder, more than 262 days since Breonna Taylor was killed in her own home; even as I read that 666 — a damning number — children remain separated at the US-Mexico border from parents who cannot be located; even as I know that at least 40 transgender and gender non-conforming people have died violent deaths in 2020; even as the number of COVID-19 related deaths continues to climb in the US (currently: 307,000+). Despite all of this knowledge conflated in my synapses, I remain hopeful.

As I write these thoughts, it is World AIDS Day (December 1), and I’m reminded of that mostly overlooked lyric in TLC’s song: “three letters took him to his final resting place,” a trenchant acknowledgement of the HIV pandemic in a song that uses a natural metaphor to advise us to slow down, stop “moving so fast.” For many people diagnosed as HIV positive today, HIV will not take them to their “final resting place.” That was not true in 1995. I am also reminded of Paul McCartney’s 1980 song, “Waterfalls”: “Don’t go jumping waterfalls/ Please keep to the lake/ People who jump waterfalls/ Sometimes can make mistakes.” This year, as I have been chasing literal waterfalls, the solidity of all assurances of health and security, of equal justice and protection before the law, has again run off the cliff, unmooring us from any idea that we are but vapor — “waftings of waterfall spray” — in the order of things, here today, gone tomorrow. And still, I maintain the audacity of hope, hope that we can avoid further “mistakes” as we continue to push for a faster exit from the hellish year we have all endured, from the waterfall in which we’ve all been.

In 2020, we have been reminded that too many will be lost along the way, many too soon, too quickly, too unnecessarily, too solitarily, too illogically. Some will fall through holes despite the warnings, despite all that we know that could protect them. Many will succumb to the insidious persistence of racism and white supremacy. Many will still contract HIV; far too many of those will progress and die from AIDS complications in a country that still cannot understand healthcare as a human right. As the rates of COVID-positivity and hospitalizations spike before vaccines can reach many of us, far too many will continue to be lost. Many with pre-existing, underlying, or un-diagnosed conditions will continue to face worse COVID prognoses. Many of these will be our most marginalized: communities of color, people living in poverty, people experiencing incarceration, people un- or under-employed, frontline workers without the luxury of working from home. Again, this year, more than twenty-thousand lives will succumb to seasonal influenza in this country. In our year of siloed living, rates of depression and other mental health diagnoses as well as suicides have increased, what Aaron Reuben calls the “anxiety fallout” of the way we live now. Too many will take their own lives as we approach a holiday season that remains as painful for many as it is joyful for many others.

Author at the top of Amicalola Falls, Georgia, December 2017. Photograph by Brent Calderwood.

Each time we talked, I sensed no cause for concern, neither caution tape nor warning flags nor holes in the delicate mesh-siding holding him together.

Shortly before hiking Fall Creek Falls State Park this Thanksgiving weekend I learned that my ex-boyfriend’s ex died suddenly. He was thirty-five years old. The family has refused to release the cause of death and made neither mention of his current boyfriend in the official obituary nor, so I’m told, acknowledgement of any same-sex intimacy or his gay identity in his funeral services. Yes, these things still happen to queer people in 2020. I did not know him well, but he had reached out to me to talk twice in October of this year, and each time we talked, I sensed no cause for concern, neither caution tape nor warning flags nor holes in the delicate mesh-siding holding him together. Yet, on this side of the chasm that separates our living conversations from the fact of his death, I wish I knew then how little time he had left, how in less than a month those who knew and loved him would have to learn how to go the rest of the way without him.

There will always be those who go too fast, who die too soon, and those for whom slowing down is preferred, those who choose to adopt the pace of nature. Perhaps caution tape and breath breaks and mask mandates and police reform and antiracist policy and safer sex and mental health awareness and hoped-for vaccines cannot possibly save everyone. And yet, these tools exist to remind us that along the shared path that we all must travel, we each have a responsibility to one another, both those we know well and those we know little if at all. Perhaps this traumatic recognition of shared responsibility is the greatest lesson for each of us in 2020. At least, I hope. I sometimes wonder if my words accomplish anything, if my training in literature contributes something tangible to the world, but I recall a student this semester reminding me of Pauli Murray’s maxim: “One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.” There is power — awesome and humbling — in the one.

In “Elegy,” dedicated to his late brother, the poet Brent Calderwood juxtaposes the 58,178 names inscribed on the Vietnam Memorial — writing that “they are too young, all of them” — with the loss of his brother, a loss that meant brother would have “to go the rest of the way without” brother. In spite of the sheer volume of loss in this year of global mourning, it is the one vacant hospital bed, the one empty chair, the one silenced laugh, the one unaccompanied hike that will haunt most of our days. For many, that one has become more than one, and still, for others, one is far too many. Irreplaceable and inconsolable, we must continue going the rest of the way without the ones who have given meaning to our days and purpose to our path. There’s just this for consolation: we do not have to go it alone.

It was my friend Brent, the writer of the lines which begin this essay, who first showed me the wonder of waterfalls in the winter of 2017 — long before the siloed living of 2020 physical distancing — when we hiked Amicalola (derived from the Cherokee for “tumbling waters”), the highest cascading falls east of the Mississippi. On our hike in the snow, ice crunching under our feet as we climbed the 604 metal grate steps up from the base to the top of the falls, it was Brent who had to practice patience as I stopped repeatedly to catch my breath. It was Brent who waited for me, felt responsible for me, guided me to the summit upon which we stood looking into the horizon, together.