Over the Top (A Short Story)

Let’s suppose that it’s late afternoon when you start up the John Muir Trail for Nevada Falls.

The sun in the west sets the cliffs of Yosemite Valley afire, shines through the sequoia leaves so that they shimmer like gold coins before the purple of the departing storm.

The water from that storm still drips off the branches and squelches beneath your trail shoes as you fly up the asphalt path. All the runoff has swelled the banks of the Merced down below. The River of Mercy thrashes like a white serpent through the boulders. When the river comes against a rock, thousands of pounds of water explode into the air. Then it all falls back and rejoins the writhing flow.

Trains of mist wander like lost spirits through the trees.

You hear the Merced thundering with its recklessness and unbridled energy and wonder if you are jealous.

You focus on turning your legs over as quickly as possible. Breath comes in ragged gulps. Fatigue begins to seep into your legs like syrup.

Only your exhilaration trumps the tiredness. It is exertion for the sake of it, the feeling of taking your body to the edge of self-destruction and savoring the moment where you no longer quite have control.

You sprint out to where the trail crosses a bridge and look straight down. Even in the maelstrom of pounding whitewater there are shapes — standing waves, sharp parallel columns whose molecules fly past at a hundred feet per second. The noise of it fills your skull.

What would it be like to feel that tremendous energy from within? The answer is beyond your ken. You swing your camera out from your knapsack, aim the lens at the churning foam, press the shutter and move on.

There are steps on the other side of the bridge. You start climbing, taking pleasure in the quick efficient strides. When you are in the flow, it hardly feels like work.

You keep pressing up the trail until you see the alabaster pillar of Nevada Falls plummeting over the cliff ahead of you. The sunlight on the falls makes it glow from within. Great clots of water break out of the main flow and disintegrate in the air, flung apart into component molecules. It looks like a vast chandelier, shattering forever.

When you get to the top of the falls, you find another bridge. You can watch the waves from the center of the span, the whole churning mess of the river race toward the edge and disappear into space.

You cross to the other side where you walk up down the up and down the stony riverbank in search of the perfect view. There is a place where you can see where the current  flies apart into white gouts, suspended in glorious trains before they hit bottom. To be a part of that!

It is a struggle to hold the whole picture in your mind. Every time you think you have it, the image gushes out again, exploding heedlessly toward the abyss. Once again, you wonder what it would be like to store even a fraction of that wildness inside your soul.

You press your eye against the camera viewfinder, trying to take the picture that tells the story. Maybe the shutter will catch something in the pattern of golden drops suspended in their fall. But stills are not enough; this waterfall is an animal in motion.

You switch to video.

Amazing, you think. Each splash is its own pattern, a perfect sculpture that can only last a fraction of a second. There are shapes in the water that no one has ever seen before, created and destroyed in the blink of an eye.

The same waterfall, changing always.

Zoom in.

Half-formed thoughts dance through your mind as you pan over the chaos. Perhaps, the meaning of this is beyond understanding, you think. Its spirit is formless; it has no nature but change, no loyalty except its will to push forward and fall. You can't even define the dimensions of the thing because there is no way to tell where the waterfall ends and the mist begins.

As you move the viewfinder over the waters, you feel like laughing. Is all this profound or meaningless? Maybe it’s both.

All the forms that anyone held sacred, they too will splat apart, reform, recreate themselves in new iterations of the same idea. Whose idea?

It feels close enough to grasp now.

The tug around your ankle is gentle but catches you completely off your guard.

You let the camera drop from your eye, and see that you are standing in the current. You weren’t zooming in with your lens; you were walking forward the whole time.

You totter on the slick rock and flail your arms. One knee sinks into the river, immediately launching a spray of water into your face. The knee slides back along the rock and you make a desperate grab for the slippery bank. A wave hits you and rips you away.

Two figures on the bridge are flailing their arms at you, pointing. You think you hear one of them scream.

The water shoves you through the final rapids and up against stones. Resisting won't help anything at this point.

Suddenly you are weightless. There is no up or down that you can sense. You are in the center of the chandelier. Globs of water wiggle before your eyes in slow mo, elongating and breaking apart in the air. The wind tells you that you are accelerating, but it feels so strange and delightful to be floating there in the golden light.

Sooner or later, you know that you will hit the bottom with everything else, dashed like so much foam upon the rocks. So really, you should enjoy the moment while you have it. And for a short time, you do.