In the top ten of over-photographed subjects, along with sunsets, flowers, butterflies, and cats — is, surely, waterfalls. So what am I to do with the half-mile series of many waterfalls that is on one side of where I live, and the quarter mile of mini-waterfalls on the other side of where I live? The same thing you should do with sunsets, flowers, butterflies and cats. Enjoy them but spare us the pictures! Okay, but just this once … so you’ll know what I’m talking about elsewhere in this blog (good excuse, no?).
First picture, below, is what you see when standing on the bridge in my driveway, looking upstream.
Next, is Cookie taking a dip in one of the many pools below or between the various waterfalls.
Below, you see, first, the view looking downstream from about mid-way up the falls, and below that, looking upstream about three quarters of the way to the top.
I live way out in the middle of nowhere. The state road dead-ends at my driveway, which is a (very) dirt road. You go around a sharp bend and come to the bridge over the stream with all of the waterfalls, shown above. Point being, that this is not exactly a high-traffic location.
Nevertheless, some, presumably very timid graffiti artist painted the underside of my bridge a few weeks ago. Talk about a conflicted impulse — wanting to be a ‘public’ artist, but at the same time being extremely afraid of being caught …
The point of graffiti is what? To be seen by everybody, right? The only way you can see this stuff is by going down into the stream bed, and looking up. It’s not visible from the road (if anybody were there in the first place). This means your audience has to walk past multiple No Trespassing signs, through a thicket of knee-high poison ivy, down a steep, slick bank, across wet, slippery rocks …
I could show you pictures of the graffiti, but then I’d be doing the person a favor. You can see enough of it in the picture, above.
Before I moved down here, when they were getting ready to start building my house, they had to replace the decking on the bridge. I happened to return from a hike when all of the bridge was gone. I had parked up the road — on the other side. The bridge had a single six inch wide plank laid across its span. I walked that plank, but only because there were three grinning carpenters standing there waiting to see what I would do. I was the typical terrified-person-trying-to-look-nonchalant. One must not be a sissy, even if it means very possibly falling and breaking every bone in your body.
Why is there all that bare rock in this stream? Because the stream-bed got blown out in hurricane Camille, and because every hard rainfall since then causes another blowout of any soil or plants that are trying to grow over the stone. There is nothing to hold the water.
Below you see what the “stream” looks like when there’s heavy rain in a short time span (steady rain over many days does nothing). This picture was taken from the road on my side of the bridge, looking upstream (see the first picture at the top of this post to compare). I was afraid to get any closer. The ground was shaking, and the water was coming out of the lower side of the bridge in a huge, red, rooster tail.
There you have it. Tomorrow, sunsets!
-Julie
