The Waterfalls in the rain

There's an odd little science fiction book of Eric Flint's called 1633 whose concept, as far as I understand it, is of a modern Army town from West Virginia magically transported to 17th century France. The whole thing is bizarrely conservative, with characters breaking off at odd moments in the plot to advocate guns and prayer in schools, and I really remember nothing about it except one scene.

When the inevitable military clash comes, the 17th Century opposition isn't impressed with planes. The sight of chunks of metal cruising through the sky is so far removed from their realm of experience that they're not sure how to react except to shrug and continue their work. Speedboats, however, speedboats floor them. They've seen boats before, and these are just like the devices they know, but fast and small and able to make impressive noise. The speedboats are what they freak out over.

This is the scene I had playing over and over in my head when I went to visit the Waterfalls today. It wasn't great timing; coming through the bleak drizzle of Wall Street, pushing through all that concrete to find...a grey river and even greyer sky. At the end of Pier 11 you can see all four Waterfalls at once, just me and a tiny Asian man fishing giant wriggling eels out of the spray.

Well, they're big, the waterfalls. They're certainly huge. But like the 17th Century French, I really wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to be looking at. There was no context or comparison. Yes they were big, yes there was a lot of water, but what of it? Why go through all that effort to mildly aerate a bit of liquid? It was coming down quite a bit as it was, no? Pick up some water, drop some water...perhaps they were meant as some kind of zen meditation exercise?

The only exception for me was the falls under the Brooklyn Bridge. The falls are set up so that it looks as though water were coming from the bridge itself, flowing back into the river. Now this - water coming from somewhere and flowing somewhere else, this is something I have a frame of reference for. It was is if Manhattan had sprung a leak. I remember reading in Alan Weisman's A World Without Us that without electricity, Manhattan's subway tunnels would be flooded in three days. Seeing the water seemingly gushing from the Brooklyn Bridge, I can picture it. The manholes exploding into fountains, the avenues slowly sinking into canal-dom...

So I suppose my reaction to the chilly hour spent in the drizzle at the end of Pier 11 is this. When we see a beautiful woman walking down a street, we might admire her beautiful hair and sexy dress. But to be sure, just watching a disembodied set of tresses and miniskirt float down Broadway would be confusing indeed, no matter how well styled and fashionable. That's because what we're really admiring is the hair or dresses ability to accent the woman herself, to draw attention to her hips or pretty face.

No one really visits a waterfall for the water. The water is an accent to show off how high a cliff truly is, it's an accent to contrast the darkness of the rock or the lushness of the surrounding vegetation. Visitors at Niagara falls look up, around, or at most, at the rocks below to watch the splash. No one spends their honeymoon cruise staring at the flow of liquid as it goes by.

I truly think that if all they had available to their visual line of sight was that moving sheet of water, they'd be as bewildered as those 17th Century Frenchmen trying to understand the point of airplanes.