My plan for the next few months is to write a short personal essay about the specific context in which I first heard a beloved song. There aren’t that many moments like this for me: whereby the very first occasion of hearing a song is embalmed – or as well embalmed as our fungible memories allow. In some cases, the song may complement the mood of the context described – in others, like here, the two are jarring.
I’ll keep the series to five songs, appearing along with other pieces, and written as a way to inspire – and loosely justify – essays on all manner of things: in this case, the eeriness of Niagara Falls.
This essay is revised from a 2017 piece, written immediately after the incident it describes, but of which I’ve long thought was poorly cooked. And so here, six years later, it’s been neatened, shortened and re-arranged.
Song: Alvvays, “Saved by a Waif”
Where: In a car, somewhere between Toronto and our destination of Niagara Falls
When: September 25, 2017
Not far from us is one of the natural wonders of the world. The Horseshoe Falls, the most famous segment of Niagara Falls, cascades thunderously from the semi-circular lip of the gorge. An eddy is perpetually maintained 50 metres below, and from this basin rises a huge and permanent cloud of mist.
People take photos with their phones and fancy cameras. Not of the Falls but of the shirtless man on the wrong side of the metal railing. Beneath him is a fatal drop. Yellow police tape cordons off a small section of the footpath that runs along the Canadian side of the gorge. It is a brief perimeter. Small enough that tourists crowd 15 metres from the man and the police officer negotiating his survival.
It's hot and humid. The man takes a silver flask from the ledge and empties its contents on his back. He is careful to splash water over both his shoulders. I wonder if he brought the flask, or if it was a rapport-building gesture from the policeman. And I hopefully think: what man cools himself like this if he is about to die?
* * *
Approaching the Canadian town of Niagara Falls from the highway, one sees an unusually large skyline for a place of 90,000. Arriving, one realises it is not built for locals but for the millions of annual visitors – it’s a skyline made of casinos and hotels. Jammed between them and declaring themselves with neon signs are novelty cafes, souvenir shops, a wax museum and a house of horrors. Assembled before one of the world’s great natural wonders is an orgy of schlock.
It has long been such. The hucksterism may have found its nadir in the 1980s when rival tourist operators began violently sabotaging each other. At first, billboards were defaced. Then information kiosks were torched, hoteliers received death threats, and the home of the largest tour operator was shot up.
Much had changed since 1679, when First Nations people led a Franciscan missionary to the falls. Once arrived, Reverend Louis Hennepin reportedly fell to his knees and crossed himself. He later wrote:
“ ’Tis true, Italy and [Sweden] boast of some such Things; but we may well say they are but sorry Patterns, when compar’d to this… Betwixt the Lake Ontario and Erié is a vast and prodigious Cadence of Water which falls down after a surprising and astonishing manner, insomuch that the Universe does not afford its Parallel.”
* * *
A woman walks past and says to someone: “He’s having a meltdown.” She seems disgusted. A paramedic waits beside his ambulance. People keep taking photos, lifting their phones for a better frame. There are two spectacles today.
The police officer seems tolerant of the audience, or perhaps he’s just professionally resigned to it. Police negotiators speak of “containing” a situation – sterilising it of as many disruptive influences as possible – but we are at one of the world’s most famous tourism spots. Ten million visitors a year, the guidebook says. “The World Capital of Honeymoons,” the posters say.
I linger briefly. There are mixed feelings: dark magnetism; a vague, feckless and quickly aborted urge to do something; a desire to witness a happy resolution. It seems faintly perverse to leave, to turn my back and continue to the boat. But more perverse is staying, joining those taking photos. Plus, there is a very simple fact: I do not want to watch this man die. After a few minutes, I leave.
* * *
Two months before, the body of Kirk Jones was found 20 kilometres from the falls at the mouth of Lake Ontario. Two months before that, friends had helped him – and his pet snake, Misty – inside a large inflatable ball, before rolling it into the Niagara River rapids. On April 19, 2017, tourists were surprised to see what they assumed to be an unoccupied plastic globe tumble over the edge of the American Falls.
Jones had gone over before. In 2003, on the Canadian side, he fell unprotected – no cage, barrel or ball – and survived. He broke ribs, found infamy and was barred for life from Canada. Jones said he was chastened. “I’m feeling very happy to be alive,” Jones said. “I ask that no one ever try such a terrible stunt again. I understand what I did was wrong. You’ll never see an action in Niagara waters with my name written on it again.”
Most deaths here aren’t reported. But Jones’s demise was sufficiently strange, and his motivation sufficiently ambiguous, that publications across the world ran short, isn’t-this-wacky pieces. Mostly omitted from these stories were friends wondering if Jones hadn’t, after all, sought death. After visiting the falls in 1834, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, said: “I felt as if I could have gone over with the waters; it would have been so beautiful a death; there would have been no fear in it.”
* * *
Having left the man on the ledge, I walked away from the Horseshoe Falls towards the catamaran that would take me back to them via the river. I bought my ticket and took the combination of elevator and zig-zagging ramps to the bottom of the gorge and the boat’s ramp. Before reaching the bottom, I entered a tent with confusingly numbered lanes taped to the floor. It appeared to be a system for corralling different ticketholders. But it was a scam, my friend explained, a private company permitted to impose what seems to be a processing point, but is in fact a green-screen photo booth.
The confusion is deliberate, designed to ensnare distracted tourists and, once the shot is taken, to oblige their purchase of it. There is a dreadful cynicism to this subterfuge, but also a strange redundancy – there is ample opportunity for tourists to have their photos taken with the actual falls behind them, rather than a digital counterfeit.
At the top of the gorge, tourists were taking photos of a man inches from death – at the bottom, they were tricked into buying fake ones. The visitors’ guidebook boasted of this being “North America’s most Instagrammed destination”, and I wondered how many images of the man were now being shared online.
The boat chugged towards the basin, towards the thick white mist that, from this vantage, mostly obscured the falls. The spray cooled us. The roar was impressive. We moved through a rainbow. But I was thinking about the man on the ledge. To my right, I could see police lights near the river’s edge.
After the 20-minute cruise, I disembarked, threw my poncho into a recycling bin, and made my way through the marquees selling Niagara Falls Lager. I passed Elvis crooning from a small stage. I walked back up the ramps, back to the top of the gorge. The suicide crowd had dispersed. There were more police cars now. Detectives and uniformed officers were conferring. The police tape had been extended. Over the ledge, at the bottom of the cliff, I saw the yellow body bag.
I don’t know the name of the man. I found no reporting of his death. I know nothing about his life, his health, his family. All I know is that here, on the edge of the Horseshoe Falls, it was strangers who took the last photos of him.