#awaywithacamera

Like any public park that’s been open for a century and a half, High Park is a space that exists in the vast middle ground between wilderness and playground. Some of the paths through the Savannah forest are well-traveled, the earth between the older trees packed flat, the underbrush controlled. No surprise that it’s a very popular part of the park all year round, a short distance from a subway station. (I came across hammocks strung between trees here – little day camps set up by locals who use the park like a backyard.)

It’s an ominous and mysterious view by now, and I wonder what the Falls must have looked like to the natives living nearby, and to the first Europeans who were guided by them to the edge of the gorge, long centuries ago. Early visitors exaggerated its properties, describing how spray from the Falls petrified into a kind of salt with medicinal qualities, that the rocks below the waterfall teemed with eels and that birds flying too close became saturated with the mist and fell to their deaths. The priest and explorer Louis Hennepin was among the earliest but not the last to describe how viewing the Falls renders one “seized with Horror, and the Head turns round so that one cannot look long or steadfastly upon it.”