Helen Tookey

economy falls

The sign had said eight kilometres to the falls but it seemed hours since we had turned off the road. The track was uneven, with deep ruts and pools full of orange water, the trees and bushes pressing in at either side. As the ruts got deeper we drove more and more slowly, afraid of having a tyre blow out, or cracking up the steering, with no possible way to get back. Eventually, coming to a pool that looked impassable, we left the car tight up to the side of the track and got out to walk.  

It was cool and pleasant on the path through the trees. After a while we came to a roughly built wooden staircase with handrails, set into the side of the gorge and obviously leading down to the river. Halfway down, someone had carved the word Hunter into the splintery handrail, quite recently by the clean pale look of the letters. The sound of the falls grew louder as we climbed down, the pines now seeming to reach infinitely high above us. It seemed hardly possible trees could grow so tall.

At the foot of the steps the path came out onto a small beach, a flood channel of flat stones extending the river’s outside curve, the river just beyond, running wide and fast and shallow, and the sound of the falls loud now, the falls themselves out of sight around the outcrop of the gorge. Scattered over the flat stones were pieces of camping gear, the bright orange fabric of a tent slung over a nearby tree. Coming down to the water, we saw two people, a woman and a man. The man was small, lightly built, with cropped dark hair and an outdoors tan. He was tending the stove, boiling up coffee in a small pan; he seemed to move constantly, jumping up every few seconds to fetch something or look at something or maybe just to be moving. The woman was paler, more indoors-looking, and she sat calmly on a rock, watching the river. I felt awkward to have arrived at the same place — surely they had come here to be completely alone — but when they saw us they greeted us enthusiastically. The man offered us coffee and said he was about to roll a joint. Let me show you something, he said, and showed us the trail map on his phone, telling us about the best places we might go, asking where we were from and what we were doing, and then we were all sitting on the rocks telling each other things, watching the river, drinking molasses-thick coffee from the billycan and passing round the joint. 

I couldn’t get the speed of things under control. My heart was thumping, I was talking fast but couldn’t slow it down. The river seemed to be running at different speeds and with different sounds all at once — its quick high surface-sound laid over a deeper sound, a slower sound. Did you guys hear, the dark-haired man said, there’s a storm heading in. Cyclone. Due to hit sometime tomorrow. He was excited, gleeful almost, talking about the exact place to set the camp, the way it would feel to be inside the storm, not fully in danger but not completely safe either. You just don’t know, he said, you just don’t know the way it will go. He sat back on his heels and dragged on the joint, his eyes bright with the sunlight sparking off the water. The woman said little. She seemed to enjoy his excitement, to find it amusing even, but not really to be part of it, there was something cautious in her, watching and waiting to see how things might turn out. It came to me that they hadn’t been together for very long, that maybe they weren’t together at all in their everyday lives, only here, in this particular and temporary place they had found.

I said I needed to pee and walked back a little way along the flood channel, then climbed partway back up the wooden steps to an overhang above the falls. Up on the rocks, among the birches, I sat and watched the water pouring itself through the throat of the gorge. I noticed that someone had tied a thin blue rope around one of the birch trunks, to get down to the flat rocks just above the water — or maybe to help someone get back up again. At first I watched the white water, the excitable break and rush of it, but then I noticed, just above the lip, how the current ran faster in the centre, narrowing to its falling point, and how the water moved slowly out at the two sides, almost circling back in on itself, forming two slow circling pools, orange-black, the river here as though pausing, musing, a place to stay and rest a while before committing itself. I felt my body and mind tuning down to the key of the water, the deep slow circling pools — breath, pulse, the pace of thought tuning down to the right note, secure and held as the resonance locked in. This was the place to ride out the storm, high on the rocks above the slow brown water.

Helen Tookey is based in Liverpool. She writes poems and short prose and has collaborated with musicians Sharron Kraus and Martin Heslop. She has published two poetry collections with Carcanet, Missel-Child (2014) and City of Departures (2019), and is currently working on a third.