We got to the cottage at night, figured out who was sleeping where, woke up, had a hurried breakfast. George said, "Lets go!"
Took us maybe twenty five minutes to drive east on 64 then south on 281 and come to a pull-off alongside the Horse Pasture River.
As soon as we opened the doors we could hear a waterfall. Always something exciting about that.
We followed George down a little path that led to the top of the falls. George said, "Take off your shoes." Then he began to wade across about twenty feet upriver of the falls. We followed.
The water was really, really cold.
There was another path on the far side. It led down beside the falls. "Drift Falls," George told us.
The path was steep, rocky, kind of washed out, weaving around rhododendron through which we had a broken but continuing view of the falls. About half way down George turned off the trail and took us out to rocky edge of the waterfall itself.
Drift Falls isn't a 90 degree straight down waterfall. More like 45 degrees--like a sliding board beside a swing-set. A really huge, bumpy, roaring, flooded kind of sliding board.
George took off his shirt.
"What are you doing, George!?" somebody asked. I don't remember which of us spoke, but it was the question on everybody's mind.
"I'm gonna slide down," George said.
None of believed him. We were a band of scoffers. The water was so fast, so cold, the prospect was so scary.
About 40 feet and directly below where George was standing a big plume of water, a rooster tail, shot up and out treacherously. Impossible.
"No way!" we said.
George smiled at us, a little disdainfully, turned his head downstream and sat down.
Immediately the river took him. His legs were straight ahead. He kept his hands flat against the falls for balance and, it seemed to me, for navigation. In a blink of an eye he was going as fast as the water, shooting forward, his back ramrod straight, his eyes fixed ahead.
He managed, just barely, to miss the rooster tail. But the contour of that great slab of granite beneath the falls has a certain kind of launching effect about 10 feet below the bottom. It lifted George, impressively, off his butt, into the air and then into the big pool of water at the falls' base.
He disappeared under the white wavy water and popped right back up with the kind of great and happy scream a boy has when he's done something big and brave and fun.
The four of us back up on the rock beside the falls looked at each other with a very different kind of feeling, though still a big one. George had shown us, like the chicken showed the possum, that sliding down Drift Falls could be done.
What George did was a very, very powerful kind of showing. We boys, standing up there, still on the dry side of adventure, knew we had to decide if we were men enough to do it.
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I hope to continue this thread tomorrow. Friday's my day off and right now it's time to turn my head toward chores, remembering how many times and how many ways I've been shown by friends and family that chores, too, can lift us off our butts and into life's stream.
(Though most Fridays I'd just as soon slide down a cold waterfall.)
