I clamber down the steep incline, hanging onto rocks and trying not to slide on the pine needles. It’s been raining for most of a week, but right now the rain has stopped. I try to go slowly, slower; it doesn’t matter if it starts raining again, but it will matter if I fall. Not that I am such a long way from civilization, but if I hurt myself it would be difficult to get back up; this path is nearly vertical. I know it will be worth it; just the thought of the waterfall in these conditions pushes me onwards. Of all the places in the Circle of Eight, this is the one I think of as grounding the whole circle; the beginning place from which everything else is born. Here I feel at the nadir, as if this waterfall and its pool pin the whole circle onto the land, and so it has my special loyalty.
Near the bottom I stop. The river bank that we walk along to reach the falls is gone, submerged under swift, swirling muddy water. This river has no bank, only a steep side I will have to clamber along: a mass of loose jumbled stones, all of them on their way down, towards the water. I scramble sideways, using hands as well as feet to jam myself into temporary crevices. The waterfall is only a few hundred meters upstream, but with this level of difficulty it will take me a while.
Even from here I can hear it roaring. It crosses my mind that probably no one else would do this—come here in a week of torrential rain. It would be considered dangerous, mad, inconvenient, unnecessary. But I have been waiting days for the rain to let up a little, feeling the call of the waterfall singing to me, beckoning; I have delighted in those masses of water closing roads and swamping everything, feeling this glory ahead of me. I was here once before when it was in flood, but not after as many days of rain; then I still walked along the path.
When I get there it is amazing, certainly worth this little effort and concentration it has cost me, and I am laughing and shouting up at the smashing torrents of it, the usual two streams of this waterfall merged to one thick, curling torrent out over the lip of rock and bellowing down into the round pool. I have never seen it like this. The air is filled with spray; water fills my mouth when I open it. The waterfall has overtaken the land and the air, and water leaps everywhere, temporarily escaping the huge downwards force. The photos I take are blurred with water.
The pool is alive, rapid ripples of waves quivering out from where the falls thunder down. I take off my clothes and go in. It’s alive and fresh, not even very cold; this is a summer storm. The water pushes at me, pulses at me; I stumble past the shallows, hurting my feet on the sharp rocks, but I don’t care, I just want to be in it. Once I’m deep enough I turn to face the cascade and swim. It takes all my strength to stay in one place, but laughing with it, playing this magnificent game, is like swimming in liquid life force; I’m tiny in this shouting, dancing water held within the circle of the pool. I look up at the rock walls and the trees that top them; watch the water lilies wrenched from their bed and pouring past me in the current; feel the fertile earth all around me, sheltering and breathing in with wet breaths; and know that even though I am half-submerged in water, this place is my ground, the earth; the anchor place of the circle.