Waterfalls

Waterfalls

　

　

1.

Eva Rosse staged three garbage avalanches at Fresh Kills on Staten Island. The first thundered down on a grove of trees that Ms. Rosse had planted in the garbage-slide’s path. The trees were crushed while cameras recorded the spectacle. The second garbage-slide, triggered by a dozen small dynamite charges, smashed a small, stick-built suburban home moved to the dump for the sole purpose of being destroyed. Video feed within the house documented the burial of the structure in the debris. These first two avalanches were named "Untitled 1" and "Untitled 2." The third garbage avalanche was called Lahar – it was more impressive: Ms. Rosse had permits to ignite the swiftly falling river of garbage and the flaming trash toppled spectacularly down the slope of the great funnel-shaped gorge that the artist had carved in the flat-topped ziggurat of waste. Flames spurted fitfully from the debris, sliding under the impetus of explosive charges. Two dozen witnesses enjoyed the spectacle from an observing platform floating like a raft on the sea of detritus. The fires were not readily extinguished. Some of the flames bored into the heart of the garbage plateau at Fresh Kills and they are said to be burning in hidden underground galleries unto this very day. Needless to say, the spectacle garnered Ms. Rosse a McArthur "Genius" grant.

Ms. Rosse’s next endeavor was called -1 / +1. This work involved waterfalls, specifically the destruction of one such land form (named -1) and, by recompense, the creation of a new, artificial waterfall – that is, +1. The net environmental burden, Ms. Rosse wrote in her grant proposal, was zero – that is, she wrote, "a number shaped like the globe, round and empty as drop of dew."

In order to implement - 1, Rosse traveled to Australia and inspected waterfalls in the coastal mountains in Queensland. Most of the falls were plunge variety, water sluiced down a high, narrow gorge to spray free of wrap-around cliffs comprising stony, fern-filled amphitheaters. The waterfalls were hidden in lush coastal mountains and, mostly, protected within national parks. Several smaller falls on private property owned by either timber concerns or railroad companies were unsuitable for Rosse’s project because relatively inaccessible – the falls were several kilometers away from roads in jagged country and, although, the artist could see the cascades above her, bright white horsetail plumes above the rainforest canopy, she couldn’t find any viable trail to access their brinks. A small block waterfall purling over a ledge in relatively flat country seemed a reasonable candidate for destruction – there was an old logging trail that crossed the stream a dozen meters from the precipice – but the property was entailed to dozen or more heirs and Rosse knew that it would impossible to solicit their approval to blast the waterfall out of its stream-bed: of course, one or more of the owners would protest. She turned her attention to a small fairy-cascade on the right-of-way of a railroad company. The waterfall was three kilometers from a village, accessible on an overgrown trail that could easily broadened for pickup trucks and heavy equipment. When she hiked to the brink, Rosse was uneasy – someone was watching her and she wondered if the local people had guessed her purpose in trekking to the cascade. Twigs snapped and unseen bodies moved rapidly through the brush and Ms. Rosse felt as if eyes were on her. As it happened, three dingos were tracking her, although she didn’t see them until she emerged from the forest on the side of the highway where her rental car was parked. The dingos were scrawny and had tattered fur and their eyes were a malevolent yellow. As she started her car, Ms. Rosse wondered whether the wild dogs had planned to attack and eat her. As it happened, the plunge pool beneath the waterfall was protected – in the wet cavity of stone, giant spear lilies were growing and those plants were so rare that their habitats were rigorously conserved.

Rosse flew from Australia to Iceland. The country along the Icelandic coast was very green and innumerable streams poured down from fields of ice and snow in the highlands. Impermeable lava dikes walled-off the narrow rift valleys from the glaciers and waterfalls throbbed and churned in basalt canyons. Rosse guessed that most of the falls were too powerful for her purposes and carried too great a volume of ice-cold water down to the slate-grey sea. Inspecting the brink of several falls, she nearly slipped and walking down a slope covered with flat frost-fractured slate tablets, her foot skidded out from under her and she rolled a dozen yards down the trail, twisting her ankle in the clatter of tumbling stones. The people in the pubs said that the waterfalls were protected by trolls and that these were sinister creatures capable of inflicting great harm on their adversaries. After four or five days inspecting Icelandic waterfalls, Rosse had come to fear and hate them – the terrain was too stony and the volume of water too great: the streams barreled down from the heights as if shot from a cannon. On her last day in the country, hurrying back to Rekyavik, Rosse drove her Landrover into a broad, shallow-looking stream pouring across the gravel road – she had forded a number of other streams in the vehicle and this one didn’t look any more treacherous than the others. But the current was more swift than she expected and, at one point, the water was deep enough to briefly float the Landrover and turn it sideways against a ridge of submerged gravel. The vehicle was trapped and Rosse with it, and, embarrassed, she had to call for assistance. Some men came from a nearby fishing village and, paddling up to her stranded vehicle in a orange rubbery dinghy, extracted her from the Landrover. The cost of towing her rented Landrover off the reef of gravel mid-stream cost a twentieth of her entire budget for - 1.

Leech Falls was the name of a small plunge cascade on Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior. Eva Rosse had lived in Minneapolis when she was little and she recalled vividly visiting the waterfalls along the fall line where rivers flowing down to the great cold lake cast them themselves over brown and black cliffs. She studied topographic maps, making lists of unnamed waterfalls not located on State Park or, other, public land. The unnamed falls were mostly locked in miniature gorges, flowing in stone slits so tight that the plunging water never saw the light of day – the cascades were hermetic, inaccessible, concealed in sheaths of wet stone so that you could hear the falling water, but not exactly see it. At first, Rosse didn’t inspect the waterfalls on private land that had names – she assumed that these were features of the landscape would be non-negotiable, off-limits with respect to her project which was, after all, the destruction of the falls – surely, it would be easier to procure permission to destroy an unnamed falls than one that had been christened. Accordingly, at first, she didn’t hike up to see Leech Falls, although the cascade was only a quarter of a mile from the cabin in the woods that Ms. Rosse occupied. One night, at a bar in the resort town down the road, a fishing guide told her that Leech Falls had been on the property of an eccentric hermit but that the man had recently died in a fire, apparently without heirs. The guide told Ms. Rosse that the hermit was very deaf because he had spent forty years living right beside the waterfall. This intrigued Rosse and she followed a rough four-wheel drive trail up the hillside to the cascade. A stream reddish with tannic acid tilted down from a wide-marsh cupped between two dark and shaggy hills. On a knoll overlooking the stream, Rosse found a burnt-out building and, then, a ravine filled with garbage, zigzagging down to parapet of low basalt cliffs. The stream slipped sideways along the brink of the cliffs, found a breach in the stone wall, and, then, dived down 18 feet to a round plunge pool that, in turn, boiled over into a three separate creeks segmented by boulder fields and running down through the forest to the big lake. The guide told her that there were many different kinds of leeches that lived in the marsh above the falls and that some of them carried infectious diseases. The flow of water over the edge of the cliff was impressive but not overwhelming and Ms. Rosse was interested to learn that the acreage, including the ruins of the hermit’s cabin and the falls, was administered by a bank’s trust department in Duluth.

As it happened, the Duluth bank had delegated management of the premises to an affiliated financial institution in Minneapolis. The hermit had died in a house-fire, apparently arising from a cooking error of some kind combined with high levels of alcohol intoxication. The only relatives were collateral and remote, people who lived somewhere in southern California. The trustee at the Bank was a friend of the arts and, indeed, had served on the Board of Directors of the Walker Art Center. He was sympathetic to Ms. Rosse’s project and said that he probably could procure the consent of the owners by default to the destruction of the waterfall. Surprisingly, the stream that cascaded over the cliff near the burnt ruins of the hermit’s cabin had never been registered as a fishing resource – the Department of Natural Resources had not stocked the stream with fish of any kind and, because the mouth of the river was inaccessible under a tumble-down heap of hematite-colored boulders, the watercourse was not significant with respect to the seasonal smelt-run. Accordingly, there was no regulatory impediment to modifying the river and its appurtenant gorges. Ms. Rosse ordered a survey of the elevations on the land, had the title brought up to date, and, then, negotiated some easements allowing her to improve the road to the head of the falls. The heirs in California, who had never seen the property, authorized her to destroy the waterfall on the basis of her payment to them of $15,000 split four ways. Curiously, the greatest concern of the California heirs was that Ms. Rosse issue to them enforceable indemnity and hold-harmless agreements – they were afraid that someone would be injured in the attempt to destroy the cascade and that they might be held liable for that misadventure.

After securing the site, Rosse scouted locations for the + 1 aspect of the project. In the autumn, she prepared designs for the waterfall that she intended to engineer in Pittsburgh. Rosse worked with a community liaison in the South Side Slopes neighborhood, an area of steep hillsides descending toward the Monongahela River. With the assistance of the Warhol Museum, Rosse negotiated a ten year lease of the abandoned baseball field located off Top of the Yard Way. The old field was built on a hilltop terrace overlooking the river valley and surrounded by 15 foot high cyclone fences with a splintered, storm-weathered backstop perched on the edge of the precipice. No one had used the baseball field for many years and city crews no longer maintained the place. Accordingly, it was not difficult to contract with the city for access to the old diamond and fields together with the cliff-like slope dropping down from the heights into the valley. The slope was tangled with small trees and exposed faces of crumbling sedimentary rock covered with a thick drizzle of green and red ivy. At the base of the four-hundred foot hill, an abandoned brewery with a ruinous red-brick tower huddled over a shadowy, fern-filled gorge – an artesian well had been cut into the hillside to exploit the natural springs beneath the bluff and the little canyon arched over with pedestrian bridges carried water down to a sandy bar shaped like an elbow in the Monongahela River. The ravine was derelict and, as the bricks and mortar of the hundred-year old brewery crumbled into the gorge, the debris was borne downstream toward the river in the wet hollow beneath arched masses of brush and trees.

Winter begins in October on the North Shore of Lake Superior. By December, the creek draining downhill to Leech Falls had frozen solid. Rosse’s contractors moved heavy equipment up to the brink of the frozen waterfall, a kind of chandelier suspended from the cliff with its innumerable pendants embedded in the dark ice of the plunge-pool. Explosive charges were used to excavate a pit upstream from the waterfall and, then, a ogee-shaped ditch was jack-hammered into the hard volcanic rock, running parallel to the cliff face. The new channel was lined with impermeable gravel and the diversionary canal was routed down and around the drop-off, cut into several steps to lead the water from above Leech Falls into the plunge-pool at its base. A thaw in mid-January tested the concept – the stream cracked and water rippled from the clog of ice blocking the river, trickling into the new basin upstream to the waterfall and, then, sliding sideways along the top of the cliff in a kind of aqueduct down to switchback into the plunge-pool. The river’s flow, although merely a few inches of water, followed the path as engineered, and, later, when the Spring thaw filled the creek bed with water, at full spate only a few inches overflowed the cascade’s brink – the rest of the water sped down the diversionary canal, rounded the curve and, then, toppled into the plunge pool. Leech Falls was gone, replaced by a sluice hacked into the cliff, a canal dropping down to the brimming round bowl of the plunge pool. The old brow of the waterfall was smooth, a deep groove eroded into the parapet of basalt where the cascade had once been.

While this work was underway in Minnesota, north of Duluth, Rosse’s crew knocked down the fences and backboard at the old ball field atop the overlooking south Pittsburgh. A series of gravel and packed earth ramps were built around a shallow basin excavated over the baseball diamond. All snow collected by city crews in South Side Slopes and its surrounding neighborhoods was hauled to basin and dumped there by the truckload. It was a snowy winter and the mound of compacted snow and ice soon grew higher than the ramps spiraling around the big white pyramid. On clear days, contractors brought gravel and dirt fill and raised the access ramps so that more snow could be heaped in the basin. At the same time, six men suspended in harnesses on the steep face of the hill below the basin cut into rock face, using dynamite to blast a shallow vertical groove in the incline. The groove re-contoured the hill side into a vertical, stone-lined shaft about eight feet wide and dropping 254 feet from the basin down into a bentonite-sealed impoundment reservoir on the slope above the ruins of the brewery. Several culvert-sized pipes were sunk in the fallen boulders and stony debris at the base of the hill and these conduits were angled down to bypass the brewery and disgorge into the ravine a little above the artesian well.

On the hilltop, the pyramid of compacted ice and snow, all removed from city streets and parking lots and sidewalks and piled in the basin dug into the old ballfield, was blanketed with a thick layer of saw-dust – this to insulate the glacier of ice and reduce its meltwater from a torrent to a brook slanting downward on a white apron of freshly poured concrete. The concrete apron ended above the groove incised in this hillside so that the water poured in a white, frothy free-fall 254 feet to splash into the teardrop-shaped impoundment reservoir. The City engineered a cul-de-sac near the base of the waterfall into a small parking lot and installed an 120 foot long asphalt trail up the slope to a viewing platform at the base of the cascade. The waterfall was named the Iron City Falls after a famous brand of beer once brewed in Pittsburgh. The snowpile feeding the waterfall was large enough to keep the cascade flowing until the end of August when the last of the ice-pack had melted.

So -1 +1 was completed. Films documenting the work required to destroy Leech Falls and create Iron City Falls were shown at the Guggenheim, both in New York City and Bilbao, as well as at the new Whitney and MOMA. The project, although criticized in some environmental circles, was generally hailed as a great triumph.

When the U.S. Geological Survey issued its next 7.5 minute (1:24,000 scale) topographic map of the North Shore terrain where Leech Falls had been located, the feature was no longer marked. Satellite images show the creek descending toward the great lake through a blurry flowage, then, making a dog-leg along a line of cliffs to ramp down into a wet forest on the edge of the coast. The river shows caramel-colored like whiskey or coca-cola flowing between black trees to the shuddering, foaming edge of the lake.

The City of Pittsburgh trucked snow and ice to the top of the artificial waterfall for six years. Calculations showed extra mileage and fuel expenses incurred in snow removal could be avoided if lowland (riverflats) depots were used to dump the snow and, so, the headwaters of the waterfall was no longer maintained. The first year that the snow was not packed above the falls, there were protests and, ultimately, the City plumbed the hilltop so that Iron City Falls could be turned on in May and operated at a steady flow through the end of October.

　

　

2.

The Waterfall Bar, a successful franchise on the West Coast, has established an outpost in our city. The tavern graces the revitalized near north side, part of the vibrant neighborhood that has grown up around the Ballet eatery and the old Heights movie-house now converted to a stage by the Comet and Meteorite Theater company. Indeed, the bar occupies what appears to have once been a hardware emporium, a narrow commercial space tucked in between the Ballet and the Comet and Meteorite playhouse.

Featuring iced water from more than 80 waterfalls world-wide, the Bar is a cascade-water enthusiast’s dream. The wait-staff is knowledgeable about the waters both on-tap and available in flights on the tasting menu. Patrons are seated in hospitable mahogany booths at tables inset with flat-screen interactive computer display pads. The screens provide spectacular views of the sources of the water on sale – images of towering cataracts and roaring cascades, often filmed by drone cameras hovering so close to the spray that the lenses are dewy with water-droplets. Customers place drink-menu orders by tapping on the interactive screens. At the bar, Waterfall offers five waters on tap – Iguassu, Niagara, Victoria, Dettifoss, and Reichenbach. Behind the bar, the five waterfalls featured on tap are shown in a panorama of plunging, surging water. Menu waters are served in iced shot-glasses. Water collected from the falls featured in the menu is stored above the tavern’s tap room in second-floor flasks at exactly 33 degrees and poured torrent-style – this means that the water is sluiced from a fifteen-foot height through vertical channels chilled to 15 below zero. These sluice-ways provide aeration to the falling water and are arrayed in a luminous display within a walk-in cooler – the channel taps look like light-sabers from the Star Wars movies and, when they are engaged to drizzle drink-water into shots, the hollow water columns make an audible whooshing noise. The bar is the place on the near North side to see and be seen and the dark common room lit only by images of plunging white water has an uniquely romantic atmosphere. The only thing detracting from the experience is that the bar is loud with the sound of plunging and rushing waters – conversation may be difficult for some people.

Of course, more important than atmosphere is the quality of the water on offer to the bar’s patrons. Specimens of cascade water are gathered from both brink and base of the falls, mixed together to provide a liquid representative of the cascade, and, then, subjected purification by ionization processes – the purification is designed to remove potentially harmful contaminants from the fall water while not affecting the drink’s flavor. The water carried over the brink of a cascade or waterfall has a distinctive taste due to dissolved organic materials, sediments borne by the fast-moving stream, and minerals acquired in the rapids, gorges, and plunge-pools – this flavor is accentuated by the lightning-strike ozone characteristic of fall-water, a factor that intensifies the natural scent and taste of the water. The tap waters were uniformly excellent – Dettifoss is hard, metallic, with a slight flavor of salmon; Niagara is industrial, cold and precise, with hints of rubber and plastic-factory pollutants; Iguassu has a heavy, muddy flavor while Victoria seems almost herbal like a rich tea. Needless to say, Reichenbach is mint-flavored with an element of chocolate and has an enigmatic Alpine finish. Eight ounce servings on tap are priced at between five and seven dollars.

Flights of water curated from less well-known waterfalls are more expensive – eight to 15 dollars a shot depending on the remoteness and relative inaccessibility of the waterfall sampled. We ordered a flight of Queensland, Australia fall-waters, six specimens from Stoney Creek, Purlingbrook, Barron, Wallaman, Millaa Millaa, and Zilly. All of the Queensland fall waters had a distinctly fruity flavor with a fresh floral finish. Millaa Millaa, in particular, was strongly flavored with a slight vein of chili pepper coloring the mango-citrus infusion. We finished our taste-tour with shots of the famous Nachi Falls from the Kii peninsula in Honshu. As expected that fall-water had a crystalline taste, purely water and nothing else, that is, no taste at all, cleansing the palette and bringing an end to a perfect evening of waterfall tasting.

The Waterfall Bar is open every night from 5 to 11 except Monday. All major credit cards are accepted.