Niagara Falls has Frozen Over

Niagara Falls is the largest waterfall in the world. Not because of it’s height or width, but because of its volume. It’s extremely rare for a waterfall to have such a continuous stream: more than 6 million cubic feet of water go over the crest line of the falls every second during the day. The sheer size of the thing usually keeps it from freezing over, and that’s probably a good thing! The falls might be breathtaking for tourists, the eighth wonder of the world really, surrounded as it is by fun amusements and chocolate shops and casinos. Big boats. And hotel rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the water.

To Niagara residents, however, the falls serve an important purpose. The waterfall keeps our lights on. We run on hydro power and those big power plants hulking beside the falls aren’t just for show.

The waterfall doesn’t usually freeze over, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the weather here is usually pretty mild. Our winters get cold enough to produce snow but not sheets of hard ice. Rarely do we get the kind of snowstorms that are common up North. Niagara is temperate, with mild summers and meh winters.

A few years ago, we had sustained low temperatures that made everything freeze over. I went out into the garden to check on the roses and they’d turned into crystal statues of stray blooms and abundant thorns, like something out of a fairy tale. It was easy to imagine a princess in her castle, inside my house, frozen in time. Easier still to imagine myself as that princess, since I could hardly go out. I checked on the roses and then ran back inside, shaking from the effort. My skin burned lobster-red from the contact.

“Did you see them?” he asked.

“They’re beautiful.” I turned over on my side, resting my head in my palm. He looked at me like I was beautiful, too, even though my face was breaking out in hives. “I wonder what Niagara Falls looks like.”

He turned on his back. “Niagara Falls never freezes over.”

“Still.”

“I’ll go take a picture for you.”

I couldn’t sleep at all that night. He held me on his shoulder, burning brightly until he fell asleep. I kept thinking about the fairy tale roses with their crystal encased thorns. I kept thinking about frozen Niagara Falls.

“It never freezes over,” I told the cat. He never abandons me to do silly things like sleep at night. “He’s right.”

His little ears were soft under my touch. The top of his head was smooth and flat. He flattened it more, like a hammer head, and pressed himself against my chest. It was cold. The kind of cold that penetrates your entire body. My bones felt like ice cubes in a drink.

“But imagine if it did.”

He curled himself into a ball underneath my armpit. The claws of his back legs dug rhythmically into my side. My cheeks burned the way they used to when I had a crush. My tongue swelled. The cat’s claws dug into my side in perfect rhythm. You could have played a song on his beat.

In the morning, he put his coat and boots on with the snow pants he dragged out of the basement someplace and bid me (and the cat, who was sleeping by then) a fond farewell. He kissed me on the burning cheek with ice cold lips and ran off into a snow bank. It swallowed him.

“Come back! It’s probably not frozen over anyway!”

“It’s frozen,” he said.

“How can you tell?”

“The power’s out.”

The cat kept a respectable day-time sleep schedule, and the power was out, no internet, no TV. I read books and wrote in my journals until he came back, knocking his boots off on the doorstep. He came in looking like a real character: snow was piled three inches thick on his hair, and it coated him from head to toe. His breath had turned to crystal in his beard, and his face burned red like mine, though I hadn’t been outside that long.

His crystal beard and moustache split, forming stalactites and stalagmites around his burgundy mouth. He grinned, and he nodded. As if in celebration, the power went back on.

“It is?”

He nodded furiously. “It IS!”

“It’s not moving at all?”

He shook his head and sent snowballs flying everywhere.

He showed me the pictures he’d taken on the TV. Hundreds of them, from all angles. From both sides of the border. He’d been taking them for hours. The majestic waterfall, frozen. Every small detail besides. Every last icicle hanging from the cave openings. Close-ups of each frozen lamp post coated in sheets of ice. A tiny baby shoe someone had forgotten, preserved in an ice-block. White seagulls hunched like old men by the fire. City workers shouting to eachother from inside and outside of their trucks, trying to clear the roads. He’d even caught the winking sparkles. The beautiful reflections. Everything. Every picture but himself.

So I turned the camera on him and finished the job. There he was, grinning on the threshold of our front door, ice sparkles on his beard and love sparkles in his eyes.

“It really did freeze.”

“It really froze.”

“I never thought we’d see it in our lifetime.”

“I’m sorry you had to go to Niagara Falls alone.” I know he misses going with me. “I feel like such a burden.”

“You’re not a burden,” he says, tears in his eyes. I don’t want to hurt him.

So I tell him to go eat the ice cream. What’s left of it, since the power’s out.

Love is one of those funny things that survives. Love and waterfalls.

Niagara Falls is 12,000 years old.

I wonder if, in 12,000 years, it will remember him.