Funny thing happened on the way to Blackwater Falls
The Mountains VIII
Lately, I’ve been kicking off these email newsletters from the PCAS with an image of the cover illustrations that Harper’s New Monthly Magazine used for each installment of David Hunter Strother’s ten part series, The Mountains.
This time, however, I can’t help myself.
Without further ado, here’s Strother’s iconic illustration of Tucker County’s Blackwater Falls.
My favorite thing about this illustration is the guy at the bottom, taking it all in. He’s so very small in comparison to the rush of angry water that cascades from a precipice of some 60 feet at the head of Blackwater Canyon.
I wasn’t an art major, but maybe Strother included that guy to give his readers a sense of the scale of the Great Falls and perhaps to suggest that some things are bigger and more powerful than we are and should not be messed with.
Or maybe he simply thought it’d be cool to show a guy just chilling by the falls, as my son would say.
Strother first wrote about Blackwater Falls in 1853’s The Virginian Canaan, the light-hearted account of a hunting and fishing trip that made him a household name. He and his cronies camped “on the brow of a cliff, within thirty paces of the great fall, a situation of unequaled beauty and savage grandeur.”
He returned to the Blackwater Falls setting some 20 years later in the eighth installment of The Mountains - telling the tale of an arduous hike that almost didn’t happen.
The Blackwater River was apparently swollen with rainwater and the fictional Lawrence Laureate and his companions were being urged to wait when Laureate makes an appeal to pride, asking “can we look Moorefield in the face without having seen the Great Falls of Blackwater?”
Strother doesn’t say it explicitly, but it’s not hard to figure out that the lovely Rhoda Dendron was on Laureate’s mind - Moorefield being where she was staying with other members of the group that left Berkeley Springs together way back at the beginning of Part One.
What follows is a hike “of the most intolerable fatigue and difficulty that any of our party had ever experienced.”
With no footing to be found near the river because the water was running so high, Strother describes an exhausting hike along the steep, rocky, ankle-twisting mountainside, often on all fours through dense undergrowth of greenbrier and rhododendron.
And after spending the night on a flat rock that rose a couple feet above the waterline and made miserable by clouds of gnats that attacked in force, the party despairs of ever reaching Blackwater Falls. But they push on the next day and eventually triumph “at the accomplishment of a difficult and dangerous enterprise.”
“Taken altogether,” Strother writes of the scene, “ with its graceful lines, its rich and varied coloring, its singularly regular and art-like beauty, in the midst of this disjointed and hideous wilderness, I think this fall one of the most pleasing natural objects I ever beheld.”
Today, it’s not hard visit to Blackwater Falls.
It’s as easy as driving into Blackwater Falls State Park, parking your car in the lot above and taking a leisurely stroll down to the viewing platforms crowded with other people. No more crawling around on all fours through an unforgiving landscape.
From car to falls, it takes all of five minutes - and after snapping a few pics, you’re back in the parking lot thinking about the ice cream they serve at the snack bar. Or maybe a hot dog and a Coke to wash it down before browsing the gift shop for a Blackwater Falls t-shirt.
I posted Strother’s illustration of Blackwater Falls on Facebook as a preview for this edition of the PCAS newsletter and my friend Alyssa remarked how much she would love to experience a natural wonder like that for the first time - just “out in the wild,” like Strother did.
I agree.
The sense of accomplishment must have made beholding the Great Falls that much more satisfying.
“And thus we celebrated our victory,” Strother wrote, “each going forward, catching a cupful of the rainbow spray, and in devout silence drinking to his absent love.”
And then one of their number broke the spell, shouting “the home-bound horse needs no spur.”
There’s one in every crowd - the cheery bearer of bad news. It was time to get back on hands and knees for the difficult hike back to civilization.
Maybe being able to park a car within earshot of the falls isn’t so bad after all.
That’s it for me this week.
If you’ve already shared this edition of the PCAS newsletter, thank you for helping me get the word out and about.
If you haven’t?
Well, here’s another chance for you to help me grow this thing. And if you have any thoughts, you can leave them here, too. Oh … and if you’re not a member of the “Porte Crayon Applejack Society” yet, smash that button.
I’ll leave you with this pic of a frozen Blackwater Falls taken last week by another FB friend. Note the two ice climbers.
