Waterfalls

I went looking for two local waterfalls I’d just heard about because on satellite view they looked very close together, like just a couple dozen meters, on small creeks that braid through the Sooke Hills, but when I got there it wasn’t that simple at all, the first one was on the very edge of the provincial park with a Designated Trail and a Viewing Platform and there were people in unsuitable shoes walking very slowly and blocking the steps to the Viewing Platform and there were families in the pool below the waterfall, little naked babies and stunned-looking dads with sunglasses and moms picking up the naked babies in one arm and reaching for something else with their other hand like a diaper bag or a pair of pants, constantly reaching for something else, and they made me think of Emma Hamilton’s attitudes 

And I set off for the second waterfall that was just outside the park but the Designated Trail ended at the edge of the park so I followed a dirt path in the direction I thought was right and it dumped me onto a trashy-strewn railroad track that ended in the gleaming steel security gates of a fish hatchery and I couldn’t walk the thirty meters to the New Multi-Use Path to the second waterfall that satellite view said was just over there, so I crashed through the woods, and at the New Multi-Use Path I looked back and there was a big sign on a tree in the woods I’d just crashed through saying DO NOT ENTER WATERSHED WARNING ZONE INTERDICT or whatever 

And so I walked down the New Multi-Use Path a wide well-groomed trail in the middle of nowhere for bikes but you can’t step even a millimetre off it and then a bit further there was another gate across the New Multi-Use Path and a sign said CLOSED FERMEE INTERDICT July 16-21 for chemical treatment of the fish hatchery stream

And I just thought how it was forbidden to walk in the forest but they carved a big swath of Designated Trail and Multi-Use Path but they don’t connect because it’s not in the same park, and both are leaching gravel dust and bike tire plastics and boomer biker rage but it’s closed because they’re pouring chemicals into the stream that you can’t walk near because they don’t want you to get chemicals in the stream 

So I walked back up the Designated Path to my car and drove to the other end of the New Multi-Use Path and back toward the way I had come and ten kilometers and two hours later I stood half a kilometer from the first waterfall and the second waterfall was a dry tumble of dark rock in the July summer sun but the light was brilliant I want to say after all that it wasn’t worth it but it was, it was, it was, if only because now I know