minnehaha falls

After dinner, Connie and I drove up to Minnehaha Falls. The last time I saw the falls my grandparents were alive; mid-1960s. And back then, it was known locally as Hiawatha Falls; and back then, there were stairs from the bottom of the valley up to the cascade.

What I don’t remember are the mosquitoes. Holy shit! As soon as we got out of the car, we were assailed by swarms of stinging, miserable insects. As the locals like to remind me, “June is mosquitoes only month, but July, well the black-flies wake and join the swarms.” And people wanna live here, WHY?

The section of Hiawatha Park with the Falls, is run by the Kiwanis Club of Sault Ste Marie and the organization maintains a paved road down into the valley. From the parking lot, we walked up the ravine, on foot-paths beside the falls. (Connie mentioned that when she was much younger, she and her friend Jodi jumped from one of the outcrops and into the ice-cold pool at the bottom of the falls.)

Tomorrow, I get to see the area again from an airplane. Two things surprised me on this trip – the profusion of lilacs in the west-end and the various shades of green as spring fills the trees with leaves. Coming up, I saw the variant greens from the air, but wasn’t sure why I was seeing this spectrum of green. Then, I saw the variants again when Connie and I went to her cottage and realized I was looking at different trees coming-into-leaf at different points in their development towards a full crown of leaves.