“DON’T GO HERE. PEOPLE DIE HERE, LIKE, ALL THE TIME, D00D”. that’s what it says on the tourist board when you cross the highway to take a closer look at Boulder Falls in the snow at least it says something like that which in effect says if you climb up here when there’s a perfectly icy disjointed loose graveled and shiny rock laden path down here then you deserve to plummet 10 metres to your death in the icy flow of the falls you stupid ass why did you come here anyway it’s not that exciting its not like niagara or anything even if you’re from the UK right you’ve got waterfalls don’t you jesus. still, notwithstanding the advice I thought I’d check out the falls again because there were some pretty nice snow covered sections of the river on the way up that caught my eye when I should have been looking at the road and the snow trucks and explorers coming in the opposite direction on the carriageway I’d just crossed over onto which the suzuki didn’t repond to particularly well to as I screeched back across to the right using full lock and whizzing the wheel through my hands like steve mcqueen on lombard street and so I though the falls might yeild some nice winter shots I could tag with ‘winter’ and ‘snow’ and ‘winter snow’ and stuff like that in flickr and join all sorts of new groups called things like ‘snow’ and ‘winter snow’ and ‘joys of winter snow – READ THE BLOODY RULES’ and things like that and post my winter snow shots and see how many people completely ignore them because well they’re just a bit rubbish next to the nikon d70s club who’ve trekked up the himalayas and have stunning sherpa silhouette shots looking down at the cloudbase with the sun overexposing on the virgin snow at the highest peak in burma with a flock of eagles flying past in the background waving free tibet flags in their beaks while an airbus380 leaves a heart-shaped vapour trial in the distance so my grainy closeup of a bit of cold water and half my foot doesn’t really cut it and even though someone who lives in norwich and so is polite enough to leave a comment like ‘er, I like the movement on that, I think’ there’s not really much to stop me just deleting it except I’ve geotagged it now and I can’t be bothered
after a couple of experiments with the self-timer and the edge of a cliff I’m getting pretty cold anyway and I really should be heading back to the hotel now to contemplate the strategy for web globalization over an endlessly distributed and fragmented internal infrastructure soon to be converged around common content services and the extension of the software lifecycle to incorporate the whole research, get, subscribe support process when we’re looking at how to accomodate licence purchases with briefcases full of cash in China and so I head back to the suzuki generous and attempt a complicated reversing manoevre into the path of an oncoming snow truck while in a forward gear and hanging over the edge of the river like something out of the Italian Job. in the end I just kind of screech wildy around while everybody pulls up and watches but I put on my best ‘sickly grin I’m a tourist and even worse I’m british’ look and end up looking a bit like john cleese which mostly always gets me off the hook and I even throw a silly walk in for good measure usually but right now I’m content with just sticking my hand out of the wrong window in a kind of apologetic but thankful gesture which probably ends up looking like I’m giving everyone the finger but now I’m careering down towards the 36 and so I don’t really care anymore until I hit a school bus and bounce into the front yard of a surprized looking family from Wisconsin who’ve only rented the place for the weekend.
I made that last bit up about hitting the school bus by the way, but it happened like that in my mind…