If you're looking for a family vacation that involves watching enormous quantities of water go off a cliff, you can't beat Niagara Falls. We went there recently with several other families, and our feeling of awe and wonderment can best be summed up by the words of my friend Libby Burger, who, when we first beheld the heart-stopping spectacle of millions of gallons of water per second hurtling over the precipice and thundering into the mist-enshrouded gorge below, said, "I have to tinkle."
The falls have been casting this magical spell ever since they were discovered thousands of years ago by Native Americans, who gave them the name "Niagara," which means "Place Where There Will Eventually Be Museums Dedicated, for No Apparent Reason, to Frankenstein, John F. Kennedy, Harry Houdini and Elvis." And this has certainly proved to be true, as today the area around the falls features an extremely dense wad of tourist attractions. In addition to the museums (both wax and regular), there was a place where you could see tiny scale models of many world-famous buildings such as the Vatican; plus one of the world's largest floral clocks; plus, of course, miniature golf courses, houses of horror and countless stores selling souvenir plates, cups, clocks, knives, spoons, refrigerator magnets, thermometers, folding combs, toothbrushes, toenail clippers, hats, T-shirts, towels, boxer shorts and random slabs of wood, all imprinted with what appears to be the same blurred, heavily colorized picture, taken in about 1948, depicting some object that could be Niagara Falls, or could also be hamsters mating.
Of course, the big tourism attraction is Niagara Falls, a geological formation caused by the Great Lakes being attracted toward gravity. Also limestone is involved. We learned these facts from a giant-screen movie that we paid to get into after the children became bored with looking at the actual falls, a process that took them perhaps four minutes. They are modern children. They have Nintendo. They have seen what appears to be a real dinosaur eat what appears to be a real lawyer in the movie "Jurassic Park." They are not about to be impressed by mere water.
The movie featured a dramatic re-enactment of the ancient falls legend of "The Maid of the Mist." This was an Indian maiden whose father wanted her to marry a fat toothless old man who, in the movie, looks a lot like U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee Chairman and noted stamp collector Dan Rostenkowski wearing a bad wig. The maiden was so upset about this that she paddled a canoe over the Falls, thus becoming one with the Thunder God, the Mist God, the God of Canoe Repair, etc. At least that is the legend. Some of us were skeptical. As my friend Gene Weingarten put it: "I think she became one with the rocks."
Since that time a number of people have gone over the falls in barrels, not always with positive health results. What would motivate people to take such a terrible risk? My theory is that they were tourists. They probably paid ADMISSION to get into the barrels. I bet that, even as they were going over the brink, they were videotaping the barrel interiors.