Waterfall in the sky

 

I can still remember when I first saw it. I was here in this grand, Belle Epoque City as a visitor, a tourist, hardly imagining I would one day live here!

Aw, who am I kidding? My darling wife and I were both fiercely imagining that we would one day live here, almost from the start. But we have vivid imaginations, we have dreamed thousands of things, and the important thing is: I didn't seriously believe that we would one day live here, let alone in just three years.

Anyway, in this singular past moment, I was sitting at an outdoor cafe, and I looked up into the sky and saw a waterfall. I was pretty sure I was imagining it. First of all, through the broken clouds of the day, it looked like an apparition. And my experience with this city was too new at that point to understand how many things there are here that seem too good to be true, but nevertheless... are. Secondly, waterfalls don't normally work like this: They don't start at the top of mountains, with water falling out of thin air, and this one kind of did. It didn't make a lot of sense at first.

So I puzzled over the waterfall in the sky for a long time.

This is the Cascade Du Chateau, built in the 1800's on Colline Du Chateau. It is part of the network of parks, ruins, cemetaries, trails, and viewpoints overlooking the city there, and I don't and probably never will understand why this feature isn't the symbol of the city and a world famous landmark besides, more like The Eiffel Tower, La Sagrada Familia, or The Trevi Fountain. If this city could be said to have a single famous symbol, it is probably the iconic view of its coastline and the Promenade Des Anglais from a vantage point somewhere in the vicinity of the waterfall. And that is all terribly lovely, but this? This is...

A waterfall in the sky!

It is of course a lovely place to visit, and looks best when it's turned on full blast, which I don't think is always the case. I mean it's not a real waterfall, but it's all the better for that. If one consults the tourist literature, and the babble of the Internet, one can take in the world's mild delight in the scene before it drifts off into rhapsodies over all the nearby views. But that's not really my point. And it's not exactly the key thing about it, as charming as it is.

No, the key thing is how it perches in the sky like a little vision of heaven.

You walk the beach, or sit in a cafe, or wander the city, and then something calls you. You look improbably up, and in the clouds you can see just an odd little glimpse, into paradise, straight into the abode of the gods.