PsychoGeography: Will Self

Over the edge

I'm beginning to suspect that Ralph may be "on" something - and I'm not just talking about the barrel he and Anna are tucked up in, in this arresting image. Wacky dare-devils is about the size of it, because, like latter-day Annie Edson Taylors (who, famously, shot the Horseshoe Falls - the Canadian side of Niagara Falls - in 1901, in a sealed barrel), the Steadmans have now done the same. Here's Ralph's own, forgivably grandiloquent account:

"Niagara is a miracle that still flows on the earth's surface. It is there to defy the arrogance of man. It drops something like 600,000 gallons over its edge every second ..." (A wild, self-aggrandising over-estimate by Ralph - in truth, daily flows are c. 5,000 cubic metres over each of the Falls; and - get this! - this is after some of the Canadian gush has been diverted to the US in order to bolster theirs.) "... and throws up a mist which fills the air with localised cumuli from which rainbows arc, drawing one's attention like a peacock's tail." (OK, Ralph, we'll let that overwrought image go, although you have been warned about this sort of thing.)

"We walked beneath its thunder in tunnels to witness the water pounding down and I thought 'Yeah! We can do it. All we need is a barrel.' We plummeted down like a living cork, turbulated for what seemed like hours ..." ("Turbulated" is Ralph's own coinage. I find it effective - evocative, even - while being in synch with the tendency of contemporary American English to verbify, and create such mongrel expressions as "weaponize".) "... plummeted yet again over the Horseshoe Falls and resurfaced back in the State of New York." (I'm not clear at this point exactly what the Great Man is saying: did they go over one falls, then pop back up, and go over the other? Frankly, this stretches my credulity although I have to commend Ralph on the economy of his description; lesser writers would have spun it out to book length.)

"Luckily, the champagne survived and with it we celebrated our own survival on the northern shores of Goat Island." (Fair enough.) "The ice bridge was beginning to build up so we were lucky. About 5,500 years ago the young Niagara River intersected an old riverbed that had been buried and sealed in the last Ice Age 18,000 years earlier. The Falls, however, scoured out the glacial debris and made the course clean and free, turned the river through 90 degrees and caused what is known today as Whirlpool Rapids." (I'm a little nonplussed by this paragraph, it seems a bit studenty: an attempt by Ralph, after the event, to justify this reckless adventure with a spurious, geological field trip. Much in the way that modern, so-called "explorers" claim they're man-hauling across the Antarctic ice-cap in order to compare the effects of extreme cold on the buttocks of British and Norwegian men.)

"Of course, the Americans had to have a piece of the action and the United States-Canadian International Border was born, although I suspect that it all first belonged to the Province of Ontario. Still, like all rivers, the Niagara had to find an outlet and wandered on through New York State until it found the broad Atlantic. It was a real bummer because we had to go back through Customs to re-enter Canada and meet up with our friends who had waited for us ..." (Hmm, the sideswipe at the USA is predictable - woeful, even - while the personification of the river is, well, sophomoric. As for the deadpan conclusion, believers will say it confirms the tale, while sceptics that it damns it. I like to keep an open mind, and will wait until Ralph and Anna's logbook has been examined by the relevant authorities.)

All I will say at this juncture about their escapade, is that the ease and spontaneity with which the Steadmans were able to "shoot" the most prodigious torrents in North America came as no surprise to me. Flying into Canada decades ago, I was struck by how tiny the Falls looked from the cabin window of my BOAC plane. Really, with the skyscrapers of Toronto appearing as little more that the whitened pillars of a loggia, and the surfaces of both Lake Erie and Lake Ontario as smooth as ornamental ponds, it was hard to conceive of Niagara as anything but a piddling water feature.

When I arrived at the resort town on the Canadian side of the border, my suspicions were confirmed: that had been no back-projection, against which Marilyn Monroe had emoted in the 1952 film of the same name (described by The New York Times as "A masterly example of fluid screen narrative"), but the actual Falls themselves! I was so piqued that I went straight to a hardware store and bought a thousand yards of clothesline. Then I mounted my bicycle, and, well, not to rain on Ralph's parade, but, the rest is history.