A year ago, I experienced cascades of emotion and healing at Niagara Falls.
As with many people, 2025 was an incredibly stressful year for me, partly due to factors affecting US society at large and partly due to unique personal factors. Among the personal factors was the difficult illness and death of an aunt, who I felt a unique sympathetic connection to and who I felt I had only just started to really get to know right before she became ill. I was staying in Niagara Falls to attend her memorial service held in a town a few miles downriver.
I had been to Niagara Falls many times before, but most of those trips were before I turned 12 and I was at the mercy of my parents’ choices. I remember once having a conversation about what side of the Falls we were going to visit that time. We had been enough times to both sides that I had a preference. And while I don’t remember which side I preferred, it was the opposite of the one my parents preferred. The last time I visited Niagara Falls, I was 18, on a weekend adventure with my dormmates, in the middle of the night in the middle of winter.
Twenty years later, visiting the Falls for the first time when I had full control over the choices of the how, when, and where I explored, it was like visiting for the first time ever. Some sights were vaguely familiar, particularly close to the Falls, but there was so much that I didn’t recognize.
Niagara Falls is so much more than the Falls themselves. Frederick Law Olmsted recognized this and successfully fought to create Niagara Falls State Park to protect the sublime encounters with nature against the fast encroaching industries spurred by the power of the water.
While most of the industries are now gone and Urban Renewal rushed through much of downtown Niagara Falls leaving behind soul-crushing expanses of wide, empty roads surrounding empty islands of parking lots and vacant lots; the river rushing around islands of soul-soothing woods on its way to the roaring cataract remains much as it was 100 or even 150 years ago.
As I walked down paths and over bridges designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, I felt that I could see what he saw and feel what he felt.1 Then, as I crossed a bridge to the Three Sisters Islands, I felt my aunt and uncle join me.
A few years before on the day before we were to leave for my uncle’s memorial, I developed a stomach flu and had to stay home. I was able to watch the live stream of the event as I lay miserable in my bed and I posted some thoughts on his death, but my mourning felt incomplete. As I walked in my aunt & uncle’s footsteps across the Three Sisters Islands, taking photographs of the same views that appealed to the three of us, this felt like the true moment of memorialization. While we held different views of God and religion, we were aligned on the majesty and wonder of this special place. This place doesn’t hide from the raw and the rough of life, instead it shows that peace and beauty live intermingled with tumult and destruction.
- And, by the way, I was right about the flamingo boats. Frederick Law Olmsted hated the Maid of the Mist and the spectacularization of nature. He definitely would have hated to see flamingo boats treading the water of his lake in Buffalo. ↩︎