...JUBILANT JOURNEY (conclusion)

As soon as we left The Sportstown, I knew we were about to hit the border in no time at all. It helped that my Geography is proficient, uhmm, but there was actually a tell-tale sign right inside the train. A uniformed woman with badge, 2 way-radio, curious eyes, the works, was collecting the forms we signed some minutes prior and was casually interviewing passengers as to the purposes of their border-cross. "Customs", life professor whispered to me, and I instantly thought of those espionage movies where clandestine agents of some governments cautiously rendezvous with their contacts inside trains under the noses of border patrols. I could have played out a game by deliberately trying to look suspicious to the prying eyes of the lady-agent but suddenly got out of the little stupor when a family of about 5, Indian looking all, were herded out of the bus by another Customs agent. "Will they be sent back?", I asked l.p. "They could even be detained", she retorted, "That sucks", I said as I slumped on my seat and decided to keep quiet.

Sure enough, we crossed the border in no time at all and the voice on the speaker proudly announced - as he must have proudly announced a thousand times in his entire career as a proud announcer - "There it is at your left ladies and gentlemen, the world famous yadda, yadda, yadda...". So we all obediently turned our necks sideways like inimitable onlookers gawking at a scene of a crime; some kids at my back were asking, "Where is it?, where is it?", and I could have answered, "The hell would I know" were it not for the fact I was still thinking of the Indian family. Actually, the only thing I could see from my seat was the emerald waters of the river and the awesome steel bridge accross it, but like those kids I could not see the cataracts. Maybe we were the ones suffering from cataracts. So, instead, I closed my eyes hoping to feel the rage, wishing to hear the thunderous roar so they say, but all I heard was the chug-chug-chug of our stupid train.

Fast forward to an hour. The cataracts were before me, before my eyes. Funny how they're called cataracts, all three of them, while I considered the only similarity between these wonders on the one hand, and the disease on the other, being their deftness to cloud the eyes. The rest were differences: for the former you sing out loud and rejoice in having been given the chance to see, for the latter you only curse in having been condemned with the opposite...

Hundreds of thousands of cubic ft/sec. of water go down the precipices at a furious pace and I begun to wonder how the ground was able to withstand the ferocity of falling water, at such a tremendous amount. It was unbelievable, the meeting of the falling water and the river it was falling unto was so determinedly violent that a cloud of mist, huge and tall as a building, was a permanent effect. There are several cataracts in the world that could be more enormous than these ones: between Zambesi and Zimbabwe, between Brazil and Paraguay, but where was the need to see those when these alone already overwhelmed you? I mean, they were so enormous and so huge, the gorge so deep, that, well, they looked so small. Why? The enormity was so unbelievable your eyes seemed to tell yourself nothing could be that big.

And to think that these were all about water, the journey of water, from lake to precipices to river to wherever. Just like our journey. It was, and will be, a journey to wherever.
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* Charles Wright
The Other Side Of The River
** Henry W. Longfellow
Paul Revere's Ride
***Shintaro Tanikawa
River
****Antonio Machado
Passageways
*****Agnes Nemes Nagy
Between