Black Hole Falls is as scary as it sounds

When one of Anna’s friends invited us to accompany him and his parents on a trip to a secluded beach yesterday, I said sure. What better way to spend a sunny March afternoon than rock hounding in the fresh air, right? Wrong. As it turns out, there are LOTS of better ways to spend a sunny March afternoon when the route to the beach is actually a mountainous death trap.

Yes, a death trap, I tell you, and nothing – not even the way everyone else was bounding over fallen logs and leaping from wet, mossy rock to wet, mossy rock like a bunch of mountain goats – will convince me otherwise. The problem, you see, is that my knees are not made of bone and cartilage and ligaments like yours, but rather cracked toothpicks and dried gum and bits of half-rotten string. That’s a fact.

Anna’s lovely young friend and his wonderful parents couldn’t possibly know this, of course, but I bet they’ll ask for x-rays and a complete physical before ever inviting anyone on a trip with them in the future. Spending three hours with a red-faced, grunting, wincing, limping mess (that would be me) oughta do it.

The first two minutes were promising enough, but then Anna’s friend suggested we take a short detour to see a waterfall and that’s where it all went downhill. Like literally down a really steep hill. I stood at the top and watched all the others scamper down fearlessly and thought something along the lines of, ‘oh poopy.’ With my first tentative step down, my right knee made a horrible popping noise accompanied by a knifelike pain below my kneecap and I started to sweat because that’s my good knee.

It was a rough trip to the bottom – not because I fell, although I did consider hurling myself down the hill more than once, just to be done with it. My shaken confidence and inability to stand upright for more than two seconds helps explain the quality of my photo of the waterfall:

Water, trees, ice, beauty, yeah whatever – I’m dying.

But I didn’t die, happily or unhappily (it depends on how you feel about me) and after the kids failed to drown in the frigid water below the waterfall – not from lack of trying to fall in through foolhardy behaviour – we crossed that stream raging river you see in the foreground not once but twice. Everyone else had perfect balance, naturally, and the ability to leap from the tip of one icy, jagged rock to the next across the water while I, crippled and embarrassed by my lack of athletic ability, did not.

When we finally made it to the beach, I rejoiced and wondered if it would be possible for me to live there permanently, partly for the lovely scenery and partly because I didn’t know how on earth I would ever make it back out. The Bay of Fundy shore (along this part of Nova Scotia, at least) is rocky. Really rocky:

 Those rocks are a good twelve feet high, I’d say, and we had to cross them to get to the beach beyond.

 That’s everyone else charging on ahead while I tried (and failed) to keep up. At least no one could hear my whimpering back there.

 This is Charlotte climbing out of a cave. “Come in, Mommy, you have to see this,” she yelled. “It’s really neat.” Without a jet pack to propel me up there, I had to regretfully decline.

 See what I mean by rocky? I lived for those flat, pebbly areas.

 The red speck in the centre is Foster coming down the sheer face of a giant rock as if he were hopping from the top of a bunk bed.

 They’re fit, fearless explorers, as you can see. They get that from me.

Ha.

To celebrate making it out alive, we stopped at The Look-Off on the way home for my kind of sightseeing: drive up, park, stand on level ground, take pictures, repeat.

 Here, Foster, Anna and Charlotte commiserate over their failure to have lost me in the woods. Try harder, suckers! (Actually, don’t.)