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Rainbow Tourist

Paterson, NJ - kc - Sunday, October 16th, 2005 : goo

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I always wanted to go find this waterfall, cause I heard it was big. And it was somehow hard to believe, that it could be in the middle of a city in New Jersey. Today seemed like a good day, because the sun was out. And this is after seven days of rain. According to Wikipedia, it's 77 feet high, the second highest on the East Coast after Niagara. I forgot to get a map of the city, so first I ended up driving around some flooded streets and then I asked some very nice people in a laundromat who told me to just follow the road to the top of the hill. So I did, then turned left, and soon I found it. It was the mist rising next to the roadway that gave it away. In 1778 Alexander Hamilton got so excited about the power of the falls he wanted to build the "nation's first planned industrial city" around it, according to Wikipedia. That never happened, exactly, although there were textile mills and Paterson was famous for silks. Someone has written "A Proud Platano!!!" on Hamilton's statue. I don't know exactly what that means, but it does say something about how Spanish Paterson seems to be, apparently lots of Mexicans and Peruvians and others, plus a substantial Turkish community. At any rate, there was a festive air around the falls--it's not often it gushes like this, I'd imagine, and lots of people had their cameras out.

Somehow I didn't quite get what was being fed by the falls, maybe some kind of power plant, but any rate this guy was outside regularly, operating what seemed essentially to be a device that scraped underwater debris off screens that protected the turbines.

Here's one load of debris coming up. You may be able to make out the turtle down at the bottom. I said to the guy, "Hey, you've got a turtle." He said, "You want it? Go around to the gate."

So I had a turtle. The turtle was briefly a celebrity, recorded by cameras and kids with video cameras and, after a special plea, held up to a startled baby in the back of a car. One man wanted to name it "Ned."

I wasn't quite sure what to do with the turtle. Eventually I crossed the road and saw a spot where you could look at a "race," one of the wide ditches that I think used to feed water to the mills. It seemed better for the moment than the surging waters. If you see a dark blur under this surface, that's the turtle.

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GGP: A major adventure! Much enjoyed.

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