Chapter Nine – Nate

“I accompanied him to the waterfall…

It’s a crashing torrent cascading through a dramatic gorge. It descends a series of steep drops to finally surge over a thirty foot free fall where it comes to meet swift water at the bottom. There are three spots where you can jump from which land you into the deep creek beneath the falls, a fifteen foot jump, a thirty foot jump, and an eighty foot jump. I never had been to the spot but he took me there late one night, just the two of us. There was no moon, it was dark. We started climbing down the cliffs which made me immediately apprehensive. The first climbing I had done since the incident. It was only a small cliff, and we climbed it briefly with ease.

“Here, Mike, shine the flashlight down there so I can see where I am jumping,” he said, perched on the fifteen foot jump. It looked like fun in the daytime but not in the dark. He jumped. Didn’t even think about it, just jumped. He hit the black water with barely a sound over the churning falls beside him and as he surfaced, was quickly washed away downstream with the raging current. He swam to the banks and climbed back up to me,

“Wow!” he said, “the river is definitely stronger at night.” Then he went and stood on the lip of the thirty footer. “Are you gonna do it?” he asked.

“I want nothing to do with it!” I called up to him over the crashing din of the moving water. After his swim, we sat there in the grass with our backs against the cliffs and looked at the stars. We talked to each other. Nate was good to talk to, he was intelligent, he would understand. Nate would talk and be open.”

This story is about the second tragedy at Glacier.

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