Water Falling

The first year their summerhouse was built they counted a total of seventeen drips. Seventeen buckets and bowls filled slowly with forest rain tainted grey with new mortar. Water drops in the living room seeped through the patio above. Water drops in the kitchen next to the stove pooled their way across the slate floor.

The summerhouse, called so because that would be the only time it would be used, was built as a favor to the architect whose business had been all but wiped out by the after-war recession. The man liked this architect’s work; factories and offices. His wife needed convincing. 

‘He hasn’t built a house in, God knows – how many years?’ she said. 

They were being served breakfast in the morning room of their city home.

‘He’s working on bigger things,’ her husband said. ‘He’s designing cities nowadays. High-rise cities.’

She glanced back at her husband. She cared less for flights of fancy and more about practicalities, it was how she was made. ‘If he’s designing cities, why is he interested in a summerhouse in the middle of our forest. Ask yourself that question.’

Her husband looked down at the remnants on his breakfast and circled the plate with his fork. ‘He gave our son his first job.’ he said.

‘And then had to lay him off,’ she said. 

‘Well, we owe him, and he needs to keep his company afloat.’

She leaned back and smiled at her husband. ‘Are you and that son of yours in some sort of pact with each other?’ 

He took that smile as a yes, not that he needed one to build the house; he never needed her permission. Just her ‘yes’ as a mark of family complicity – the three of them, in agreement.

‘But if it’s to be built on our land then I have final say as to where,’ she said.

‘You’ll have final say. I promise,’ he said.

The architect was an idealist. He was still without commissions yet had been designing towns where future families may live happily side by side. Towns where the countryside would be nowhere in sight. The planners would call these places ‘Hillside Down’ and ‘Deepdale’, when they were nothing close to that description. They eventually became the same city slums they had been intended to replace. They became overgrown, absorbed back into nature. And then they were gone. 

During the 1936 recession, before President Roosevelt’s New Deal, house building was down and the cost of materials high. It was the same the world over. When business had been better several years before, the architect had hired their son for two summers after he’d finished graduate school. The workshop studio was out West, somewhere in the desert; almost invisible in the landscape, a line of low windows sketched across the horizon, easily mistaken for a line of sedimentary rock. Their son had described it to them over the phone not long after he’d arrived that first summer. His father liked the idea of blending the summerhouse into the landscape, making it a part of the breath of the forest. Isolated and obscured by the trees.

‘You mean dark,’ his wife said.

He unscrolled one of his own sketches across the kitchen counter for his wife to see. 

‘Not dark – just deep inside the forest. In the clearing here…’ he pointed with the end of his pencil, ‘…and here. That way the light will come from the gap in the trees above.’

She measured the distance from the red spot where the house would be to the stream, using her thumb and baby finger as a compass. ‘At least there we won’t be deafened by the falls,’ she said.

‘You love the falls,’ he replied.

She released her hand, and allowed the paper to furl back. ‘I also like to sleep.’  

His wife was originally against a house in the woods on account of the bugs. They’d inherited the track near to a stream and waterfall but as winter set in the stream froze over and the place became lifeless and barren. When he was a child, they took their son to see the high icicles, which stood sentry along the falls. They walked behind him and the leafless forest blurred ahead of them. Great slabs of ice across the bear pit below. They spent summers lying on the flat slabs that jutted out and encased the waterfall. His wife and their friends lay under the canopy of trees and sat on submerged boulders to cool off. And this was the part they both loved. A place for a few weeks in summer; a place limited to humans by nature. 

Visiting the forest to plot the summerhouse, they squelched their way to the falls. 

‘The place is too damp,’ she said.

‘It’s next to the stream, of course its damp,’ he replied.

‘And it freezes over in the winter.’

‘So?’

‘Pipes split. Basements flood. It’s not good to build next to a running stream.’

‘This is to be our place, he said. ‘It has to be here.’

It was their favorite place, despite the lack of light. The moon was bigger there than anywhere else, sometimes making the nights brighter than the days. As a child their son jumped from the stone slabs into the falls. When he was a teenager it was here that he camped with friends. And when he began dating, he brought his girls here and stood in silence listening to what sounds of the forest they could hear above the roar of the falls. It was easy to steal kisses here.

They invited the architect over from the desert to see the land and make some suggestions of what may or may not work. They marked an area with a stick twenty-five feet from the edge of the lake, to give an idea as to the edge of the property. Perhaps the living room, its windows looking down onto the valley. 

Their son drove him from the airport. ‘My parents are so looking forward to meeting you at last.’

The architect sat silently, tapping his cane.

  The son led the architect down the dirt path to where the hills started, and the path widened culminating in a concavity they called the Bear Pit. The architect stopped and they stood for a moment in silence. 

‘What?’ The son said.

‘That sound,’ the architect replied.

‘It’s just the falls. My parents are further down in the valley.’

The architect wandered in the direction of the sound.

The son found the architect standing alone on one of the flat stones his parents used as a suntrap, where they drank Gimlets from a thermos. A place where no conversations took place, and where the son played between them. As he approached, the architect held out a hand to silence him. They stood together and listened. The architect stepped up to the plateau next to the falls, and threw a stone toward the other ledge. 

  ‘It’s the centre of the forest,’ the architect shouted. 

‘It is?’

‘The nostrils.’ The architect bashed the side of the falls with his cane. ‘A tiny opening is the life of the entire forest. Vital.’ He shouted above the roar.

The son nodded as if he could hear what the architect was saying, as if he too was involved in the secret plans that there were to be no log cabins. No trees felled to make a wooden cabin in the woods. No taking away.

  ‘I’ll bring my parents to you,’ the son said.

The architect sat quietly, listening to the layers of sound which made up the thunder of the falls. Not just one noise; not a single sound, but continuous drips of different volumes adding up into a single roar. ‘Layers,’ the architect whispered to himself, ‘some less dominant than others.’ 

The architect left the following day with their scribbled idea for a bungalow located on stilts between two spruce escarpments. There was to be a master bedroom and bathroom, three additional bedrooms and a suite below for their son. The architect had nodded and smiled as they’d shown him the plans. 

By the time he’d flown back West, he’d already forgotten their plans. All he could remember were the sounds of the water as he’d stood on the plateau beside the falls. All he could feel was the spray on his face. When he got back to his studio, he gathered his trainees around and asked them how they might solve the problem. They mentioned bungalows and stilted ranch houses and again, he was silent. 

The architect didn’t touch upon the project again until he received a message months later, that the man was visiting the studio to see the plans for the summerhouse that week. Knowing no such plans existed, the trainees hid behind the drawing boards and plan chests as the architect began working on the house – two hours before the man was to arrive. 

The trainees watched the meeting from behind the glass partition as the architect revealed the work to his client. Three levels of a house had been mapped out on graphing paper: unfinished layers, terraces cantilevered out, unsupported, balancing. When the meeting was over the man left smiling, with a folder of sketches under his arm. The architect sat silent, as the trainees drifted back into the office.

‘The house will go over the falls,’ he said to himself.

They crowded around the drawings.

‘How will we build a house over the falls?’ he said.

After the first year, seventeen drips were reduced to ten and then eliminated altogether. And the roar of the falls remained below and around the house, humming through the sealed metal window frames. Metal, stone and concrete. And falling water.