The Smoke That Thunders

The torrential downpour at Victoria Falls, on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, is not the average way to turn twenty five. 500 million cubic meters of water plummet 100 meters into the gorge each minute, and there just aren't many places - if any - like it in the world. From a helicopter you see the real prowess of it all, spreading out 2 kilometers, the mist shooting up into the air and visible from miles away. I stood at the adjacent island for quite some time, soaked from head to toe, water coming and going from every direction, entranced by the way nature does things, and how simple and complex that can be.

The Kololo Tribe, living around the Falls in the 1800s, called it "Mosi-oa-Tunya," or, "the smoke that thunders," and as I find true with many tribes and pre-colonial, pre-industrial nations around the world, living before the era of telescopes and microscopes and science, they have the simplest and sometimes best way of explaining things. We can know very clearly how something works - that a basalt plateau has many large cracks filled with weaker sandstone, and that over the course of 100,000 years the falls recede upstream, eroding the sandstone to form these very gorges - but no one really cares when they look out at it. We know we are seeing something miraculous, the culmination of a million tiny and improbable factors over a period of time much longer than we will ever witness first hand, and that is quite enough.

One of these very witnesses was David Livingstone, who explored the Zambezi River in 1855. He was the first European to see the Falls, and in the most British of ways wasted no time honoring his home country by naming the site after the Queen. "No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It has never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight," he said shortly after discovery. People have come and gone and thought similar thoughts since the very beginning, no matter their level of intellect, and these are things I always find comforting. In today's world, we are hardly ever alone. Consider the best things and the worst things, and someone out there has no doubt been through it before, survived, and died an old man better for having done it. 

I'm well into my 25th year now, but I still think back on that weekend trip down south: the roaring sounds, the fresh smells, and the invisibility that turned to visibility as the spray of water came and went with the wind. 25 years is a drop in the ocean. There are some things - from a family to a river to the stars - far bigger than ourselves. Seeing it that way is both humbling and empowering. As we sit and tell ourselves our lives are volatile, hopeless, and out of anyone's control entirely, trying to keep our heads above water on a day-to-day basis, things just keep on moving, so we are best suited to find some level of peace in the short time we have - and guard that inner peace with everything, because without it there is nothing.