Two of the most-talked-about aspects involve the water. Salamanca historians tell us that not too long ago, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers divers didn’t finish the underwater part of a dam inspection. Shadowy shapes buzzed them by the dam wall, many of them bigger than human size. The divers surfaced and refused to go back under. Surely these shadow figures were natural critters like lake sturgeon or muskellunge. They can grow . . . almost that big.
THE GREAT FALLS
(Seneca Country)
Waterfalls are sacred all over the world. There is only one this big—Niagara Falls—and its creation was an act of fury.
The geologists tell us it was a single cataclysm, an ice block of the melting glaciers that let loose the water of a vast prehistoric lake, shearing the Niagara Escarpment into the tortuous form we have today. The old Iroquois thought it was made by the death rolls of a titanic serpent, caught in the open by a Thunder Being and fried with a single bolt. Everywhere, though, the Great Falls of Niagara are counted as something special. The first whites who saw them just stood and gaped. No wonder: The area is packed with vision sites.
Goat Island just below the great falls is joined to the American side by a small bridge. To the Iroquois this was Turtle Island, named for their image of the world as a great body resting on the back of a primal turtle. It was sacred to them as an omphalos, a world still point or navel. Their shamans prayed and sacrificed here over the graves of great warriors. At its western edge are small islands, the Three Sisters, one of them three hundred yards from Horseshoe Falls.
Anyone who doubts the falls’ reputation should remember the famed harmonic convergence, almost single-handedly launched by art historian Jose Argüelles, author of a series of books mixing Mayan mysticism and New Age thinking. On August 16, 1987, the planets fell into the shape of a double triangle or Star of David, and a metaphysical Woodstock was proclaimed. Seven global power sites were chosen for the first dawn of the New Age. Among the elect: Machu Picchu in Peru, the Great Pyramid in Egypt, Stonehenge in England, Mount Olympus in Greece, Mount Fuji in Japan, the banks of the Ganges in India—and Niagara Falls in New York state.
Buffalo mystic Franklin LaVoie observes that waterfalls are symbols of the dissolving process in alchemy, thus purifying in emotional senses. Niagara Falls are for lovers and newlyweds: The falls’ energies dissolve rigid patterns in lives. They can be a new start in relationships.
Like all great forces—fire, electricity, wind—this one can be edgy. The bloodiest night in Canadian history—the 1814 Battle of Lundy’s Lane—took place within earshot of the surging waters. Freak accidents happen here with depressing regularity, and more people than we hear about take the plunge. Not every one of them is killed. When the survivors can talk, the first question they have to answer is usually, “Why did you come here to kill yourself?”
A good part of the time, the answer is, “I didn’t.” They remember coming to see the great falls, looking in, admiring, wondering, adoring, and . . .
Contemporary psychics say that anyone who listens long enough can hear ancient spirits in the natural hiss-roar. They must hear something. Ted Williams’s father, Eleazar, used to tell him about places on the Niagara that can just take you. “You look into them, they haul you in, next thing you know you are gone.” Anyone who has ever stood close to a speeding train and felt the pull of the wheels may understand. And this is vastly grander.
SNAKE HILL
(Mohawk Country)
Spook, snake, or devil: These are scarlet-letter place-names in the Northeast. Whenever you come across one of these in reference to a site, it bears examination.
Most of the early white settlers who developed these place-names were nurtured on the dualism—the good god, bad god—of Christianity. Anything that didn’t compute as saintly defaulted into the satanic. Calling something Spook Hollow, Devil’s Punchbowl, or Snake Hill might be a sign that it held an immeasurable power to an earlier society, a power that even the early settlers could feel.
Snake Hill is one of the most conspicuous natural monuments in the state. You can’t miss it as you drive or boat around Saratoga Lake. On a promontory that juts out from the eastern shore, it is a curious piece of geology, and it is coupled with others.
Locals will tell you that in most places, Saratoga Lake is no more than a dozen feet deep. Boaters can usually see the bottom on bright, still days. But just offshore from Snake Hill are declivities said to go 250 feet down. The fish breed and grow down there, they say—a fine place to wet a line. Something dropped into that abyss would be there a mighty long time.
Some conjecture that Snake Hill was named for a resident who liked his privacy. To keep it, he generated a legend of rattlers bigger, badder, and more profuse on Snake Hill than anywhere else in the region. Other stories feature a white man who raised and trained the snakes and showed them off to the public. (One day he got bit, and that was the end of that.) Still another rumor concerns an Algonquin who collected an abnormal bounty turning in just the rattles, taken as evidence of death. It turns out that he wasn’t harvesting the varmints, just trimming the rattles and waiting for them to grow back.
At the northeastern edge of Iroquois territory, Saratoga County was hunted and fished by Mohawk and Algonquin groups. By all accounts, Snake Hill
