Get ready to pucker.
I was twenty four years old, six foot seven, three hundred pounds, and hanging out the side of a boat with a camera that cost more than my car. Six in the morning. Fog on the water. Three of us, and two of us were working very hard to look like we were not scared.
The captain had not spoken in four minutes. Then he leaned over and said the four words I have thought about every day since.
I want to be clear about what happened next. Every orifice in my body puckered. Every single one.
The river was the Niagara. In 1861 a captain named Joel Robinson took a boat down through that water and it broke him. He never worked the river again and he was dead two years later. Down broke a man. In a hundred and eighty years, nobody had ever gone up.
A boat builder out of Idaho decided he would. The locals told him nobody can do it and anyone who ever tried died. He asked if I wanted to come film. I said yes before I knew what river it was.
We hit the wave hard and the boat started to turn. Oh, here we go, we are about to tip. He corrected. We came over the top.
Three of us on that boat. Three. And we made enough noise to fill a stadium. Sixty thousand people worth of noise out of three human beings at six thirty in the morning.
The Coast Guard came out. Then Border Patrol, Homeland Security, the Canadians, and the Maid of the Mist blowing every horn she had. Once the official part was over you had grown men in uniform grinning at us going, no, really, how did you do that. By lunch a pilot had flown me over the Horseshoe. Best day of my life, and it was not even the afternoon.
Then I walked the bridge to shoot the Canadian side, and customs stopped me on the way back. Six foot seven. Three hundred pounds. Twenty four. Alone. Crossing a border with a camera the size of a small child and a tripod that looks like a weapon. Of course they stopped me. I would have stopped me.
Thirty minutes.
That night we shot fireworks over the falls and what I felt was, yeah, it's fine. Three hours earlier I had been screaming loud enough to fill a stadium. Nothing about the falls had changed. I changed, and then I reached back and changed the whole day behind me.
That agent was not a villain. He was polite, he was doing his job correctly, and he was right to stop me. He did everything right, and it cost me a day I never got back.
And he will never know. He went home that night and had dinner. He has never thought about me once.
Neither will you.
