What might have been millennia of quiet days and nights for Princess Louisa Inlet are blanketed by the incessant conversation of Chatterbox Falls. We were only the most recent of yachtsmen to make the pilgrimage to this coliseum of beauty to be lulled into serenity by the constant murmur of the rushing waters.
At first we just heard a great crack above the falling waters’ sound, ...a sharp report that had no apparent source. It ricocheted off the nearer walls, then repeated itself further and further down the Inlet. As the initial rifle-shot sounds echoed themselves to sleep, a growing growl filled the basin of basalt we were anchored in and we finally looked up to see that a gargantuan slab of stone high up the cliffs had shifted downward, teetering on its heel as jagged shards the size of apartment complexes rushed to get out of its way.
Beginning in a slow rotation outward, the grey behemoth lost its grip on the mountain and added a downward slide in giving up its millennial fight against gravity and erosion. The evergreen forest grappling up the jagged ramparts of the mountain’s fortified face trembled in victory as stalactites of dripping stone wept for the loss. One of the great warriors was falling to its doom.
Time caught up with the glacial pace of the first few seconds and thousands of tons of crystalized earth began to scream down through the wooded walls above the bay. The main body of rock, though, did not bounce down the cliff, it ripped its way. Tall cedars were scattered in a cataclysm of green and brown, exploding outward whole and in huge toothpick splinters. The fallen soldier’s dive into the water was led by thousands of boulders, collateral damage that splattered the mirrored surface.
A huge wave rose upwards in counter-point as the warrior stone drove downward, building continuously as the rock tumbled to its silent sleep. It was a great green knight wearing foaming white plumes that charged through the anchorage with a battalion of foot soldiers in flanking maneuver, lifting up 40 foot yachts and shaking them at the ends of their anchor rodes. On the lucky boats the lines parted and they simple rode up and over, but my Mabrouka had 120 heavy feet of 3/8 inch triple-B galvanized chain and a 60 pound plow anchor set firmly into the rocky bottom that gave up the fight less easily than the laminated mahogany and spruce sprit it hung from.
After the waves passed and Mabrouka settled peacefully on the field of battle, the sprit’s shattered structure hung akimbo from her quivering bow, still threaded to the bulwarks by the unyielding chain. The wave, like that first great sound we’d heard, eventually quieted itself against the granite shores around us and the water resumed it’s silent, glassy observation of the sky overhead. Yachts gleaming in shiny stainless steel and white fiberglass rolled themselves back to stillness. The ones at the dock on the far side of the bay bumped and jostled against each other and the floats until they, too, came to a disheveled rest.
The space left by the great catastrophe was filled with silence while the pitiful human bystanders tried to absorb nature’s sudden pronouncement on their insignificance. Five thousand sheer feet of cliff, though newly scarred, resumed its watch from high above.