Niagara Falls is the most powerful waterfall in North America, and almost none of that power comes from its height. Fifty-seven metres is an ordinary drop. The volume is not: four of the Great Lakes empty through this one notch on the Ontario–New York border on their way to the fifth, three thousand tonnes of water a second, and the crowd at the rail is watching a river disappear. Three falls share the view. The American and the narrow Bridal Veil come down on the United States shore. The Horseshoe, a curved green wall over eight hundred metres around, takes almost all the water, and from the Canadian promenade you face all three. Even this has a tap. A 1950 treaty lets both countries pull the river into power stations before the brink, half of it at night and all winter, so a summer afternoon carries double what goes over in December.
Everything else here is a way of getting closer. The boats go in furthest. The Maid of the Mist from the American bank and Niagara City Cruises from the Canadian push to the foot of the Horseshoe, into a cloud where you cannot see, cannot hear and will not stay dry. At Table Rock an elevator drops you thirty-eight metres through the rock into tunnels cut in 1889. They end at openings a few metres behind the water, which from there is a white wall and a noise with nothing else inside it. Downstream, where the gorge bends and the river winds into a whirlpool, a small car has crossed on six cables since 1916. Every night projectors wash all three falls in slowly changing colour. None of this handling has made the place feel safe. In 1901 a sixty-three-year-old schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor sealed herself into a padded barrel, had it towed into the current above the Horseshoe and climbed out alive, the first person ever to survive the drop. She went over on purpose at the exact spot the boats now queue to come within a few metres of.