Pondering Niagara’s Lost Innocence

NIAGARA: A History of the Falls by Pierre Burton, (Penguin Books, $14.95).

Six months ago, I’d have smirked at the idea that Niagara Falls was anything but a tired icon for the most prosaic of travelers. I had glimpsed Niagara once from afar and written it off as the tamest of tourist traps, an over-hyped honeymoon destination. Then last summer I took a closer look. So when I spotted “Niagara,” I snatched it up.

For millions of years, geological forces worked to create this shale and dolostone escarpment. For another 12,000 or so, the Niagara River whittled away at the ice-sculpted sediment. And for the past 250 years, the entrepreneurial spirit has been at work on the falls.

It is this most recent history that rivets, offering a postcard-perfect look at humanity’s tragicomic efforts to find its place in nature.

Eventually, we shook off our fear of this roaring beast and confronted it as an opportunity and inconvenience. We spanned it with bridges, walks and railways. We domesticated it with a small power plant, then a grist mill and finally with power plants that suck a full half of the river’s flow away from the falls.

But we have been most ingenious and insane in our efforts to accentuate the fall’s gradually diminishing majesty. For the first extravaganza, which drew thousands of cheering spectators, we loaded two bears, a buffalo, two foxes, a raccoon, an eagle and 16 geese onto an old steam ship and cut it loose above the falls. Those notorious barrels and tightropes followed.

Standing at the brink of Horseshoe falls last summer, I was able to screen out, for a moment, the gaudy surroundings and focus on the water’s rush. If I’d read this book, I’d have realized I was seeing a fragment of something early European explorers considered so frightening as to be “sublime,” “a terrifying phenomenon in the heart of the North American wilderness.”

This book will make readers appreciate the falls and pine for innocence lost.

Quick trips:

ROMANTIC CALIFORNIA & THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST by Ken Christensen (Lamp Post Productions, $14.95). Real romance is better discovered than planned: The seedy motel that seems so cozy compared to the storm-battered coast outside; the pie-scented cafe found at the precise moment spirits flag. Still, plans can expedite the unexpected, and this book offers a variety of suggestions.

ADVENTURES TO IMAGINE by Peter Guttman (Fodor’s Travel Publications, $17). The sensuous lines of a desert canyon and the striated sides of an iceberg have more in common than geology. Such forms possess an allure that makes a certain type of traveler long to touch and explore. Immediately. Guttman’s action photographs and immersing snippets of text offer just enough seductive sense of what it’s like to sail a tall ship or chase tornadoes, to lure new travelers from their armchairs.

THE MAVERICK GUIDE TO OMAN by Peter S. Ochs II (Pelican Publishing, $19.95). Oman? This Middle-Eastern nation would seem to have about as much appeal to a globe-trotter as Baker has for someone touring California. This guide’s matter-of-fact presentation, however, makes Oman’s landscape and customs at once unfamiliar and inviting; it triggers the travelers’ most basic urge: to connect with people who are different from us.

Sipchen is a writer for the Times’ Life & Style section. Books to Go appears the second and fourth week of every month.