‘‘Oh, you think nature is the only force that can create a proper waterfall? You think natural waterfalls are superior to manmade falls by default? You don’t think that the same civilization that harnessed atomic energy, that carved the faces of dead men into a mountain, that molded chickens into monstrous meat-fruits, can also make some water pour from a high place to a low one?’
This is the attitude with which ‘Grace Falls,’ an artificial waterfall placed, ostentatiously on the outskirts of Las Vegas, was constructed. Thirty stories high. One hundred feet wide. An average flow of 115,000 cu ft/s and pressurized such that its water doesn’t fall, exactly, but is jettisoned downward onto a reinforced cement floor where it vaporizes into a fine mist that occasionally coagulates into a vicious, if not predictable, thunderstorm.
‘It is the horrific reversal of a hydroelectric dam, wasting energy and water alike,’ raves The Clean Energy Coalition (‘raves,’ here, being used in the less positive, near hysterical sense).
What The Clean Energy Coalition can’t deny (though they’ve tried) is that ‘Grace Falls’ is a fairly impressive feat of engineering and it is absolutely mind-boggling to see in life. It roars like a tornado- is capable of bursting a man’s ear drums if said man were to approach the fall’s landing. It is capable of pressing a man’s body through a metal grate, effectively turning him into a series of gruesome hot dogs if said man, disoriented from the damaged ear drums, were to continue to charge forward under the water. It is capable of turning the man’s wife and eldest son into hot dogs as well, and the family’s lawyer too, as was demonstrated by a freak accident that wildly benefited those who own and operate ‘Grace Falls’ some weeks after the initial, less suspicious freak accident.
‘It will turn you into hot dogs,’ reads a sign just past the lower lookout and often obscured entirely by the mist, ‘It will turn everything you love into tubes.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside.
