About 3km above Tianxiang are the lovely, secluded Wenshan Hot Springs. Situated next to the Taisha River, the springs are enclosed in an open basin of solid marble and surrounded by dense greenery. A long soak in the warm bubbling water is the perfect way to ease the aches and strains after a long day of hiking. To get to the hot springs, take the main road from Tianxiang up to the mouth of the first tunnel. Follow the steps down to the Liwu River, and a suspension bridge. Cross the bridge and walk along the cliff-side path to reach the springs.

My mom shrugs. “If a rock’s going to kill you, well, then I guess it’s just your time.”

Someone’d kicked the gate in, or rather took one hell of a run at kicking it in, because while the lock and heavy chain still held fast, the lower-left corner had been savagely bent and there was just enough room for a person to crawl under on all fours. “By entering, you are taking your life into your hands.” This isn’t the kind of thing you see very often in Taiwan, least of all down a wood-planked footbridge going green with neglect, suspended hundreds of feet above white-rapids and about as far from the English-speaking world as one can hope to get on this island. The words sounded like a prophesy compared to the usual near-miss dictionarese (the ledge of the abandoned bathhouse, where we changed into our swim gear, had an aging plastic sign that said only NO CLAMBER). Seemed serious, so I figured I should at least ask her one more time before we passed underneath and finished our walk to the now-infamous Wenshan hot-springs. Jake, her husband, filmed all this with their tiny, snap-shot camera.

The two of them had been in Taipei for six hours before I shuttled them right out again. Taroko Gorge National Park is Taipei’s complete antithesis, with sky-bending marble cliff faces so massive even the (then) world’s tallest building falls pathetically short in comparison. Held back from some of the heaviest mining in the world, the park’s pristine mountains run from chalk to slate, flush orange in patches from natural iron deposits, open into sunny groves of creaking bamboo, then fill them with hosts of ghostly butterflies, spread vast and silent vistas before you, and then fill those with grim notions of treacherous, skull-splitting rockslides that yearly redefine much of the park’s trails.

Hours before, when confronted with the fact that going to the hot-springs was forbidden, I’d driven the young hostel clerk to frustration with my refusal to understand, until at last she interrupted me to make the shape of a cascading rock with her hands, and to make sure I got the message, smashed it into the side of my head. It turns out that as of 2005, four people have been killed at Wenshan by falling rocks. The first of these closed the site indefinitely, leaving the three pools of sulfur-rich water to go on filling endlessly somewhere below, and the three of us scrambling under a steel gate to get in. Reaching through the metal bars, my Mom asks for her glasses back, and I catch sight of the scar that runs up the tip of her right index finger and under the nail from, when I was a baby, she’d slid her hand into the blade of a bandsaw. She’s a sculptor, has sculptor hands. On the way down she’d run a palm over the rock as she passed and judged its grain.

She was right, about a rock’s death being your time. The hairline that eventually snaps, the tiny crack that’s the agent of your undoing, is older than you by magnitudes. Wind, ice, rain, a wayward root, thousands of tiny actions tinker for lifetimes, and you just so happen to flash into relevance in that one window of that one time when it all comes together in a single crackling burst. The only nonessential component of the mechanism that kills you is you. So what’re you going to do about it?

The planking on the cliffside path ends abruptly after a few hundred feet through the canopy of a lower ledge. The forest at one side breaks, and a bare cliff opens on the remains of Wenshan. It’s hard to know what to think. Last year, a typhoon raged the river high and violent enough to rip everything out, the wooden benches and canopies, the walkways, the water-coolers and lockers, leaving only a crumbling concrete foundation full of hooked rebar. A steep run of decimated concrete leads the way down, and this can be taken backwards with the aid of a frayed old rope that someone had long since tied to the inside of the final gate, which ends the path and doesn’t budge an inch. You get past this last gate by leaning out over the cliff and slipping around the outside.

The three others to die at Wenshan met first this surreal landscape, without so much as a place to sit down, their belongings rolled into balls and stuck to one side as cautiously they picked their way across broken rock and metal. There aren’t any pools visible, just the concrete falling into the Taisha River, which has hit a calm spot, and puddles of rain water stuck in the ribs of old foundation. At the water’s edge, however, a handful of people sit in swim gear. They look flushed.

On the crumbling rim of the one remaining hot-spring pool, his feet dangling over the river and with the concrete in pieces at one side, a skinny man sits with a gold-plated Taoist charm hanging from his neck. He ignores me, but the tattoo on his thin bicep, a geisha in black ink, casts me a dark look and, as if to cover her bare breasts, tries to raise her sleeve. At his back, water pours from a fissure in the cliff rock and fills a shallow pool where his two friends lay sweltering like drunk frogs.

I knuckle down in the hot water and the larger of the two men claps his hands to welcome me. He likes my enthusiasm, he says straight away. He’s a real convert. He says he comes here at least once a month all the way from a town just outside Gaoxiong, Taiwan’s center for both heavy industry and organized crime. He extols the virtues of the steaming water at length, but the two friends he brought along this time don’t seem too impressed with the dilapidation, or the heat.

Is this hot-spring really that much better? By means of an answer, he gets up, shakes the water off his shorts, and stretches out again directly under the break in the rock where the running water has left a long, creamy sulfur streak. He rests his head and feet on stones so they stay out of the water and remains that way as long as he can stand it, before getting up and out with slow bravado. Red, grinning knowingly, he says it’s my turn. As if this were a Taiwanese drinking contest - in which we all drink until someone’s too sick to move - he insists.

When I don’t lift my feet, he wags a lazy finger and does it for me, sticking a stone under them. The heat is terrific. My body goes numb. My skin starts to buzz and the inside of my eyes show red. Sweat pours from my head, and after about fifteen seconds, he calls it quits - it’s dangerous to stay in too long, he says, lifting me out. Shaking, I slap him on the shoulder and hurry out of the water.

The rest of Wenshan’s in total shambles, with one pool entirely lost and the third only a torn pipe sticking out from the concrete and feeding hot water straight into the river five feet below. A circle of large river rocks have been clustered to pool the hot water before it’s lost to the river, and mixing with the frozen water, stays hot just enough to bring the pink fluster over my mom’s face and chest below. At her side, and in a typical display bizarre prescience, Jake has greeted the white-haired man occupying the pool next to him in Russian, and they’re conversing cheerfully. He runs a bed and breakfast on the Baltics, he says as he rubs black sand on the back of his Taiwanese girlfriend, holding back the straps of her awkward pink bikini in a tight grip. They’ve been there for hours already, he says satisfied, soaking and snacking on tiny green mangoes that had just come into season. His girlfriend he met on the internet, and as he tells Jake this she stays silent, face frozen in a weak smile.

The way down to their pool is along the fallen pieces of foundation, and as I grab a piece of rebar to help me down, I catch sight of an older woman, probably sixty, crouching on her haunches away from everyone else. She’s wearing a nightgown and dumping bucketfuls of sulfur water down the front of it, reaching a bar of soap inside with the other hand to lather. Her run-off flows down the trenches in the foundation, and where it seeps into the river the rocks and leaves have been coated with sickly white soap film. She must live here, and probably doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin. She’s too taike not to be, too local, too far on one side of the island’s North-South divide.

Despite knowing next to no Taiwanese, I find myself alongside taikeren all the time, and gangsters too, for that matter, hopping fences and ignoring street signs. This old woman’s probably been using the hot-springs to bathe most of her life, knows the people who tied the rope that leads down and who battered the gates in, and for her the government’s squeaky rules matter about as much as they do to petty gangsters or the Polish man and his mail-order bride.

And that’s the group of us, settling in to the river, taking our lives into our hands. Still fuming from my contest on the ledge above, I rush into the cold river and let the current lift my arms and legs. Behind me, the river breaks into violent rapids. Far above, Taiwan’s young mountains loom with their jagged edges, slowly weathering into something more permanent.