Geology

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.