We cut through Wli on the way to the falls, the village bisected by a dusty road gouged with potholes. Cinderblock homes frilled with corrugated tin roofs cluster around red-dirt courtyards. A woman drapes herself across a bed-shaped monument in front of her house—here, people bury their dead right where they lived and died. Thinking of my father’s grave, oceans away, I find this comforting. The morning’s grey calm is punctuated by the rooster’s song and the bawls of goats, their voices strangely human.
I turn my head to see a brindled doe standing still, back legs spread, rooted to the earth. A translucent white and pink sac protrudes from her hindquarters, the deflated bag streaked with blood, stuck to her rear leg and trailing in the dust, her body still inside out. A soot-colored lamb falters nearby, coat slick with fluid. The mother stands, stolid and solitary as Mount Afadja—and I think of my own surgical births, babies pulled from me as I lay flat on my back like a stone crucifix, arms pinned, latex-gloved hands extracting the placenta, that cosmos of blood and life; no gush of water tumbling down my legs like the cataract at the first stage of the falls. She will likely consume the afterbirth, nourishing herself with her body’s own nutrients.
The mountain looms, green fuzzing its rocky face, crowned by a membrane of swirling fog. We enter the verdant glen at the foothills, passing the border between Ghana and Togo, so near I can see the guards at the gate. Clouds shroud the peak, a veil hiding the brink. I feel the water before I see it, tiny droplets carried on the breeze misting my face. The trail veers right and the sight of Agumatsa (in Ewe, allow me to flow) nearly knocks me down: a torrent crashes into the shallow plunge pool lined with sparkly river rocks pounded flat. Somewhere behind me, the baby goat stumbles toward its mother, rooting for milk on spindly, determined limbs.
