This Women’s Month, be proud of how brave you are … and everything you have done, writes Darrel Bristow-Bovey.
Well, it’s Women’s Month, so there’s the usual hub-bub about women scientists and politicians and role models, but during Women’s Month I don’t think of them. I don’t need any convincing that women are as smart and serious as men. I prefer to think about Annie Edson Taylor, the Queen of the Mist.
Annie was born in 1838. She became a school teacher and married her sweetheart but he died in the American Civil War. Annie was afraid for the future, but she tried to make a plan. She opened the first dance school in Bay City, Michigan, but not enough people wanted to dance. She became a music teacher. She tried to write a novel. She became an interior decorator and an actress and an inventor. Nothing worked.
It’s not easy, ageing as a single woman in a society that expects you to rely on a man. When I think of Annie, I think of my mother, who was also a primary school teacher and widowed young, only she had two small children. She was brave, like Annie, but there were nights when I woke to a muffled sound from her room. This, it seemed to me, was the true sound of the world: a woman sobbing with her face pressed into her pillow so her children wouldn’t hear.
Finally, Annie Edson Taylor had an idea: she would be the first person – man or woman – to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
She would publicise the event and sell tickets (Watch the Queen of the Mist defy death!) then tour with the barrel, giving paid public talks. She was naturally shy, and the public speaking frightened her more than the Falls, but she practiced emerging from the barrel with a smile and a wave. She chose October 24, 1901 for the big adventure. It was her birthday. She claimed she was turning 43, but really she was 63.
She sank her meagre savings into customising a pickle barrel, padded with an old mattress salvaged from the town dump, and with a leather harness to hold her in place as the barrel flipped and fell. Then she curled up inside, tightly hugging her lucky heart-shaped pillow.
Air was pumped into the barrel using a bicycle pump, and the hole in the lid was sealed. Then she was dropped over the side of a rowboat. The barrel bobbed and righted itself in the river, then the current took it over the edge and she disappeared in mist and white water.
A minute or so later, the barrel appeared at the bottom of the Falls, wedged against a rock. The crowd roared as she emerged in her long skirt and billowing blouse and sturdy shoes, dazed and disoriented but uninjured, except for a cut on her head.
Annie had done it, but the world wasn’t quite done with her. She wrote a pamphlet about the experience and sold it for 10c at her public talks, but her manager absconded with her barrel and Annie didn’t have the confidence or stage presence to carry off a public speech without it. Soon she was spending all the money she made from pamphlet sales on a private detective to track down her barrel.
She did eventually retrieve it but by then her celebrity status had waned, and anyway, the barrel had been stolen again – never to be seen again. Annie died, aged 82, in 1921. My mom is 82 this year. I hope they both look back on their lives and see themselves as rich despite the money. I hope they are proud of how brave they were, and everything they’ve done.