Word: misting
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QUEEN OF THE MIST: THE FORGOTTEN HEROINE OF NIAGARA...
...impossible: merely the forgotten truth. Poet Joan Murray, in her epic poem Queen of the Mist, details the sad life and short fame of Annie Taylor, an elderly and utterly destitute school teacher living at the turn of the century who devised and executed what seemed the perfect plan for money and fame. After building with her thin hands a barrel to enclose her body like a womb and shelter her from her fall over the raging ledge of water, Annie Taylor subsequently became the first person in history to propel herself down the length of Niagara Falls...
...language never rivals the story in The Queen of the Mist; rather, the spare imagery Murray painstakingly inserts allows the heartbreaking story to tell itself without unnecessary flourishes. Images of birth, death and rebirth permeate the poem's language, providing the strongest continual layer of metaphor within the poem. The barrel, Annie's self-made womb, becomes in the end Annie's self-made tomb as Annie watches herself disintegrate within the short and petty memory of history. Eventually she is even called an imposter when the idealistic collective imagination consumes memory and literally recreates "Annie Taylor" into a blonde...
...tourists had come to clamber through the miles of unforgiving forest inclines, hoping at the end of it to see a handful of the world's 600 remaining mountain gorillas at play. But something else lay waiting in the Ugandan mist. Shortly after dawn last Monday, 100 Rwandan Hutus, screaming and brandishing machetes and guns, raided three camps outside the Bwindi national park, where several dozen tourists were just waking. The Hutus eventually seized 14 tourists they believed to be American and British and forced them to march barefoot into the hills. Only six returned to camp alive; the rest...
...would have to breathe this horrible mist in and out all day long," Durrett says. "I also hated the way that my hands were always wet, my gloves would get sticky and the bathrooms would become uncomfortably hot because of the steam...