Why It's Called Bridal Veil

Walk easy down these steps a minute, and let me come along with you — there's more to this little path than meets the eye. Boone Merrick's the

name, and you are climbing down into the strangest patch of ground on this whole road: a ghost town that brides still write letters to.

Look back up the hill behind you. There's a cemetery up there in the trees, and one small post office, about ten foot square, sitting close by

the road you just left. And down ahead of you, where this path is carrying you — the only waterfall on this entire highway you walk down to

meet instead of crane up at — a hundred and eighteen feet of water coming down in two soft tiers. That is the bridal veil that named all of

this.

The name came up off the river. Back in the eighteen-eighties, a passenger riding the sternwheeler Baily Gatzert up the Columbia looked up at

those two cascades fanning wide off the wet black basalt and said they looked for all the world like a delicate, misty bride's veil. Nobody

thought to write that passenger's name down. But the words stuck faster than the boat ran. When the post office opened around eighteen

eighty-six and the railroad drove a little station into the ground below, the government made it official: Bridal Veil, Oregon.

Now here is the hard turn, friend, because the town that grew up under that tender name had nothing tender about it. It ran on timber. The

Bridal Veil Falls Lumbering Company built a mill, and ran a wooden flume a mile and a half down off the shoulder of Larch Mountain to feed it

— and that flume was thirsty. So they took the creek. Took nearly all the water that fed the falls and ran it through the mill instead. And

for the better part of seventy-five years, the waterfall that gave this town its very name all but disappeared. Just damp black rock where the

veil used to hang. The story goes that folks who came looking for it went away certain they'd been sent to the wrong creek.

The town didn't fare much better in the end. Fire took the mill in the thirties. New owners bought the whole place — every last house — and

set the people to nailing little wooden boxes: cheese boxes for Kraft, and then ammunition crates, clear through the Second World War. The box

mill shut for good in nineteen sixty. The houses came down after that. The church held on until two thousand eleven, and then it came down

too. Near everything this town built to last is gone.

But here is the thing about this gorge — it keeps a long memory and a longer patience. When the cutting finally stopped and the flume rotted

off the mountain, the springs up top came back to themselves, and the water remembered its old way down. A hundred and eighteen feet, two

clean tiers, exactly as that sternwheeler passenger saw it. The falls outlived the town that very nearly killed them.

And that little post office back up the hill? Still open. Every spring, brides from all over this country mail their wedding invitations to

that one tiny window — close to two hundred thousand pieces of mail a year — just to carry the Bridal Veil postmark, a pair of interlocking

hearts, out into the world on the front of somebody's happiest day.

I trade in tales, not testimony. But I have stood at that little window in the quiet and done the plain arithmetic of it. The mill is gone.

The church is gone. The houses are gone. And the veil is running full again, and the name still rides out into the world stamped over a

wedding. Some things you just cannot cut down for good. And you're nearly down to her now — only a few steps more. She waited seventy-five

years to come back; she'll not begrudge you the last of the stairs. Go on down and meet her.