This is the memory palace. I'm Nate D'Ameyau.

The days beat on. The rooster would crow. And Jed Porter would slide out of bed, rub his eyes,

pat out to the cold kitchen for some coffee and some breakfast.

Some bread spread with something he'd grown in the summer, and picked in the fall.

But his wife had put in a jar and placed in a shelf in the cellar to keep through the long northern winter.

And he'd feed his animals as dawn hovered pink at the edge of the land.

And he'd be out in the fields as morning broke bread, cutting back stiff weeds,

killing the thong ground, getting the farm ready for spring in the planting to come,

in the reaping to follow, in the jars, in the cellar, in the winter, as the days beat on.

In always, as he'd wake and he'd work, and he'd slip into bed and off to sleep to do it all again the next morning.

He heard the churn of the river and the roar of the falls.

And one night, after midnight, Jed Porter couldn't sleep.

He wasn't sure why, and he decided to go for a walk, and the night felt crisp and strange and changed.

And then he noticed the sound was gone.

The next morning the people who lived along the Niagara River woke to discover what Jed Porter already knew.

The river had stopped running. The falls had stopped falling.

In everyone started freaking out.

The workers at the mills who came in to find the wheels had stopped turning.

The men who rode the boats filled with tourists around the rocks through the mist at the bottom of the falls.

The kids who were always told to stay away from the river less they'd be swept away from their parents.

Their parents, who grew up there, had their lives scored by the rush of the river and the roar of the falls.

All stood on the banks of the American side, or stood on the banks of the Canadian side,

...