My neighborhood here in Seattle was formed by rivers of ice, the last one of which began to retreat some 14,000 years ago. It covered the landscape with 3000 feet of compacted ice, too much weight to imagine, and as it retreated scoured out the lakes that are a part of my daily life, leaving only hummocks of bedrock. My Forest is contained one of those hummocks. My yard is a tiny part of another.
Ask me about glacial till, the stuff that the glaciers left behind, and I will tell you of months digging out mud and gravel as I began to build a garden some 30 years ago. I will tell you about the round granite rocks I wrestled from the ground and saved to edge the garden beds. I will tell you about blisters and sweat and swearing in the April rain.
More over the orange iceberg -->
Mr. bwren and I visited Juneau AK last weekend. It was a work weekend, but our hosts generously gave us a bush plane trip up the Mendenhall Glacier and into the Juneau Ice Fields, a glimpse into what our neighborhood looked like 140 centuries ago.
Juneau Ice Field, April 13, 2012
This is what 4000 feet of ice looks like from above; a plain of living ice, utterly flat yet moving ever so slowly towards the west. It crumbles as it falls from one elevation to the next.
Crumbling ice field, April 13, 2012
I have not been able to find an equation that allows calculation of the weight of 4000 feet of ice, but know this: just the weight at the top is such that all of the colors of light are absorbed except blue, which is reflected back from the cracks and crevasses at the surface. It must be so dark even a hundred feet under there, and even darker down where the ice grinds away, down where the cold carries mountain edges to the valleys below.
Glacier terminus, April 13, 2012
I got lost during the flight. This may be the glacier terminus at the head of the Elk River, but no matter, the landscape here is softened in the glacier's wake, rounded hills supporting the first generation of spruce and hemlock, cottonwood and alder and willow.
Elk River Valley? April 13, 2012
This is where the landscape became familiar again, though so raw and new when compared to what I see on my daily walks. In my neighborhood the oldest trees are perhaps 500 years old. That's near 30 tree generations beyond the Juneau landscape. In those 30 generations the landscape in my neighborhood has been tamed, by time, by incessant rain, by civilization.
Seattle. Lake Washington looking south from the Forest peninsula. November 10, 2011.
