Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile

3. After the Deluge

AFTER THE DELUGE There is a small rise of high ground just to the northeast of Beaver Brook, and just beyond that ridge, like a natural extension of the streamside marshes, there is a section of half-submerged land known technically as a bog. Dotting the landscape of this one-acre plot of land you can see small black spruce trees. These are not the massive white pines and hemlocks that can be found in some parts of Scratch Flat; the trees are no more than four or five feet tall, in spite of the fact that some of them may be as much as seventy years old. If you walk out among these stunted trees, you will find yourself on tenuous footing; the very earth will sink beneath your feet, water will well up around your boots, and, if you jump up and down rhythmically, the bog will spring in slow motion like a giant trampoline. It is an unlikely place for a meditation on the quirks of time; you are, in a sense, strung there between sky and the lower depths, held up by a porous mat of vegetation. And yet, squatting there on a June morning amidst the dwarf black spruces, with the blue empty sky arching over me, I am able to glimpse a flicker of the realities of the past. This is no idle speculation. The plants that grow in the bog at Scratch Flat are the same species that grew in the area shortly after 26 After the Deluge 27 the glacier drew back and the waters of the lake drained off. Along with the glacial stream that has now become Beaver Brook and the lake to the northeast, there were hundreds of shallow depressions, temporary pools, and ponds in Scratch Flat in the centuries following the retreat of the glacier and the draining of the lake. Some of these were simply poorly drained areas where glacial water collected; some were formed by outpourings of groundwater; and some were created when huge chunks of ice were calved from the mother block and melted away, creating the sharp depressions in the landscape known as kettle holes. All of these lakes and ponds, in fact, all of the lakes and ponds that are still in existence today, are in the process of becoming dry land. Even before the last ice had melted from the landscape, plants started to grow on Scratch Flat. They may have even grown on the body of the glacier. The Red Cowboy told me once that he had seen a whole forest growing on a glacier in Alaska, and there is a red alga which commonly grows on the snow fields of glaciers. It is likely that on Scratch Flat in the wet areas without an inlet or an outlet, sphagnum moss began to grow at the pond edges even while the ice block remained. Slowly over the decades, as the ice to the north melted back and the summers grew warmer, this absorbent aquatic plant grew out toward the center of the ponds, eventually covering the surface entirely. Hardy arctic plants such as crowberry, bearberry, and cranberry began to grow on this floating mat of vegetation, and windblown pollen grains from the coniferous forests that were growing south of the glaciated regions at the time probably settled there. Spruce, fir, and larch started to grow on the mat of sphagnum along with the hardy shrubs, but because the soil conditions are poor in boggy areas, and because of the enduring cold, it is unlikely that these trees would have grown to any height. Like the spruces that grow in the bog at Beaver Brook today, they would have been dwarfed, no higher than a man's head. In effect, the environment that existed in Scratch Flat was similar to the environment that exists in tundra regions of the Arctic today. The past at Scratch Flat is the present in Point Barrow or any other arctic region. Not all the wetlands of Scratch Flat followed this pattern, however . At the edges of the deeper ponds with inlets and outlets, sedges, rushes, and grasses started to grow in the shallow waters. Slowly over the centuries these aquatic plants blossomed, died and sank to 28 Ceremonial Time the bottom so that the floor of the body of water was raised. In time, the ponds became grassy marshes and in these damp areas...