Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile

2. The Kingdom of Ice

2 THE KINGDOM OFICE For fifty thousand years, give or take an interglacial period or two, the area known as Scratch Flat was buried under a mantle of ice one mile deep. There was a world before the onset of the glaciers; that is to say, there was dry land in the area, and there were plants and animals, life and death, trees and rocks and all the other things that make up an ecosystem. In fact, geologists have theorized that the landscape that existed in the area was far more dramatic in aspect than the landscape of today. In the valley of the Beaver Brook which runs along the eastern edge of Scratch Flat, there was a vast uplifted fault running north and south for fifty or sixty miles. Living things grew or foraged above and below these immense cliff faces. But the fact remains that everything that existed in the area before the glacier —the landscape, the soils, the living things, and for that matter the entire world—was obliterated by ice. The last Ice Age began sixty to seventy thousand years ago. It came on slowly, to be sure, but it came on inexorably, a long winter one year, a slightly longer one the next, until finally there was nothing but winter for fifty thousand years. Snows piled on snows, compressing the bottom layers into ice packs; the ice packs moved out 14 The Kingdom of Ice 15 from under the incredible weight of year after year of snow, crushing the very rocks and soils beneath, so that finally, unable to withstand the downward pressure, the whole mass moved southward like a hideous all-encompassing plow. No living thing could endure these timeless winters, and, as the ice moved southward, generation after generation of plants and animals were forced into the more benign climates of south central North America. Although there may have been two or three interglacial periods of warming, the world at Scratch Flat was dead, and would remain dead until history wrote it into existence. This interminable season of ice is the overriding reality of the landscape of Scratch Flat, and indeed of the entire northern half of North America. The record of the glacier, and most specifically, the record of its departure, is inscribed on the land; you can see it in the rounded drumlins of Scratch Flat, in the streams and ponds, and in the boulders, the numerous stone walls, and the deep beds of gravel. There is no escaping its presence once you are aware of it; if God had a hand, it was the glacier. This overbearing reality, the fifty-thousand-year reign of ice, is lost on the general public in the Scratch Flat region. Beaver Brook, the drumlin, the flat farmlands, might just as well have been created by the hand of a giant as by the hand of ice. I can't say that I blame the public for not appreciating the great timeless scales of the ice ages. The coming and going of the glacier is an event which has almost mystical overtones. Geologists glibly throw off statistics as if they were comprehensible—the glacier endured for 50,000 years, they will tell you; the sheet of ice was one mile deep, and locked up one-quarter of the earth's water. Such statistics are beyond comprehension in some ways, mere figures with no apparent base in reality. And yet over the past few years, and through a variety of methods, I think I have come to understand something of the way in which the piece of land I am writing about was formed. The traditional view of the creation of Scratch Flat, its birth by ice, comes for the most part from a friend of mine whom, for years, my wife and I have called the Red Cowboy, simply because he comes from Colorado and has flaming red hair. The Red Cowboy (his real name is Vernon Stafford) loves glaciers; he has studied them for some ten years, first at Harvard, then at various universities in this country and in Europe. He has traveled to many of the existing glaciers of the 16 Ceremonial Time world, has camped for weeks on their backs, has descended icy crevices into the very core of their bodies and emerged alive; and, fortunately for me, he has spent a few weeks at Scratch Flat walking over the...