Late Pleistocene, North America, ca. 11,000
B.P.
There must be some moment
when a thing becomes un-ordinary—bent,
maybe suddenly, out of the commonplace.
Ordinary anything: love, faces, your own face,
piano concerti, politicians, trees,
little buildings, or the masonry
of the Laurentide ice sheet, when its infinitesimal
bricks, each a single crystal
mortared with cold, reached a level
of fifty feet. Or maybe later, when the mantle
under Canada was sagging below
the old seashore lines from the weight of snow
and that same ice wall, sheer-fronted,
stood two and a half miles high—blunt-
topped but sloping gradually
westward from its three-
mile height at Hudson Bay. Dawn light
every day would shoot a straight
line across a continuous cliff
from Greenland west to the midriff
of the continent. Rivers south
of Canada ran northward then, without
much incident, for hundreds of miles. But
a moment would arrive, or an identical set
of moments, when the rivers’ gray
and white chutes, in a piled-up melee
—rolling down the side
of the Appalachian plateau as if on a slide—
ran full force into the base of the ice, and,
with nowhere to turn, had to bend
beneath themselves, churning up gravel
and mud with currents that dug like sandhog shovels.
Forested terrain throughout the Midwest rumbled
like a factory floor while major rivers stumbled
deeper, to six hundred feet down
at some places—self-confluencing, to drown,
channels gone without a trace, self-poured
into what would be the steep-shored
buckets of five inland lakes. However: those
moments were abundant and unclosed,
so it might still have been ordinary, the smash
of waters that climbed as a splash
up the ice wall to half a mile high,
unchanging, for forty centuries: There was high,
unwavering fog; day and night,
the same pitch to the roar and the same slight
Doppler shift—registered by a deer,
white-tailed, sprinting from a gray wolf near
the shore, crouching amid aspen and everyday
pines. White and gray
mornings were followed by
white and gray afternoons, every
moment of which a paralyzed
rainbow arched above icebergs the size
of small towns. No doubt
even the guano quantity stayed about
the same on shelves of slow-bobbing
iceberg chunks, where the mobbing
grebes and mergansers flew out
to fish for the fry of pike and trout,
alongside gulls by the thousands. Geese
kept scouting the ice-filigreed weeds;
there were beaver, otter, mice—species too numerous
to be remarkable but not over-numerous
enough for briefly enough to be remarkable,
either. The gulls’ cries, already stable
for forty million years before the Pleistocene,
were not more soft or raucous then
than if their icy cliff had been
a ledge of just ten
inches—the same gull species patrolling now
in short swoops or shouting in crowds
every afternoon
from the piers on Lake Michigan,
in the usual haze: commonplace, sort of, in a way,
in their as-yet-unchanged white and gray.
____
With the retreat of the glaciers and the rebounding uplift of the North
American continent—which tilts now to the south—no major river
in the U.S. empties to the north.
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