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. |