© Copyright 2008, 2015, 2021 Jon Higgins
Looking out the airplane window I was reading. I wasn’t reading a book: I was reading a landscape. 37,000 feet below, northern Saskatchewan had a story in the landscape, a chapter in a volume of what James Hutton called The Annals of the Former World. Hutton coined the term in 1795 to capture his novel insight that the long history of Earth was documented in the rock.
The shape of the land below told a story of a grinding and gouging mass of ice, one of the great continental glaciers of the last ice age. Anything that wasn’t cemented to the ancient bedrock of the Canadian Shield was scraped off and dumped someplace else. Even then no rock was safe: once every loose thing had been plucked from the surface, the glacier went to work on the rock bound to Earth's crust. Glaciers write big on the land they work on, and the forms in the landscape below - the patterns of forest, marsh, lake and bedrock - told of the story of the period 750,000 to 12,000 years ago when looking out the same window I would have seen white ice from horizon to horizon.
I was flying from Chicago to Anchorage, the beginning of my visit to Alaska. Alaska was (and still is) on my “bucket list”, with the appeal of remote and mostly untamed wilderness. I was finally making that dream come true. A big part of the trip for me was to see something of the last ice age, to read directly a few new chapters in The Annals.
Traces of the last ice age surround Baraboo, the town where I grew up. School fieldtrips to Devil’s Lake excited my imagination. Devil’s Lake was created by two tongues of glacial ice damming both ends of a gorge cut through the Baraboo Hills by the Wisconsin River. The remaining large terminal moraines at either end of the lake damming in the lake told that story. As a teenager, standing on the bluffs on the east and west sides of the gorge I would imagine the land covered with ice lobes flowing from the north and east, rising beyond to the great mass of the Laurentide Ice Cap flowing out of Canada. I imagined - or perhaps more appropriately, dreamed - of the former world.
Geology was an escape for me growing up. It was the perfect antidote to adolescent angst. Science fiction was cool, but it was, like, fiction. Geology was real and visceral, and had the appeal of escaping in my mind not to a fantasy world, but a former world, into deep time, something that at one time in the deep past was real.
John McFee coined the term “deep time” to describe the vast immensity of time that James Hutton opened the book to in his Annals. James Hutton was a member of the “Scottish Enlightenment” and friend to Adam Smith, David Hume and Robert Burns. He was also the first modern geologist, the first person to infer from empirical data he collected doing field work in Scotland that the Earth was possibly millions of years old. That was quite a leap from the Biblically based six thousand years accepted at the time. It made Hutton “giddy” as good science should. Over the past 220 years science has shown that the Annals go back even further. Deep time is the vast swath of 13.7 billion years the universe has existed before us.
Deep time works a lot like our personal memories. Recent events are clear and lie in a context that we can tie to specific dates, months or years. The farther we go back the less distinct the memories become. Many things are lost. When specific event happened generally gets tied to progressively fuzzier swaths of time the farther back you go. We have the advantage of calendars so some events like birthdays can be precisely determined. The Earth has its momentous events as well, generally catastrophic, that can be fairly accurately determined when it can be tied to the decay of radioactive isotopes in the rocks.
A good chunk of the memory of the earth is also in our chromosomes and those of the other living beings we share the Earth with. Unlike the other planets in our solar system (as far as science can confirm at this time), life is part of the memory of the Earth going back possibly as far as 3.8 billion years. That story is in the strands of DNA that run every cell in every living thing on our planet. Unlike the other planets, life also shaped the geology: the rocks tell that story as well.
If you want to look back into deepest time, the memory exists in the atoms and molecules that are the building blocks of each of us and everything we can see, touch or smell. We - each of us - are the products of the mixing of innumerable generations of ancestors. Before that, the molecules and elements that make up our bodies came from unknown generations of stars. Some were like our sun, living long and casting out their outer shells of gas and dust once they moved off of what scientists call “main sequence”. More spectacularly, stars much larger than our own sun blew up in explosions far larger than anything any of us could imagine, casting out the stuff that’s required to make a planet like Earth. The life on Earth, the fungi, the bacteria, the invertebrates, vertebrates, mammals, primates, apes and humans are all children of stars. The cliché is that we are all “stardust”: the reality is that we are all stardust.
That was my stream of thinking as I looked out the window. My mind tends to wander that way, perhaps an escape into things more sublimely closer to eternal. I page through other chapters of The Annals to put the one I’m reading in context. A crowded jet invites the escape even more.
I was primed though. Apart from the general appeal of the adventure of exploring Alaska, I’d been doing a lot of reading about the natural history of the places I was going to visit. Deep time was on the agenda.
It was a longer flight than usual: six hours. After four hours in the air I was getting a little impatient. I wanted to see mountains, but the route we were flying didn’t take us over mountains until the end of the flight. I tried listening to an audio book of Ulysses (abridged) by James Joyce. I bought it for the flight thinking it was going to be a nice long book to fill up the time.
I got bored after about 20 minutes. (I found out later Irish whiskey may have helped engage me more.)
A newly purchased recording of Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner seemed be a better fit for some reason, so I switched to that. I’m not a big opera fan, but I like Tristan, and it was long enough for the rest of the flight. It was music I could understand and words I could barely understand. It worked better than the Joyce, better than I could have imagined.
Around the start of the second act low mountains finally came into view. At first I saw small patches of snow around rounded summits, but then as the mountains began to rise I saw larger snow fields around modestly rocky peaks.
A memory from my deep time suddenly popped into my head.
I was in first grade, the afternoon of the last day of school before Christmas vacation. My teacher had set up attractive things for our class Christmas party on activity tables at the back of the classroom by the windows. Green and red clear plastic containers of candy and popcorn balls wrapped in red and green cellophane beckoned. Being a bunch of six-year-olds, the prospect of candy and a rumored visit from Santa had all eyes fixed at the back of the room.
Then one girl yelled “snow!” We all looked away from the candy and saw big clumpy flakes of snow falling outside the windows. Whatever manners had kept us at our desks before the party evaporated and everybody - including the teacher - ran past the treats and pressed our faces against the windows to see the snow fall. A first snow has a magic stronger than candy or Santa. I don’t remember much else about the day, just something about the cellophane sticking too much to the popcorn balls. There was Santa as well, but most of us could tell he was the school principal with a fake beard.
Then there was another memory. It was my turn to take out the trash one winter evening, I don’t know the date. In my personal deep time it would be the general period “during the early 70’s”. It must have been around 5:00 or so because I remember the pale blue light of dusk filtering through the overcast sky on the snow. I hauled the trash bag out to the garbage cans along the alley quickly because it was cold and snowing.
Then on the way back to the house I noticed something. It was the gentle quiet sound of the snow falling. The sounds of cars in the distance were muffled and that quiet sound, the crystalline sound of flake against flake was what I heard. I stopped to listen.
The cold didn’t matter.
In fact, there was an unusual warmth in simply taking the time to listen.
When I was very young I would look in the mirror and wonder about the person staring back. I looked into the eyes staring at me wondering who that person was staring. It was mysterious, a bit disturbing, but compelling. There were lots of intangible, wordless questions flashing back between me and my reflection. They boiled down to “who am I?” It was immediate and present, the moment was real, not easily put into a pre-conceived construct. It just was.
Standing in the snow at that dusky moment had that same immediacy and presence, but without apprehension. There weren’t questions. It was wordless and serine, just the quiet hiss of the snow and the pale light, everything was as it should be at that moment. It was perfect. For a moment it was like seeing something of eternity, the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced to that point in my life. I didn’t want to go back inside.
Then my mom shouted out the back door. “What are you doing out there? Get back inside.” The spell was broken.
Meanwhile, Tristan and Isolde were getting ready to consummate their forbidden love in my earbuds. In tragedies love is often forbidden, but generally pretty passionate (and then somebody dies). The music was becoming more and more dreamlike, ecstatic, capturing the passion of two lovers.
The mountains below were becoming more jagged. Nestled in a deep valley below, a network of sinuous water channels wove across what appeared to be the outwash plain of a glacier.
Next I’m going to see a glacier, I thought to myself.
On cue a few seconds later a glacier came into view - a really big one. We were starting to fly over the St. Elias Mountains, home of most of the tallest peaks in North America. And home of many glaciers.
In an admittedly geeky way, this was kind of ecstatic for me - probably not in the same way the Tristan and Isolde were experiencing in the opera. Like what they were experiencing, imagining is one thing, but the real thing blows any fantasy away. I’d done a lot of imagining, but this was the real thing. I was looking down on a vast frozen landscape, a place where the ice age never ended.
We began our descent into Anchorage a few minutes later over Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, the largest (and maybe least known) in the country. It was a preview of part of my trip. I saw the Root Glacier and Kennecott, a place where I’d be hiking in a few days (and bag a pretty good bear story to boot).
Then came the Chugach Mountains and the Bagley Ice Field. The ice field is a huge body of ice in the heart of the Chugach over one hundred miles long and fifteen miles wide that flows out of the mountains in massive glaciers.
Thinking of the snow on that day long ago in first grade, I wondered how many “first snows” were down there - hundreds? Thousands? They all fell without a bunch of first-graders excitedly running to windows to see them. Then I imagined just standing there while the snow fell, listening, without any other sounds other than flake against flake, at dusk with the peaks rising above me.
Suddenly, I felt a radical shift in perspective.
I realized why I was there.
Wonder.
Wonder, plain and simple.
Giddy wonderment.
The wonder of first snows, the quiet wonder of a snowy dusk deeper in winter.
The wonder that makes you want to be able to read a landscape and understand the power of ice.
The wonder looking out over the Baraboo Hills when I was younger.
The wonder seeing former worlds in rocks.
It was the wonder of looking up into a dark sky with the Milky Way arching overhead, suddenly feeling that I’m pinned to a ball of rock spinning through space with the stars, of the stars.
It was sublime and perfect.
Pressing my face against the window, floating down from the sky as snowflakes do, all I could do was wonder.
Wondering the wonder of snowflakes and stardust.