F.A. Farm

Toni and I just finished watching an old NOVA program on the Lake Missoula floods. These were glacial floods that carved out the channeled scablands of central Washington, the Columbia Gorge and petered out in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. As some of you may know, Missoula, Montana is at the center of five valleys - one of the reasons it has a smog problem in the winter. During the last Ice Age, a great ice dam would form periodically and block up the water from what is now known as the Clark Fork River. At the base of the ice dam, the water molecules could not expand and so did not become solid - in effect, supercooled water under intense pressure. This water looked for points of release and expanded any and all cracks until the ice dam cracked from the inside out. When it finally gave way, trillions of gallons of water were released and flowed west through Washington, the Gorge and down into the Willamette Valley, as well as to the sea. It only took a few hours and was truly a spectacular cataclysmic event. It is also likely that there were several such events and some Paleo-Indians may have been witness to some of the events, as they happened between 20,000 - 15,000 years ago. However, there are no stories in the myths of the indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest that I know about.

One of the interesting features of these Lake Missoula floods is the presence of glacial erratics scattered about the landscape. Glacial erratics are huge boulders strewn about the landscape in odd places. You can see them in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon, as well as in the channeled scablands of central Washington. They come about as glaciers move across a landscape and sheer off hunks of rock and assimilate them into the moving ice sheet. They then are deposited as the glaciers melt. In the Lake Missoula floods, the glacial erratics were probably carried in the chunks of ice that broke off the huge pieces of the ice dam as it moved through the landscape and then settled out as the ice chunks melted.

Toni and I are sort of like glacial erratics. We were assimilated into the great Movement of the 60's, as so many of our comrades were, and carried along in the tide of social unrest. When the flood settled out and the protective shell melted, we ended up scattered about the landscape. It is quite amusing that we ended up as glacial erratics (and yes, we are often erratic!) in Vancouver on the same ground as the glacial erratics of the great Lake Missoula floods. Then we sort of rolled up the coast to Ferndale. So here we are and we are still erratic. There are many of us scattered about the landscape and sometimes we recognize each other.