on the Des Moines glacial lobe

 

13,000 years ago, the Lake I look at from the dining room window would have been embodied in an ice sheet, around 1300 feet thick, the 'Des Moines Glacial Ice Lobe'. A mere millenium later, the ice wall had retreated north – glaciers have the attributes of troops on a battlefield, they are always advancing or retreating – leaving the depression into which water found its way.

The Ice Age! I love that term, and associate it with the American contribution to geology – via Agassiz. Who actually hypothesized the ice age in Switzerland.

‘On July 24, 1837, the Societe Helvetique des Sciences Naturelles ha its annual meeting in Neuchatel and Agassiz gave his opening addres known as the Discours de Neuchatel, which is the starting point of that has been written on the Ice-Age.” This I break off from Albert Carozzi’s “Agassiz’s Amazing Geological Speculation: the Ice-Age.”

Like many a European scientist, Louis Agassiz eventually came to the United States – in search of proof for his glacial hypothesis. Carozzi sees, exactly, the romantic aesthetic behind Agassiz’s striking proposal.

“During his stay in America, Agassiz never lost sight of the traces glacial action, which had caught his attention the moment he land in the fall of 1846. Here is a striking account of his first impression:

"When the steamer stopped at Halifax, eager to set foot on the new continent full of promise for me, I sprang on shore and started at a brisk pace for the heig above the landing. On the first undisturbed ground, after leaving the town, I w met by the familiar signs, the polished surfaces, the furrows and scratches... so well known in the Old World; and I became convinced of what I had already anticipated as the logical sequence of my previous investigations, that here also this great agent had been at work.”

We could be reading the words of Dr. Frankenstein, in search of his great agent.

Hard to believe in ice on this sunny morning. But I must mention one other great agent in this dimly rhapsodic string: Marianne Moore. Her poem, the Octopus, is, to my mind, the most enigmatic of the American attempts to saw the epic into a form fit for the American tongue. It was one of John Ashberry’s totems, with its bristle of indirections and the babble of its mysterious citations. No other poem gets so close to seeing America as a poem, a geological, botanical, political epic, with all its bloody edits. Eliot might quote Dante; Moore would quote “W. P. Taylor, Assistant Biologist, Bureau of Biological Survey, U. S. Department of Agriculture.”

Hard to believe in ice. The lake bears its speedboats, water skiers, and lilly pads, made of some foamy material, perfect tabs for young swimmers to leap around on. Last night, in the storm, it was all bustling with white caps, and today it is placid and flat. We’ll soon take a boat and dock over at Arnold’s Park and go to the Nutty Bar.

 

The Ice. It is melting in the background, the planetary background, even as I type. But I like to think of Agassiz and Moore today. Vacation is made of blissful, intentional ignorances.

 

The fir trees in “the magnitude of their root systems,”

rise aloof from these maneuvers “creepy to behold,”

austere specimens of our American royal families,

“each like the shadow of the one beside it.”