The landscape of Alaska is a landscape of glaciers.
In the cold of the winter nights, snow falls on the mountains. In certain areas of the mountains, that snow never melts; it just gets covered up with new snow, snowfall after snowfall. Where most snow crystals melt into water come springtime, or even if there’s enough concentration of sunlight though the ambient air temperature is low, the snow that doesn’t melt gets weighted down by more and more snow, packing down, the crystals jigging and jogging into place, until rather than separate snow flakes, you get a mass of ice.
The pressure builds up at the bottom of the ice, and when that ice is on a mountain slope, it begins to flow, ever so slowly. Inch by inch, ponderously and inexorably, it grinds its way down the mountainside, and anything in its way gets dragged along, ground down, dug up.
It’s a fantastic method of erosion, slow but powerful. At the tops of mountains, the glaciers carve incredible knife-edged spires of rock–the kind that make jaggedy silhouettes like the canine teeth of some gigantic carnivore. At the bottoms of mountains, what you get are rocks.
Big rocks. Little rocks. Silt. The silt chokes the ice-water rivers that rush down the hillsides in the spring and summer, coloring the water chalk-white, or grey, or, if the stream is swift enough, an incredible cloudy aqua blue. Boulders and rocks and fist-sized pebbles and smaller pea-gravel mix in with the settling silt, both from the rivers and from the bottoms of the glaciers.
And when the glaciers recede, the landscape is changed, carved. At the bottoms of the mountains, or in between two mountains, you will get lovely U-shaped valleys with craggy mountainsides surrounding them.
And in the soil in those valleys, you get a rich, loamy deposit…
…intermingled with rocks.
Big rocks. Little rocks. Pebbles. Pea-gravel. And rocks that look, innocently enough, like something that may be fist-sized, peeping up through the grass in your lawn, until you decide to take a rock hammer to the soil around those rocks to dig them up.
At which point, you discover that the putative fist-sized rock is actually a little nodule jutting out from something that would work nicely as, say, the anchor of the Queen Elizabeth II.
I have an intimate relationship with glacier poop now. I wander through our yard, peering at the ground, picking up various rocky detritus to deposit them in the pathways between our veggie beds. This serves double-duty: not only are we gaining enough rocks in those pathways to actually, at some point, have a path, but we are also clearing away the random outcrop that would–if not caught in time–result in a horrible choking clattering screech from the lawn tractor, and, perhaps, another incident wherein our lawn is scarred with a strip where the grass has been mown down to bare dirt due to a mower blade being two inches out of whack.
I spent an hour or so this afternoon alternately digging at rocks in the lawn and tossing a (disgustingly slobbery) tennis ball for the obsessive retriever who lives next door. I should feel virtuous and accomplished. Alas, I don’t–because every time I turn around, I see Yet More. I also know that next year, more rocks that were sedately hidden away beneath the soil will be newly revealed, because the Frost Gods grant us this nifty soil phenomenon called frost heave. In frost heave, the soil shrinks and swells over and over during the winter as the temperature rises and falls and the moisture beneath the surface becomes ice, then melts, then becomes ice again. This slow-motion activity causes new rocks to bubble up to the surface every year. You’d think that after a century or so the supply of rocks would diminish, and no more new rocks would surface.
Hah.
I am here to tell you: Hah.
The black soil beneath my fingernails is here to tell you: Hah.
It’s a never-ending task, and I’m sure some poet somewhere would have considered, very seriously, the idea of making one of the circles of Hell a place where one spends an eternity digging rocks out of a lawn, except that those poets were too posh and dainty to ever consider working with their hands like that…so they simply didn’t know. If they had known, they would have done it. Believe me.
