Deep Time
Michael E. Clark, Iowa City
From my study window I see the ancient white pine and relict skeletons of those trees and animals whose lives have passed. In the coolest of winter days I can peer through frost that accumulates on the window of the 150 year old Iowa farmhouse. Today it is warm and the thaw-dampened soil smells richly of earth, wet grass and decayed leaves. In weeks the spring air will smell green as grasses sprout, flowers bloom and the buds of maple and oak burst. The red tails still wear winter down. By mid May, they will lose the soft, white down and their mottled red and brown summer plumage will return.
In the winter they spend their days on the crown of pine in sentinel perch, calling “qluii…”, as they do today, like banshees to drive prey from secure grassy nests and bank-side burrows into the clearings. The killing action is swift; climbing to where they are just visible, hawks pull into a full stall and plummet, lift their powerful wings and shift into a dive as rabbits zigzag across open fields, hoping to avoid the talons of the hawk descending over a hundred feet per second. The remnants of a successful hunt are clear to those of us who have watched the red tail attack prey: an explosion of gray-brown fur. Today as the ground warms, the hawks that have taken to the air soar on thermals, rarely moving more than a left or right wingtip to bank in and out of the spiraling air currents.
More often than not the studies from my window lead me outside. Today as spring approaches and as the last of the snow melts I leave my writing early with my dog Vishnu, allow my coffee to grow cold, and begin to saunter through the pines.
***
As we pass through the stand of decaying pines—moss covered, with toadstools and ear fungus clinging to shaggy bark—I notice great horned and barn owls roosting in the lower branches. Downy woodpeckers and flickers peck through the corium for grubs and tree borers. Are they aware of their fate, as they rest between the resinous fibers of the ancient pines? When we return here next week with the grasses still brown, titmice and wrens will feed on the remaining seeds, making the forest floor dance. Vishnu pokes curiously at the scrub trees, sniffs at the nests hidden among the box elder and chokecherry—homes for this year’s brood. The moss growing in the northern corner upon rotting logs is different from its counterpart on the upright pines. It is thicker, a soft, lush carpet; waterlogged, they sluice underfoot, recording our path. Vishnu carries his canine frame over the rusting barbed wire fence in a single bound. Moments later, as my sauntering pace leads me to the sagging fence, I step over it carefully, pushing the wire down before crossing. Vishnu hurries into the alfalfa field but I continue ambling as soft mud clings to the soles of my boots.
I have crossed this threshold many times without goals—only curiosity. Today, as spring begins to creep onto the plains, I hope to unknowingly discover something that I’ve never noticed—possibly an answer to questions I haven’t asked yet. For me the land is a koan. Beyond the pine, the open fields undulate across the horizon. Their soft rolls and sinuous curves are moraines left as glaciers advanced and retreated across Canada and to the southern tip of Iowa. What remains of these glacial deposits are shadows of a past that, for most, remains hidden under nothing more than over-processed and overtaxed soils, the roots of the tall grass prairie that once stretched across the horizon broken centuries ago by fire and the moldboard plow. What remains are records that I seek on my days away from my study and the writing that needs done. It is a diversionary tactic. I make the excuse that taking a journey, whether across the rolling Midwestern fields or anywhere, holds as many answers as it does questions. That is the nature of a koan. One can’t look too directly for an answer. It’s a matter of looking out of the corner of one’s eye, squinting, or crossing those eyes at what is known, only to discover the unknown.
***
Like the land—last dragged some 10,000 years ago— the people of rural Iowa move slowly, parking four wheel drive pickups along dirt roads to talk about the old neighbors who left for somewhere else, usually somewhere warmer. Few people I remember from boyhood still remain, and even fewer of their nineteenth century wooden framed farmhouses remain. Changes to the rural landscape I grew up with began occurring at a harrowing pace as families moved out and new ones moved in, but to a rural suburbia. North of my farm are 1990s prefab ranch houses and paved roads. To the east is a burgeoning housing development—half million-dollar houses plunked down in the middle of shapely bean fields rest stoically, thirty minutes from the nearest city. Having witnessed the urbanization of eastern Colorado’s front range and the development of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, it seems a natural transition to see the rural landscape of Iowa transformed like these places. But it also seems a bit odd, since the agrarian hills share nothing of the scenic beauty of the mountains with spring fed trout streams or the chance to see elk, mule deer, and bear. Along the dirt road, living on a former bean field, the adjacent hog farm still operated by the Rohret family, the scenery reminds me of homesteading: the acts of survival and the need to make one’s self the image of hard work and the American ethic. The attraction to this land must offer something different for those who have come to live here—the non-natives. For me this land is home, and a place where I spend time trying to imagine the changes it has undergone.
The glacial remnants, moraine hills and terminus that formed the once fertile eastern Iowa farmland barely exist. Sculpted and carved by the moldboard plow and leveled by the weight of tractors, it is nearly impossible to see the past. The records remain, but on unconsolidated horizons. Each backhoe scoop and dozing converts the bean field to a rural suburbia, reordering hundreds of thousands—possibly millions—of years. The warm water sea floor is replaced with footsteps of construction workers—even the basement is altered. Nothing is left for the casual observer. Records find themselves reordered and full of mysteries to be uncovered. These things take time, although little actual skill is needed to observe: a slight dedication to sorting things out, and a bit more patience for those things that seem mundane. What is seen and how does it fit with our notions of time and place? How does it fit and why should it fit?
***
Vishnu slows as he approaches the creek line. Its narrow flood plain affords him game. Rabbits break from grassy nests as he nudges the ground. A yearling whitetail bleats and jumps across a cut-bank. We continue to walk last year’s riparian crop of sedge grass. His focus is constant, inches above the ground. My eyes trace the pattern of the moraine hills across the horizon and notice their flowing downslopes aligned with the creek. As my focus shifts to the red tail riding thermals, I imagine soaring in the warm air like the hawk whose eyes trace the dendritic fingers between each hill that drains into the basin of Brainerd Creek. I wonder how many people taking this path before me have watched the red tail—and how many left something behind. Under each step Vishnu and I take, there are footprints of raccoons, martins, badgers, pipits, wrens and the jays that hide among the elderberry canes. If I am lucky, today there will be an oriole or indigo bunting or something more rare perched among the dried rush grasses. Below these prints are others that I cannot see, ones left by the people who wandered centuries before me, possibly on the same path.
On my recent hikes I have seen a blue heron. It is an amazing creature, almost prehistoric, with wings that appear unable to carry its weight, bony legs and oversized feet that stipple the mud. The footprints that go unseen make me curious. Why did those who walked before me wander? Was it to unbury answers that go without words? What was it that they saw—the same things that I see or something else?
Two years ago, I spent my spring tracking an albino fox. We had a strange affinity. Though we never spoke and never approached each other with confidence, we were friends. It was by accident that I spotted her ghostly frame. She lay resting on the sedge beside the thawing creek. As I stopped behind a willow, noticing her, I thought she was a small dog who had strayed from home. But as I stood quietly beside the willow, whether it was my breath or scent cast into the air, she spotted me, sat up and sniffed the air; she twitched her ears and jumped across the water. She eventually came to accept my presence over three months, though never moving too close. We would look at each other for hours, briefly thinking each other’s thoughts.
***
I never told anyone who lived on the gravel road of her presence, nor did I mention her presence to anyone at work. I reasoned that academics are usually too fussy and self consumed to bother with nature.
I didn’t mention her to neighbors because I have found two types of people, although there must be more: those who revel in nature’s beauty and want to capture it, and those who find nature a haunting abomination within suburbia. Those are the same people who find themselves tied in knots when a raccoon or squirrel is found rummaging through the garbage. When a bear or mountain lion is found outside their door, they are terrified, demanding that authority figures resume control of nature and take it away—preferably very far away. And while I must proclaim the whitetail a nuisance, the reintroduction brought back a species I didn’t see until I was twenty. However, the Department of Natural Resources forgot to include a predator or two when the gentle whitetail and its ravenous appetite was restored to the Iowa plains. I suspect that it was a kindly oversight. If we forget to include a pack of wolves, or a den of bobcats or mountain lions, hunting will control the numbers and prevent irrational calls from terrified suburbanites. I have to wonder if it was the Department of Natural Resources’ fault? If someone had spent a couple of hours in the library, or a moment or two digging into the soil outside their home, or reading a letter from a long lost great grandparent, they might have rethought the notion of introducing the deer, or questioned the logic behind their house built inches from the forest and the mountain lion den. They might also have wondered about the rats and mice that forage for food in dumpsters throughout their towns and cities.
At work, I am faced with countless other writers who, when offered my pieces, say I don’t read nature writing. It’s boring—an old man’s hobby, a lost romance. You should get current and write about something that interests others. Why do you spend time playing amateur naturalist when what you are is a teacher of writing? So I don’t mention the things that I notice on my walks across the farm any more than I mention my vacations to northern Ontario or the Pacific Northwest to them. They would find my tales tedious and boring. Instead, I save those stories for my class because they are still curious and have not developed so tough a corium. They seek answers to the stories that they want to tell. My students wander across the road to peer into the past, a limestone outcropping with distinct bedding plains, and fossils. But before they have crossed the street that follows the banks of the river they look at the Styrofoam-like foamburgs floating in the water. I ask how many washed their hair before class, and I tell them that the foamburgs don’t lie. They look at me as if I have lost my mind, but the foamburgs don’t lie; they carry with them the record of washed laundry, washed hair, and of fields washed of their natural nutrients and impregnated with phosphorus. It’s all history; it’s all a matter of perceiving things that we don’t know by seeking answers. One student asks me about the call of a great horned owl that comes from a ginkgo tree. When was the tree planted?
Another student asks, How do we know that these are records and not deceptions? Not so many years ago, and in a present day reprise, ‘scientists’, and I use this title in the loosest possible way, debunked use of fossil records as indicators of the past and to provide answers. To these ‘scientists’, evolution was regarded with disdain and as a heathen science. I ask my student to look at the fossils—a brachiopod, rugose coral with its wrinkly crenulations, and a nautilus shell with shattered chambers—and explain the past glaciations, the K-T event, and the similarities to today’s climate shift. Do these indicate a cycle, a potential for change because of things we’ve done, or the whim of a great creator to rebuild the world? I’m not preaching, I tell them. I want each of them to think about what they see, the past evidence and those things that they have witnessed. I want them to come to their decisions carefully, and to pay witness to the things they observe. Like my colleagues, many don’t remember the vivid details of the past and that, I tell them, is where their ambling curiosity begins. The answers are all there, if they look around. A quiet voice asks were there dinosaurs then? I turn and look for the owner of the voice. I can’t tell who it was, and reply, you’ll have to find out. Two weeks later, the girl who asked the question reveals herself and produces an essay that ties the land to her past: the Iowa farm she grew up on and the possibility that a family of mastodon walked through what is now her parents’ garden—and the very real possibility that we could bring them back to the plains if enough DNA is located. Her story doesn’t stop there; she wonders what would possibly stop them from trampling Des Moines, and what predators are needed to control the population of mastodon. She has solved her koan.
***
Vishnu continues along the creek, rustling the remnants of last year’s grasses as he pushes through the big bluestem, Indian grass, and the shrubby masses of partridge peas. His feet part the damp and fragrant soil, its earthy smell filling our lungs. We stop, not tired but rested by our hike—both of us feel more alive, more alert, and we see things we might fail to notice any other day. The bark of a mulberry, with its sweet maple-like sap, chafed with velvet from a buck scraped into the remaining coarse bark. Our feet rest on the cut-bank. Roots of foxtail and meadow sedge hold the upper horizons fast even when the melt water flows downstream as it has for 500 thousand years. Though floods take the soils from the cut-bank and reorder them, depositing them further downstream where the currents are slow and where carrying capacity is low, they also bring things: rusted Falstaff cans, nails and screws, enormous planks of wood, and plastic toys.
Standing in the creek I can see reordered layers of time. The upper layers of time rest where we stood minutes ago: the sprouting grasses and last autumn’s dark brown decay of humus, roots, stems, twigs broken down over each season. A lone inch of humus along the bank measures hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Resting below the humus is the clay-like yellow-brown ochre of the oxidized rock soil and organics. Time grows deeper as one descends the column; materials break down, compact and store time in fractions of inches. The putrid grainless blue mass of gleyed soil clings with tenacity to my fingers, an anaerobic remnant of Iowan wetlands which covered most of the state before the land was tiled and tilled. The silty and rocky brown-gray paleosols hold with similar tenacity but abrade when rubbed against the skin. Below these, amassed in feet, is the unconsolidated glacial tilth (erratics, gravel, rock soil and organics long forgotten). Here I might find relict mastodon or mammoth bones from the last Ice Age if I dig deeply enough into the ground. Below the creek, tens or maybe a hundred feet are layers of limestone, breccia, sandstone, and shale remnants of fauna and flora left before dinosaurs walked or flew over the land.
Vishnu carries himself from the water, pulls his frame upwards onto the steep bank, gazes at me and looks disinterested. He moves into a thicket of blackberry to hunt rabbits. I want to imagine those who walked before me thinking of time. I unsheathe my Leatherman, unfold its blade, dulled and dirty from earth and rock and begin digging into each layer. When they looked into the cutbank what was it that they saw—or was it even here? In the first inches were the bones of animals they had taken earlier, and deeper still were the footsteps and charcoal of fires from generations of parents and grandparents. Did they think of the fossil remains of stromataporoid coral, the pill bug shape of trilobite and winged shell of brachiopod as remnants before humans walked the earth? Maybe they too believed that we had always walked the earth.
***
Nearly all answers may be found lying within the earth. On occasion they extract themselves to reveal ancient oceans, great floods, ice sheets, and those that came before us. When these people looked at the earth—when they looked into the earth—digging into the stratified layers, did they see themselves? And when the floods came, as they do every year, what did they carry for these people? What did the floods carry from them? Digging into the humus and clayey layers I find flint, crockery, glass and wire, an arrowhead, a clamshell button and, buried in the same horizon, a Silurian age brachiopod. I want to create a story for it to make sense from the record, but the time that lies here loses correlation: 100 years, 1,000 years, and the pentameroid dating to 425 MA. I clean the brachiopod in the creek and turn it over between my fingers. A borehole in its shell tells of its death. I turn it over again look once more before pressing it into the glacial tilth even though it doesn’t belong there. I tell myself there are more answers for a future explorer in this horizon, if they ask the right questions.
I scramble up the bank to find Vishnu waiting. As we begin our walk home in the fading light of the afternoon, there is the call of the red tail. But it is the kestrel Vishnu and I take notice of, hovering feet above the ground. For, while common, I have only seen a few, and have never been witness to its stealth. I’ve only heard of its adeptness with eyes able to focus upon a garden mite hundreds of feet away. Kestrels hunt insects and mice by hovering above the prey before dropping upon it and pinning them to the ground. We stand ten feet from the raptor, its focus so intent and narrowed upon a few inches of ground that it does not take notice of us. There is a slight rustle from the grass and a flash as the raptor descends to the ground. It alights before I have blinked, the limp body of a field mouse fixed between its talons. We return to our ancient farmhouse where I place the kettle on the stove, warm water for fresh coffee, and prepare to return to my writing—my questions answered.
The author is a native Iowan who writes from a cultural perspective. He incorporates place-based environmentalism, history and natural sciences in his creative nonfiction. The author practices subject immersion, believing that writing must come from experience.