THE TIDEWATER REACH

Poem by Robert Michael Pyle •Photograph by Judy VanderMaten

Field Note by Hal Calbom

Bretz’s Flood

It starts in the furnace of the core, rises through the mantle’s crush. Makes the crust, then breaks on through in plutons, vents, volcanoes. Dike swarms leak across the land like Vaseline on hot skin. Congeal in lava flows called Roza, Elephant Gap and Rattlesnake Ridge, Umatilla, Pomona, and Selah. Flow, then freeze in lichen-daubed entablature and colonnade, all the way to the sea.

After Pangaea, continents surfed the crusted waves, broke their backs against far shores, forging the shapes we know. Plates of the shelf shoulder plates of the land, bunch them up in the middle, raise the Rockies from nothing more than force and dust. Where mountains crumple upward, before crumbling down again, a moment comes when, high enough, they tempt the snows that crown the years. Then press, and press, and press some more, till glaciers start to move.

As cold goes south, the ice sheets grow, till half the continent goes under. Polish, scour, lathe, and grind — leave sign of ice on granite domes, the scream of ice on unforgetting stone. Rivers drain the glaciers, but Clark Fork is plugged: two thousand feet of ancient ice, two hundred miles of inland sea. Then warming, and melting, time after time for a thousand years, till the dam breaks through!

Then Glacial Lake Missoula is loosed upon the land. Down pours deluge, downhill, down-grade, down-map — ten times the flow of all the rivers of the world.

Slash Grand Coulee! Swamp Dry Falls! Shoot Wallula Gap, whack Beacon Rock, shatter the very Bridge of the Gods, before they’re even named. Never so much water, sluicing to the sea, with such a force of will — sloshing from wall to black rock wall, from rimrock to rimrock, four hundred feet deep — until, the ice all gone, the river finds its level, never looking back at the havoc it’s left behind — where all that remains is geology.

A Different Kind Of Flow

To motorists, sportsmen and tourists, they are impressive, monolithic structures that add a colossal dimension to the river flowing among them. And to academics, geologists and historians, they are equally impressive: The Columbia River Flood Basalts are one of the youngest and best preserved continental flood basalt provinces on earth. These monumental rock formations are one of at least three flows that have formed the region: extensive eruptions and lava flows; crushing flows of ice and dammed ice water suddenly loose over the land; and, of course, the more benevolent flows of water that still sculpt and shape the land to this day.

For information on ordering, see page 43.

Cut the coulees, channel scablands, carve basalt like old black butter; even gouge that great green slot that we will call the Gorge.