Hard times | How sitting around doing nothing much got me thinking about glacial geology
I was watching a man build a stone wall the other day and remembered the old saying: “Work fascinates me — I can sit and watch it for hours.”
Watching someone build a stone wall is probably not something you’d pay to view, but for what I paid, which was nothing, it was a great show. I couldn’t believe how skillfully he worked as he took a stone from the nearby pile, tossed it a few times between his hands to determine its balance and then placed the stone right where it belonged, right where it’s probably wanted to be for the last hundred-thousand years or so.
Then he’d turn toward the pile and grab another stone and then another as he worked his way along building his wall slowly and steadily, higher and wider.
It got me thinking: Here are rocks that were once a very small part of a towering eastern mountain range. For a few thousand years these rocks lay buried under a massive glacier that we’re told was a mile thick if it was an inch.
More than 10,000 years ago, when the temperature started rising, that old glacier started melting. As it melted it began slipping and sliding down toward the ocean, giving our ancient New England landscape an extreme makeover in the process. It was that glacier that helped determine where our mighty rivers would flow. As it moved slowly toward the ocean it also carved out some of our most beautiful lakes.
Don’t ask me how they know, but geologists claim New Hampshire’s White Mountains used to be over 12,000 feet tall before the glacier came along and lopped off their top half. Imagine a Mount Washington that was twice as high as the one we have today. Geologists say present-day New Hampshire wouldn’t be big enough to contain such a massive mountain range. The base for such a peak would have to begin here in Maine — almost as far over as our coastline.
There’s nothing we can do about it now, but a 12,000-foot mountain peak over there to our west would be a pretty impressive sight. A mountain like that could be seen for hundreds of miles around and Realtors today would have thousands more cottages with mountain views to sell at mountain-view prices.
In order to cut that mountain down to size — from 12,000 feet to 6,000 feet — billions and trillions of cubic yards of rock had to be lopped off those impressive peaks and ground into stones of various sizes, including many stone wall-sized pieces. But it would be a few thousand years before the beautiful stone wall was invented so it didn’t mean much at the time.
Our mighty, mile-high glacier finally reached the ocean and slowly melted away to nothing, leaving behind a pretty roughed-up landscape with huge piles of rocks strewn everywhere.
Geologists say these rocks then sank into the mud, and trees soon grew up around them and towered over the land, making it a lot more presentable for real-estate buyers who would arrive a few thousand years later.
The rocky glacial debris would be buried and forgotten until early European settlers arrived on the scene. These settlers started cutting down trees to build houses and ships. The new settlers needed open space for their gardens and fields to grow hay for their livestock. In the process of making wide-open spaces for their farms, they deforested much of New England.
Never at a loss for explanations, geologists go on to explain that when the trees were cut and the land laid bare the long-buried glacial rocks bubbled to the surface. These surface rocks are now part of our New England heritage and over the centuries people have come up with a few ideas about what to do with them.
One of the better ideas was to use the seemingly endless supply of rocks to build walls to separate pasture land from crop land and one farmer’s field from another.
Don’t ask me how they know or when they measured them, but someone claims there used to be over 250,000 miles of stone walls in New England alone. And if you want some idea of how long 250,000 miles is, these same people have an answer for that, too. They say a 250,000-mile wall would go around the world 10 times.
So you might say all this geological activity — the mile-high glacier and the lopping off of 6,000 feet of the White Mountains — had to take place around here just so this master stone worker could come along some warm June afternoon and arrange the ancient rocks in his pile. It may have taken thousands of years, but these particular misplaced rocks were finally organized.
I just wonder if this builder does garages.
John McDonald, an author, humorist and storyteller who performs throughout New England, can be reached at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com.
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