In my Geology 101 classes we’ve been learning about ice age floods. There’s still another lesson to do so I don’t have the full details on it yet, but the story of these huge floods from glacial lakes over the Pacific Northwest of the US is incredible.
During the ice age, in Montana, a lake was created by the large continental glacier which had creeped down from Canada. This was called Glacial Lake Missoula. The ice sheet acted like a dam, so any rivers that passed through that area were interrupted and as a result, tonnes of water built up. This happened over the course of around a century, perhaps.
So we have a huge thing of water, and one day, the dam breaks. Something happens with the glacial dam, and the water all comes rushing out. Like crazy. It takes maybe about 48 hours for this lake, which has been filling up for tens of years, to drain.
The water is rushing rushing rushing over the states of Montana and Idaho, sweeping up loads of debris and violently carving out landscapes. Then it hit a part of the land that it couldn’t pass through as quickly — the Wallula Gap. From there, the water came to a sort-of rest again and created Lake Lewis. The water was still moving slowly through the Wallula Gap, but it created this kind of reservoir because it couldn’t all just rush through in one go.
Moving, but not moving. Compared to how fast the water moved before, this new movement through Wallula Gap must have been deathly slow. When I think about this, I think “oh, the water must have been so bored!” Do you think natural phenomena get bored?
In my Googling, I came across “Lake Retention Time” on Wikipedia. The average amount of time a bit of water spends in a lake, before it leaves. Some lakes have a short retention time, like a few months. Other lakes have a retention time of years, some of them a thousand years. Imagine being in one place for a thousand years, if you lived long enough to notice it. Imagine being a part of Glacial Lake Missoula, and then running running running across hundreds of miles in the space of two days, and then just staying put again, while you slowly wait your turn to leave.
It’s kind of like the pandemic, isn’t it? We’re all in this reservoir and we have to wait our turn to be vaccinated, to pass through that Wallula Gap. It feels like we’re not moving, compared to the pace of life we’ve had before, but we are moving. We’re just in this waiting space.
What other times in my life have I felt like a reservoir?
School, is kind of a reservoir. But it was a good one for me… it was a place where I was developing and moving, but not unleashed on the world yet. I was in the reservoir yet I was dreaming, dreaming of the life that I wanted.
The more I think about this, the more that I feel like life is a series of reservoirs, rather than a big ol’ Missoula Flood. There’s the school reservoir, the university reservoir, then I was ill, that was a reservoir but a much harder one to be in, then there was the Canada reservoir… I guess the “floods” were the spaces inbetween, when the water was passing from one location to the other in one big BLOOMP. Some reservoirs drain slowly and some just burst when the dam breaks.
It’s a much better way to look at things if you think of life as a series of reservoirs than one big flood that gets interrupted. The “holding spaces” are where we spend most of our time. These containers. The floods are those moments when you’re like “oh my god” getting on a plane to your new home country, or when you break up with someone and move out the next month. The fast-moving moments where you can’t quite believe it’s happening.
I like the idea of being in a reservoir and dreaming. Just floating in a body of water which is slowly moving under me, and I look up at the sky, and I’m dreaming.