I
Oxbow
Oxbow
At seventeen, I left home. Through the window of my first car, I watched the mountains of Salt Lake City melt into the horizon. Raindrops gathered on the glass. Single points massing into wispy veins, combined further into long streams across my view. My parents sat next to each other, plotting the course to an inevitable fork which would divert us from the path we'd shared for the majority of my life. Flanked by boxes of things, a red, white, and green mountain bike strapped carefully to the back of our car shuddered nervously in the wind.- A few weeks later, a familiar whirring primed the dark lecture hall of INTRO TO GEOLOGY for imminent illumination. With a click, the room filled with light, the image of a bird's-eye view of a river, animating frame by frame to reveal the slow meander of its path over time. “The oxbow lake…”, announced the professor, “...begins its life as a small curve. Over time water erodes its outside edge, while depositing sediment on its inside bank. This effect compounds the water's speed and sediment's displacement, until it inevitably loops back onto itself, shortcutting its former path to form a new body of water.”
| A View West to the Oquirrh Mountains ca. 1904 Born and raised in Salt Lake City, the view of the Oquirrhs and surrounding Wasatch Mountains, not to mention other familiar landmarks like the Mormon Temple, earmark my memory of home. | |||
University of Oregon
The Destination of our road trip from Salt Lake City. By pure coincidence, I was assigned to the same building, and floor my dad lived on during his year long exchange from the University of Hawaiʻi 30 years before
In early March, 1840, geologist Edward Hitchcock stood atop Mount Holyoke in western Massachusetts, overlooking the Connecticut River as the flood waters rose. In the preceding decades, the area had become a hotbed for landscape tourism, attracting the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson. Guidebooks gushed over the lush valley and fertile fields which surrounded the river—in particular, a notable U-shaped bend. It was known as “The Oxbow” for its resemblance to the curved wooden yokes saddled on the shoulders of oxen.- Though not uncommon in the geological vernacular of the time, the homogenization of the term “Oxbow” anchored to the same location. Four years earlier, painter Thomas Cole depicted a view into the valley in his now famous masterpiece, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow. Splitting the composition diagonally across the canvas, Cole juxtaposed the stormy, untamed wilderness of the early American landscape with a bright, calm pastoral settlement. At the lower center, barely visible, Cole peers back from his sketch directly at the viewer.
- Cole’s presentation reflected the political energies of the time, romancing beliefs of Manifest Destiny which necessitated the American settlers’ expansion into the west. Considered the first true expression of American imperialism, Cole’s work marked the genesis of an ideology which ordained settler Americans with the right to their newfound continent—and ultimately, beyond—pitting peoples against peoples, and civilization against the natural world.
Thomas Cole
c.1836
ca. 1908
“From the collection of H W. Fay, Esq., De Kalb, 111. A Yoke which is treasured as an Example of Lincoln’s Craftsmanship
As the storm raged on, Hitchcock would bear witness to a total reshaping of the land. Over the following hours and days, the flood would redefine the bounds of the Connecticut, completely cutting off the sharp bend in the river once pictured by Cole and others in favor of a more direct route. To this day, the resulting Oxbow lake remains largely unchanged, save a pair of highways which bisect its diameter, a packaging plant, and a marina.- And while the hydrological reshaping of the land might seem significant enough, it was Hitchcock himself who would continue to be shaped by such floods. A fundamentalist Christian deeply enthralled by the natural sciences, Hitchcock constantly hedged the line between the theological traditions he was brought up on, and the growing scientific evidence which more often than not complicated, if not completely contradicted, his inherited world view.
- The problem of Noah’s ark, for instance, had become not a matter of faith but of arithmetic. By the 1850s biologists had catalogued some 150,000 distinct species, which by biblical tellings would mean 300,000 animals waiting at the gangplank. The numbers didn't work, and Hitchcock knew it. But rather than abandon the story, he narrowed it—proposing that the flood had covered only the Middle East, where the fauna were few, making the math forgiving. It was a solution of geography rather than theology, but it held.
- Even so, the flood lingered in his work, a speck of sediment refusing to sink below his view. In his 1833 Report on the Geology of Massachusetts, Hitchcock named a stratum of rocks in New England: diluvium. A direct nod to Noah’s deluge, Hitchcock hypothesized that a biblical flood might account for the thick layer of gravel and boulders that blanketed Plymouth and Cape Cod. He proposed the formation might be the result of a powerful deluge, sweeping from the north and northwest, over every part of the state, not excepting its highest mountains. But by 1840, that conviction too had eroded. The work of Charles Lyell, a fellow geologist, had persuaded the geological community that no worldwide flood had occurred, and Hitchcock quietly revised his maps, and his thinking along with it.
- What he never managed to accept however, was what the evidence actually pointed toward. The gravelly drift he'd spent years interpreting—first as the result of flood, then as something else—was glacial debris, the leavings of ice that had slowly retreated some 18,000 years before, during the thaw of the preceding ice age. Famed naturalist Louis Agassiz had introduced the concept in 1837, but for whatever reason Hitchcock never fully took it in.
- In its retreat, the glacier filled the entire Connecticut River Valley with meltwater—Lake Hitchcock: a vast glacial lake stretching across the very land he'd spent his career studying. When the water finally receded, a hill, once an island in the lake, emerged. Upon it, Amherst College was built, the institution Hitchcock would go on to serve as president for over a decade. His name immortalized by the result of a history he could never quite bring himself to accept.
- Another click, momentary darkness before the lights flicked on, and class had ended. Pens clicked, bags zipped, and a huddle of weary-eyed students filed out of the classroom. Outside, the white, green, and red mountain bike waited patiently for my return, while sparkling beads of water clung to its time-faded paint.
- My journey home that day traced its usual path along the Willamette River. Lined on both sides by bike paths that hugged tightly to its edge, the sprawling blue waterway offered a quiet reprieve from the buzzing small town that surrounded campus.
ca. 1832
Stretching nearly 200 miles across northwestern Oregon, the Willamette had for more than 10,000 years supported the numerous tribes who lived in this landscape. In Eugene, the Kalapuyan people comprised the majority of the population, inhabiting numerous villages where they harvested roots, grains, and bulbs from the prairies, hunted elk and deer, and constructed weirs and fish traps to catch fish in the rivers and streams. They moved seasonally throughout their territories, at times sharing land with friendly neighboring groups, setting up camps wherever fields of camas were ready to dig in early summer or oaks were dropping acorns in the fall.- By 1844, American settlers began arriving in the Willamette Valley by way of the Oregon Trail. The settlers seized plots of land, cultivating the prairies and sowing seeds in areas that the tribes relied on for food gathering. They depleted the game, fished the rivers, and destroyed various food sources, forcing many tribal peoples to work as laborers on settler farms. The fenced fields isolated them from their land, confining them to ever smaller areas the settlers permitted them to inhabit. By 1855, illness had diminished indigenous numbers by nearly ninety-five percent, and legislation had been enacted to permanently remove the Kalapuyan people from their ancestral homeland.
I coasted home along the Willamette's banks, following the path for only a mile or so as I did most days, the lecture still turning over somewhere in the back of my mind. As the path curved close to the water’s edge, I came to a stop, laying my bike onto a carpet of dewy grass, before pushing through the taller reeds to the water's edge. I emerged onto a small shelf of black-grey stones, undoubtedly rounded into ellipsoid spheres by years of erosion. Reaching out, they dipped lower and lower before completely surrendering to the cold autumn water.- In the quiet, which so often wraps around these obscured places, the animated frames of the Oxbow returned to my vision. Likely captured by a satellite floating high above the stones that lay below my feet, I wondered where I stood. Downstream, the river wrapped hard to the left, disappearing behind the trees which towered high above its banks. Upstream, a more gentle curve readied the water for its impending turn. Despite the new details which filled my senses—the cool breeze flowing across my face, the ducks that quacked carelessly by, and the stones which prodded at my feet through the rubbery soles of my well-worn Vans—I lacked the higher angle afforded by the satellite, and the institutional knowledge that tracked the river’s movement over time. Did the downstream curve continue? Sharper and sharper, awaiting the final debridement of sediment that would open a new path of movement? Did a small still water lake exist there just beyond my view, the result of a previous reshaping? I stayed there for a while longer, rolling a particularly round stone in my hands, before returning it to the depths of the dark grey river—making it back to my dorm’s cafeteria just in time to join the already-forming line for “Fried Fridays.”
Purchased in the early 90’s, my mom rode the same red, white and green mountian bike for years before I inherited (read: stole) it for my own.
A rounded black-grey river stone, not too unlike the one I held on the banks of the Willamette that cool fall morning.