I
Oxbow
Oxbow
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.