Ancient Places Read Free Page A

sheet of the Pleistocene epoch bulldozed along that trench from the north. As the ice retreated, it left behind a moraine of gravel that bulged just enough to nestle two puddles within the ditch, then pulled the water that leaked out of them north, in the direction of the receding glacier.
    When I placed one of David Thompson’s maps next to Phillips’s image, all the same elements marched across the page, from the mountain ridges on each side of the nascentColumbia’s valley to the low divide that allowed the Kootenay River to rush south while its mother river began a much longer journey in the opposite direction. Thompson, with only tribal information and his own survey data, had created a bird’s-eye view that jibed remarkably well with the camera’s stark image.
    John Phillips followed that first photo with several more, working his way south and west from the Columbia’s source lakes to track the course of David Thompson’s trade routes. What the astronaut saw from the space station was a landscape just below the southern edge of the great ice sheet—a terrain that at the end of the last glacial period was created and re-created by cycles of advancing ice thousands of feet thick. As those cycles waxed, ice-penned drainages backed up into huge lakes; as they waned, a succession of catastrophic meltdowns unleashed sudden torrential floods to rush across the Columbia Basin to the Pacific Ocean.
    Such events seem to bend the elemental rules of physics in some of the same ways that David Thompson wrestled with during his winters in the north country. The air around us may light up with a glowing electrical charge. Fire can burble out of nowhere in the form of luminescent globes. The rocks of this Earth travel of their own accord, then explode or fly away. Ice sculpts solid ground, only to be followed by a rolling tsunami that transforms an entire landscape. The best any observer can hope for is to try to take it all in. There will be time later to figure out what was left behind and what has changed forever.

II
M ELTDOWN
Keeping Fish Cool
    Just north of downtown Spokane, Washington, a rough basalt mesa floats above the grid of city streets like an aerial island. Its heights provide stunning views of the Spokane and Little Spokane Rivers as they circle toward their confluence downstream. Farmed fields spot its interior, and tribal history tells of epic horse races across its flat top.
    It was a searing summer day when I visited the base of the mesa with a group of Spokane tribal friends, descendants of the original residents of this area. On the edge of a quiet neighborhood, we parked near a stand of cattails that marked a small spring. A couple of younger members hopped out and dashed through a tangle of Douglas-firs, stumbling over rocks as theydisappeared into the greenery. Before long, we could hear their voices oohing and aahing.
    “What are we waiting for?” one of the elders asked, beckoning for me to help her out of the van.
    Four of the ladies were over eighty, but they all negotiated a branchy trail that led to the base of an overgrown talus slope. We soon came in sight of an erect bus-sized boulder of pillow basalt poised higher on the hillside. “Like a finger,” I heard one of them say from behind me. “Pointing the way.”
    Below the trail, in a hollow that had obviously been excavated and reworked by humans over the years, we found the youngsters holding out their palms in front of a crack in a craggy basalt face. The vent was only a couple of feet tall and half as wide, but even from a distance of several yards we could feel cool air wafting from its blackness. Nearby, a recent windstorm had partially toppled a gnarled, rockbound fir tree. From around its exposed roots, the same refreshing breeze poured out, continuous and strong. On such an uncomfortably hot day, it felt as though we had been carried to an entirely different place.
    A search around the hollow revealed another crack that also