Glacial Erratics

It's hard to estimate, given Covid, but it wouldn't be much of a risk to guess that this summer more than three million visitors to Yellowstone National Park will stop by this behomoth. It's not as great a favorite as Old Faithful, but this mighty thing sits in state like a great big gray relic between the trees, as if, like Gulliver, imprisoned by matchsticks. Yellowstone calls it a Glacial Boulder. It's huge, and it shall not be moved, nor has it since it got washed along--that's right, washed along--by some receding glacier, impossible as that is to imagine.

They're everywhere really. Yellowstone is full of the big guy's cousins. Down the road you'll find a field full of detritus, scattered around willy-nilly like a handful of glacial gravel. They could be moved, should someone want to rearrange furniture, but in all no one is going to pick up this mess without a dozen sticks of dynamite.

The glacier that left these mammoth stone is so long gone that its memory is preserved, for the most part, only by all this litter. Seriously, when you consider the mess you can't help think what kind of a lousy citizens glaciers turned out to be--no mind to clean up after, no mind at all, as if littering wasn't a sin but a joy.

The most celebrated glacial litter in the neighborhood belongs to Cherokee, where Pilot Rock, a quartzite monster so huge that once upon a time it pointed clear directions for aboriginal peoples, as well as a few pioneers who wandered out by way of the Little Sioux. It's just about impossible to imagine a 20-feet high, 40-feet wide mountain, 60-feet long--floating along anywhere, but that's what happened. An ocean swept Pilot Rock south and east from its moorings on the outcropping of Gitche Manitou or Pipestone, picked it up and left it behind.

An ocean here in northwest Iowa? Hard to believe. Impossible to believe. And I might just choose not to if it weren't for Pilot Rock.

Or a less hefty bit of glacial trash, a big fat hunk of granite along the trail to the top of Spirit Mound. There it sits, just off the path, as if someone simply rolled it away, which no one did. It's nothing like Yellowstone's or Cherokee's but its just plain weird to stumble on this brute in the middle of nothing but tall-grass prairie.

It just shouldn't be there, but go ahead and try to clean up.

We've likely all got 'em somewhere, so old a part of the prairie landscape that half the time we don't even notice they're there in places they've been for so long no one--nor no one's ancestry--remembers (or could) when they weren't here.

We've got one south of town, sitting out on a promontory into the south pond, dug there to get dirt for Highway 60 just north. The conservation board keeps a great trail all the way around the pond, but if you care to get to the water, this huge quartzite sofa is welcoming, although hardly comfy.



You just can't help but love the name, can you?--"glacial erratics" because they're so much unlike their surroundings. They're outsiders, outliers. They don't fit in but don't seem to be bothered in the least by their own uniqueness. 

They take their name from Latin errara, which means to wander. Go ahead and laugh. To call these boulders--even the baby one on Spirit Mound--a "wanderer" is a heckuva stretch because today they shall not be moved.

The English poet Wordsworth, as far as I know, was never anywhere close to Siouxland, but that doesn't mean he didn't have something to say about glacial erratics. Listen:

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
Wonder to all who do the same espy,
By what means it could thither come and whence;
So that it seems a thing endued with sese:
Like a Sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.

That's a grand thought, isn't it? For thousands of years now, even millions, the wandering days of these brutes have been over. They're retired. Today, they're reposing, catching some rays. Next time you run through Cherokee, stop by at Pilot Rock. It'll be there. Hasn't much to do anymore, but rest.

You got to love 'em. The only word these heavyweight itinerant preachers have offered in hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, right here in the neighborhood--and in silence--is the blessed gospel of rest.