My cab wove through the midafternoon traffic, tracing an arc along the frozen shore of Lake Michigan. On my right, the buildings of one of the world’s tallest cities stabbed toward the sky, steel and glass growing out of the Illinois prairie like modern incarnations of the grass and trees that once lined the lake. A thriving metropolis of nearly three million people, Chicago boasts and airport that was once the world’s busiest (it’s now second), with over 190,000 passengers a day passing through its terminals – including, on this particular day, me. This sprawling city prides itself on its dynamic, forward-looking culture – the “tool maker” and “stacker of wheat,” as Carl Sandburg called it. Not the most obvious place to come looking for the past.
The lake took me back in time, though – way back, before it was even there. Lake Michigan is actually a remnant of one of the largest glaciers the earth has ever seen. During the last ice age, the Laurentide ice sheet stretched from northern Canada down along the Missouri River, as far south as Indianapolis, with its eastern flank covering present-day New York and spilling into the Atlantic Ocean. When it melted, around 10,000 years ago, the water coalesced into the Great Lakes, including Michigan. Looking out the window of my cab, at the strong winds ripping across the expanse of ice reaching out from the Chicago shoreline, I felt like history might be rewinding itself. The ice age could have looked like this, I thought.
– Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Chapter 1: Mystery in the Map
image by Stephen Hudson from Wikipedia – Antarctic Ice Sheet
A friend of mine once spoke to me of glaciers – of the last traces of life in the Empty Continent (the only one left) – Antarctica. Of how it used to be green fields, and of how the ice has taken over, has left trace skulls and abandoned bacteria, of the tenacity of the last traces of life and also the cruelty of the emptiness – of pure abstraction, she said, like something by Bach.
And she also wrote to me (yes, I am a proud owner of a letter written in Antarctica!) about how the glacial pace of great change gave her hope, because the way that God works is skillful, is mysterious, is relentless, is slow – so slow that it tests our patience – but sure. Glacial change can harden the land – can make it so frigid, so cold that it cannot receive or sustain life. It makes the land barren. It begins a little by little – a little drop in temperature, a little formation of ice where water once flowed – but then before you know it, the land is white as snow, like the winter in Narnia – lasting an age instead of a season. And the opposite is true – what we are experiencing today – a little more methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a couple degrees’ temperature rise – oh it’s just a little, it makes Canada more livable, it gives deserts more rain – it drowns the Venetians (who know they have had it coming for a while), it drowns New Orleans. The levees break, the city weeps and leaves yet another Atlantis, yet another mythical advanced city wiped out by pure geography (helped along a little by unsustainable technology…).
B O A T 
