In the big gravel pits you see hills turned into hollows, as if a part of the landscape had managed, in a haphazard way, to turn itself inside out. And little lakes ripple where before there were only terraces or river flats. The steep sides of the hollows grow lush, in time, bumpy with greenery. But the tracks of the glacier are gone for good.
So you have to keep checking, taking in the changes, seeing things while they last.
We have special maps that we travel with. They are maps sold to accompany a book called The Physiography of Southern Ontario, by Lyman Chapman and Donald Putnam-whom we refer to, familiarly but somewhat reverentially, as Put and Chap. These maps show the usual roads and towns and rivers, but they show other things as well-things that were a complete surprise to me when I first saw them.
Look at just one map-a section of southern Ontario south of Georgian Bay. Roads. Towns and rivers appear, as well as township boundaries. But look what else-patches of bright yellow, fresh green, battleship gray, and a darker mud gray, and a very pale gray, and splotches or stretches or fat or skinny tails of blue and tan and orange and rosy pink and purple and burgundy brown. Clusters of freckles. Ribbons of green like grass snakes. Narrow fluttery strokes from a red pen.
What is all this?
The yellow color shows sand, not along the lakeshore but collected inland, often bordering a swamp or a long-gone lake. The freckles are not round but lozenge-shaped, and they appear in the landscape like partly buried eggs, with the blunt end against the flow of the ice. These are drumlins-thickly packed in some places, sparse in others. Some qualifying as big smooth hills, some barely breaking through the ground. They give their name to the soil in which they appear (drumlinized till-tan) and to the somewhat rougher soil which has none of them in it (undrumlinized till-battleship gray). The glacier in fact did lay them down like eggs, neatly and economically getting rid of material that it had picked up in its bulldozing advance. And where it didn’t manage this, the ground is naturally rougher.
The purple tails are end moraines. They show where the ice halted on its long retreat, putting down a ridge of rubble at its edge. The vivid green strokes are eskers, and they are the easiest of all features to recognize, when you’re looking through the car window. Miniature mountain ranges, dragons’ backs-they show the route of the rivers that tunnelled under the ice, at right angles to its front. Torrents loaded with gravel, which they discharged as they went. Usually there will be a little mild-mannered creek, running along beside an esker-a direct descendant of that ancient battering river.
The orange color is for spillways, the huge channels that carried off the meltwater. And the dark gray shows the swamps that have developed in the spillways and are still there. Blue shows the clay soil, where the ice water was trapped in lakes. These places are flat but not smooth and there is something sour and lumpy about clay fields. Heavy soil, coarse grass, poor drainage.
Meadow green is for the bevelled till, the wonderfully smooth surface that the old Lake Warren planed in the deposits along the shore of today’s Lake Huron.
Red strokes and red interrupted lines that appear on the bevelled till, or on the sand nearby, are remnants of bluffs and the abandoned beaches of those ancestors of the Great Lakes, whose outlines are discernible now only by a gentle lift of the land. Such prosaic, modern, authoritative-sounding names they have been given-Lake Warren, Lake Whittlesey.
Up on the Bruce peninsula there is limestone under a thin soil (pale gray), and around Owen Sound and on Cape Rich there is shale, at the bottom of the Niagara Escarpment, exposed where the limestone is worn off. Crumbly rock that can be made into brick of the same color it shows on the map-rosy pink.
My favorite of all the kinds of country is the one I’ve left till last. This is kame, or kame moraine, which is a chocolate burgundy color on the map and is generally in blobs, not ribbons. A big blob here, a little one there. Kame moraines show where a heap of dead ice sat, cut off from the rest of the moving glacier, earth-stuff pouring through all its holes and crevices. Or sometimes it shows where two lobes of ice pulled apart, and the crevice filled in. End moraines are hilly in what seems a reasonable way, not as smooth as drumlins, but still harmonious, rhythmical, while kame moraines are all wild and bumpy, unpredictable, with a look of chance and secrets.
I didn’t learn any of this at school. I think there was some nervousness then, about being at loggerheads with the Bible in the matter of the creation of the Earth’. I learned it when I came to live here with my second husband, a geographer. When I came back to where I never expected to be, in the countryside where I had grown up. So my knowledge is untainted, fresh. I get a naive and particular pleasure from matching what I see on the map with what I can see through the car window. Also from trying to figure out what bit of landscape we’re in, before I look at the map, and being right a good deal of the time. It is exciting to me to spot the boundaries, when it’s a question of the different till plains, or where the kame moraine takes over from the end moraine.
But there is always more than just the keen pleasure of identification. There’s the fact of these separate domains, each with its own history and reason, its favorite crops and trees and weeds-oaks and pines, for instance, growing on sand, and cedars and strayed lilacs on limestone-each with its special expression, its pull on the imagination. The fact of these little countries lying snug and unsuspected, like and unlike as siblings can be, in a landscape that’s usually disregarded, or dismissed as drab agricultural counterpane. It’s the fact you cherish.
I thought that the appointment I had was for a biopsy, but it turned out not to be. It was an appointment to let the city doctor decide whether he would do a biopsy, and after examining my breast and the results of the mammogram, he decided that he would. He had seen only the results of my most recent mammogram-those from 1990 and 1991 had not arrived yet from the country hospital where they had been done. The biopsy was set for a date two weeks ahead and I was given a sheet with instructions about how to prepare for it.
I said that two weeks seemed like quite a while to wait.
At this stage of the game, the doctor said, two weeks was immaterial.
That was not what I had been led to believe. But I did not complain-not after a look at some of the people in the waiting room. I am over sixty. My death would not be a disaster.
Not in comparison with the death of a young mother, a family wage-earner, a child. It would not be apparent as a disaster.
It bothered us that we could not find the crypt. We extended our search. Perhaps it was not in Bruce County but in next-door Grey County? Sometimes we were sure that we were on the right road, but always we were disappointed. I went to the town library to look at the nineteenth-century county atlases, to see if perhaps the country cemeteries were marked on the township maps. They appeared to be marked on the maps of Huron County, but not in Bruce or Grey. (This wasn’t true, I found out later-they were marked, or some of them were, but I managed to miss the small faint C’s.)