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this is the first installment of a series of installments comprising michael
ceraolo's Euclid Creek book. Prologue It is not an epic waterway christened with a catchy nickname and celebrated in song and story, at least until now, though it is eminently deserving of being immortalized as such; in fact it has heretofore been derided with the diminutive creek, deemed unworthy of the designation river, even denied depiction on most maps And probably not even a majority of the residents of the surrounding area know where the waterway begins or could place it accurately; or if they could place it, know much of its life or history Until now Part One I The Birth of the Land The land around Euclid Creek was born about one-point-one billion years ago; born sometime shortly after six o'clock in the evening in the day-long life of the earth; or, born in the most recent hour-and-a-half or so in the day-long life of the universe, depending on which timepiece one chooses to use; born in a collision between what then constituted all of the continent we now call North America and another unknown continent which has since broken away; the kind of collision that has often occurred as the continents skate across the globe; a collision, though, that occurred over millions of years as the continents don't skate very fast; a collision that caused a mountain-building episode that heaved up Himalaya-like hills which then eroded over time to today's lowlands only several hundred feet above sea level, land that I survey today The land that I survey today is about half-way along the way of the creek's winding journey to its destiny in the inland sea, a journey that is about five miles as the crow flies, perhaps twice that distance as the creek flows from its source in the tony suburbs to the east of the central city, encased and entombed in concrete culverts for a part of its journey, flowing openly through a posh country club, here in the park creating a waterfall I don't see a man in the waterfall, as Dr. Williams did at Paterson, but I do see human hubris on view as I listen to the roar at the base of the falls, at the top of the canyon houses are perched precariously on what was surely solid ground when they were built, for much of the surrounding area is built on a rock quarry, covered only by a thin skin of clayey soil, that had to be blasted through with dynamite in order to install the storm sewers Because bedrock is indeed the dominant feature around the creek, for you can see where chunks were carved out of the cliffs, creating caves sometimes inhabited by those with nowhere else to go (It wasn't always thus though Earlier natives of the area inhabited the caves by quite conscious choice, using them as a winter quarters, climbing down with deer and elk hunted in the summer, celebrating their good fortune with rituals now doubly lost, the chants, poems, and tales now lost, the languages themselves that such magic was created in now lost, as lost as those earlier natives are I hope this poem can capture a fraction of that lost magic) Massive slabs of stone not used for sidewalks have fallen across the creek, almost damming its flow And scattered stones in miscellaneous sizes are arranged in haphazard rows in a kind of outdoor amphitheater home to no shows And the bedrock not carved by man, witness to ancient eras of history sculpted into hard canyon walls and etched with lines of nature's graffiti, is washed by the trickling brook slowly away ________________________________________________________________________ II The Birth of Euclid Creek But water and its relatives have not always been quite so meek Many times in the past the army of ice advanced southward from the polar ice cap, conquering and laying waste to everything in its path over the course of tens of thousands of years, interspersed with short periods of strategic retreat when confronted with climatic opposition, the retreats then followed by further advances that extended the ice empire's dominion over a large part of the planet, ruling far greater areas for a far longer time than any human empire could ever hope to rule, ruling without opposition The last, or just the most recent, invasion reached the area around Euclid Creek about 25,000 years ago, and continued southward, occupying its maximum territory about 18,000 years ago Over the next 5,000 years or so the ice retreated as far back as this area, though of course the retreat was not smooth and was accompanied by intermittent advances And the last advances and retreats were spectacular in their sculpture, creating the gray Great Lake into which Euclid Creek empties, and all of the sister Great Lakes, and the magnificence known as Niagara Falls, and Euclid Creek itself III The Uneasy Co-Existence The four-, six-, and eight-legged crawling and flying people and the finned and flippered swimming people greatly outnumber and outvote me here as they do everywhere But theirs is no tyranny of the majority, for they are respectful of minority rights And it would surely be a sacrilege for a non-oppressed minority to attempt a coup by trying to impose the doctrine of might makes right And so they and I have entered into a non-aggression pact But outside the park there remains the uneasy co-existence with the two-legged people: the crows, with the ancestral memories of the forest encoded in their genes, waiting by the side of the freeway for the rush hours to end so that they can feast on the squirrel who played chicken with the cars and lost; and the groundhog, celebrated one day of the year, ignored or reviled the rest of the year, lying squashed at the edge of the road; and a rabbit, who has escaped from that green cage we call a park and wandered into someone's backyard, where it sits sucking nourishment through the stem of a dandelion as though sipping through a straw, thankful that no one has put poison on the plant; and a different rabbit, or maybe the same one, hopping frenetically, with only its tail visible as the swirling late-season snow falls to its doom, giving the illusion of a moving snowball as it struggles to find food; and a raccoon, poisoned for having the audacity to eat what the humans didn't even want any more; and bees and wasps and hornets, exterminated for attacking those who tried to destroy their homes; the robin lying belly up in the driveway, having sampled the seed stuck in the spilled oil; and another bird, despondent over the destruction of its home in the name of development, committing suicide by a kamikaze dive into the grille of a moving car; and the homeless skunk, driven into the diurnal world by the breaking of its biological clock, wandering with the eyes of an unmedicated schizophrenic, finally lying down, seizing, and dying; ~ and the deer, who refused to keep their population at near-extinction levels, who refused to remain contained on the reservation to which they had been consigned, who refused to refrain from eating grass and shrubs and hence blasphemed the ideal of human property values, and were thus sentenced to be executed, several hundred strong, although the execution was given a nicer-sounding scientific name Nothing new here, unfortunately, for this is one of those times where the events don't read any better now as history than they did at the time as news, if indeed they were even notice as news It was just a century or so ago that the last of the passenger pigeons was killed And just a century or so before that that elk and bear and wild turkey and other animals were hunted almost to extinction by the first white settlers in the area, the animals having re-colonized the area after being driven away and overhunted by the earlier natives And so it goes in boom-and-bust cycles back to the days of the final retreat of the ice sheet, where some animals followed the tundra as it moved away from the area, and those grizzly bears and caribou and bison and some species of musk ox and voles and a couple of kinds of lemmings saved themselves by moving away, for they still live today, although not in the Euclid Creek area But other animals were not so lucky Peccaries and beavers the size of bears and the ferocious carnivorous short-faced bear and a species of moose and a species of deer and a species of musk ox now exist only in the imagination, as do the wooly mammoth and the Jefferson mammoth and the mastodon, all done in by the sinister synergy of changing climate and the appearance of fierce hunters, the first humans to see Euclid Creek--- IV The Autochthonic Americans There is still some debate about the debut of humans in this hemisphere Conventional wisdom postulates a late arrival conforming to a single migratory pattern across a specific route at a specific time Unconventional wisdom showing diversity is treated, no matter how compelling the evidence, as coming out of left field, and dissent in scientific matters is sometimes punished as harshly as dissent in political matters But there is little debate about when humans first came to Euclid Creek, humans who belonged to the same race as us, the only race, the human race ~ They came at the time of the final retreat of the ice sheet, around the time of the mass extinctions They left posterity no written record, and so have been scorned as uncivilized, slandered as savages, though they were neither They had their own creation myths and epic poems songs and stories in oral traditions in now-lost languages They had their own religious rituals, celebrating the hunt and later the harvest, celebrating love, celebrating birth, recognizing death, rituals and beliefs now lost They had their own forms of social and political organization, some more egalitarian and enlightened than anything extant today They had their own modes of dress, which differed from European fashion and so incurred the wrath of those who would make a moral issue out of a matter of style They were as subject to the vagaries of the weather as those who live in the area today, surviving the cold climate they first encountered, adapting to the gradually-increasing warmth, prospering through the climatic optimum which occurred from five to three thousand years ago and provided plentiful hunting and fishing and ample gathering opportunities, suffering through summers of drought and weathering the worst of winters in similar seasonal variations as today, rejoicing in the Little Climatic Optimum that began a thousand or so years ago and lasted for a few hundred years, persevering through the more extreme deviations such as the dust-bowl like conditions that lasted from the mid-1200s until the middle of the next century and the Little Ice Age that began a century after that and lasted past contact Their housing developed from caves to temporary single-family dwellings to more permanent multi-family longhouses, as conditions created the necessity for change They developed tools out of the available materials, tools that grew more sophisticated as circumstances demanded They developed art of the type frequently dismissed as crafts They developed trade networks and a more complex economy, switching to more of an agricultural society as population density dictated Their cultures and traditions had periods of great influence followed by periods of decline and succeeded in turn by other cultures and traditions, the same as all other civilizations, all of which must have been unknown when I took Ohio history in school in the nineteen sixties and seventies, for I was never taught about any of it They had friends and enemies among the neighboring nations, and those designations changed sometimes like all other human societies Their cultures and traditions were labeled, not with their own names, but with the names of, first, the Europeans, and, later, the newer Americans, who dug deep into the earth to discover them, and were celebrated as archeologists rather than reviled as graverobbers They lived millennia of ordinary extraordinary human lives, and then they disappeared from this area around 1640, the result of a second sinister synergy between historic enemies from the east and the cumulative effects of the Little Ice Age and advance armies of European germs, and didn't appear again in the area, at least on a permanent basis, for about a hundred years ________________________________________________________________________ V The Reading Room Here, in the reading room of God's library, the books are made of rock, and the volumes are stacked one on top of the other, with the oldest being on the bottom Reminiscent of pre-printing press days each volume is painstakingly produced over a period of many millions of years The history of life is written in these rocks, written of course not by humans, (we have already seen the small scratchings humans put there) but by the forces that formed fossils; this history is written in a language that I don't understand, a language that few humans understand, a language that was exceedingly difficult to decipher But some have deciphered that language, and this is the tale those translators tell: Life arrived with the birth of the land around Euclid Creek, mostly single-celled life that sometimes collected into cities of unimaginable population, life that reproduced itself by simple div ision, staying relatively simple for about half the time life has been lived around Euclid Creek And then came a Great Mystery In the latest few hours of the earth, life, which had only recently learned to reproduce itself sexually, suddenly, so to speak, became multicellular and then exploded in complexity, developing soft skeletons and shells in response to some sort of change in the seas in which all life then lived, seas that surrounded the land around Euclid Creek, land that was then in the southern tropics As the land around Euclid Creek remained in the southern tropics, though skating slowly to the west, life developed a backbone, for the first fish formed And so over many many millions of years fish continued to develop, giving rise to what has been called the Age of Fishes These rulers of the seas were no mythical monsters of Lake Erie, as sometimes have supposedly been sighted near here in recent times, but real-life ones, ones that would be terrifying if they were still extant today, ones that would make today's sea creatures seem like house fish Spectacular specimens of some of these fish have been preserved in books that have come to be known as the Cleveland shales, books excavated in the nineteen sixties when the highways were being built The seas that covered the land eventually receded for good, at least so far, and the salty remnants left behind are still being mined- Today on one of the ancient beach ridges of a bygone sea, a giant mountain of salt sits unused outside the salt mines, the result of the failure of capitalism to produce a severe enough winter, while across the street is one of the educational salt mines named, in a paroxysm of parochial pride over politics, for a Socialist, albeit a safely dead one- After a hundred million years or so came the first pioneers, those so equipped to be able to step onto land and survive, and eventually thrive The land around Euclid Creek continued its skate across the globe, remaining in the southern tropics for eons named, in the imperialistic manner, for places in Europe where fossils from a particular period were first found, as though those were the only places where those events occurred! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! |