I thought I'd begin this blog with a story I wrote when I was taking a Creative Nonfiction course as part of my Master's degree. I managed to eke out an A with this story, so I suppose it wasn't too bad for my first attempt at nonfiction.
Back when we moved to Washington State, we had no idea this was the state that bore the brunt of the insanely huge Missoula Flood that happened some 15,000 years ago. Last summer I had decided we needed to go on a camping trip, and since Washingtonians are rabid campers, the only camping spot in the state I could snag was at a place called Sun Lakes State Park. I figured I'd better find something interesting to do, so I started reading up on the area and realized that the whole purpose of the park was to preserve the region around Dry Falls, which was where this ginormous flood carved out the entire landscape in something crazy like 48 hours. Needless to say, we were spellbound by the place. Coming from the lush and damp Puget Sound side of Washington, it was crazy to realize that half the state was dry and desert-like. I even managed to crank out a cool little painting inspired by the inky black night we experienced there.
So without further ado, below is my first (and so far only) creative nonfiction piece.
Un-riddling the Mysterious Scablands
On a hot summer day in the late 1920s, a geologist named J Harlen Bretz scrutinized a massive cliff spreading along the horizon. He had puzzled over that cliff every summer since 1922, dragging his wife, kids, and dog from their home in Chicago to spend the summer holidays tramping through the arid Scablands of Washington State. Bretz couldn’t quite figure out how that cliff ended up in the middle of such a dry landscape, and, as a prominent geologist, he was determined to unravel its secret.
His fellow geologists had dubbed the cliff “Dry Falls” and insisted that an ancient waterfall had chiseled it out over thousands of years. Geologically speaking, that made sense. Bretz’s entire career had focused on the slow movements of the earth over time; he’d done his dissertation a few years back on how glaciers had slowly carved out the lakes in Washington State’s Puget Sound area. So he understood how erosion was supposed to work.
But a huge waterfall in the middle of an arid desert did not make sense, especially when there was no evidence of a river, even an ancient one, flowing through these parts. Bretz adjusted his spectacles, shoved his hat more protectively onto his balding head, and surveyed his surroundings. Basalt boulders were scattered randomly about as if a gang of giant children had abandoned their game of marbles when their mother called them in for dinner—how did they get there? The subtle work of erosion wouldn’t have created such an odd dispersion. He shifted his focus to the undulating hills behind him—those hills weren’t made by erosion either. They couldn’t have been. He was sure of it. This whole place—the cliff, the boulders, the hills—was a complete puzzle, and one he was determined to unriddle.
Maybe it was because he had spent most of his career studying the movement of water, but when Bretz closed his eyes against the summer sun, an image that had haunted his dreams for the past several months filled his thoughts. He envisioned a mountain of water speeding towards him with the roar of a thousand freight trains. The deluge drowned everything in its path—trees, rocks, any animal without wings. It pummeled the ground as it raced across the earth: blasting out deep holes, carving canyons, violently and almost instantly chiseling that massive three and a half-mile long cliff where there was once flat land. A foamy mass of muddy water thundered over the cliff—the hugest waterfall ever seen (if there were anyone around but Bretz to see it) in any point in Earth’s known history. The torrent swept past him and rushed onward, heading towards what one day would be Oregon, thundering down the Columbia River Gorge and burying the future site of Portland under 400 feet of water.
That’s how this place was formed—Bretz was sure of it. In a geological blink of an eye the entire landscape before him was utterly and permanently changed when a massive flood roared through the desert. His fellow geologists were right about Dry Falls—it was a waterfall, but slow erosion over time didn’t have any part in creating it. A catastrophic flood made more sense.
Now, how on Earth could he convince the rest of the scientific world of this radical idea? They already thought he was a little eccentric and a bit bullheaded. He’d already tried presenting a paper on this theory, and they almost rode him out of the Geological Society on a rail for merely suggesting such a blasphemous thing.
He brazenly went for it again anyway. In 1927 he defended his theory at a conference in Washington D.C. And, as he predicted, his fellow scientists again scoffed him out of the room.
“Impossible,” they said. “Geological features are formed through years of erosion, not in one single, fantastic swoop.”
“Then how do you explain the huge boulders scattered in the Willamette Valley down in Oregon?” reasoned Bretz. “They aren’t native to the area—how did they get there? How do you explain those strange, undulating hills in the Scablands? Erosion couldn’t have possibly caused that!”
“All right, if there was a huge flood, where did it come from?” his fellow geologists countered, and there, Bretz was stumped. He hadn’t come up with a source for his flood theory, although he was certain a catastrophic flood was the cause of the Scabland’s crazy features. And since he couldn’t prove where this Biblical-proportioned flood came from, his arguments fell on deaf ears. He couldn’t convince his fellow geologists; they knew darn well how geological features were made—through wind and water slowly eroding the rocks and earth over the centuries. Definitely not a process that could happen bang-pow overnight.
His theory did spark the interest of one geologist, though. While Bretz had been puzzling out the odd formations in the Scablands, a man named Joseph Pardee had been trying to figure out the cause of some similar undulating hills in Missoula, Montana. The hills looked like ripples to Pardee—giant water ripples. His theory was that Missoula had once been buried under a huge glacial lake. Pardee wondered if maybe his theoretical lake was the catalyst for Bretz’s theoretical flood.
It wasn’t until the 1940s, however, that the scientific community finally began to pay heed to both these theories, as every other conjecture on how the Scablands formed was summarily refuted. Did a giant glacier shape the landscape? Nope—glaciers never covered the Scablands. Did a great river carve out the area’s unique features? No river in history was large enough to form the huge potholes that dotted the landscape. It turned out that the combined theories of Bretz and Pardee were the only theories that held any water (literary and figuratively), and over the decades, the pieces of this geological puzzle fell in place. And it went like this:
Fifteen thousand years ago, glaciers began crawling down from the north, inching into Montana. A finger of one glacier choked off a river, and a lake was formed—a 2,000 feet deep and miles wide sleeping behemoth. At some point that ice dam had to give, and when it did, Pardee’s Lake Missoula—all 500 cubic miles of it—drained in a staggering 48 hours and hurtled across the country. Its flow was ten times larger than the flow of all the combined rivers in the world, and as it ripped across the northwest, it stripped soil and rocks from the ground, transported small icebergs on its surface, and gouged out massive chasms and canyons as it went. The massive wave of water rolled through Montana and upper Idaho. Then it hit Washington State.
This part of the country was used to floods of another kind—floods of lava that over the millennia had built up, hardened, and formed a craggy basalt terrain. Over the centuries, the basalt was pushed up into high vertical columns, and when the Great Missoula Flood hit those columns, it chewed through them like a drill eating up concrete, forming the Channeled Scablands, an insane topographical terrain unlike anywhere else on Earth. The churning waters, moving at a whopping sixty miles an hour, carved out Dry Falls—ranging from 400 to 900 feet in height and 3.5 miles in length. The flood was so deep that it barely fell over those falls as it swept along, and it left huge gravel bars, some as high as 300 feet, in its wake as it churned over the countryside.
Eventually the rampaging wall of water moved south, depositing large rocks that had been carried inside melting icebergs into Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Then the remains of the great Lake Missoula emptied into the ocean. The immense destruction ended, but the sloth-like glaciers up north continued their slow crawl southward and Missoula Lake began reforming, only to burst through another ice dam years later. For two-thousand years the pattern kept repeating, further carving out the landscape, until the glaciers finally retreated, the Ice Age ended, and the area known as the Scablands reverted permanently to a dry desert. Little oases were scattered here and there wherever rivers brought water, and the immense potholes scoured by those torrential waters eventually became beautiful little lakes surrounded by gingko trees, poplars, and twittering birds. Indigenous peoples moved in and called the place home.
Today, the Scablands is still home to several tribes and is also a quiet haven for campers, boaters, swimmers, and hikers. People understand the events that caused the Great Flood now, but back when Bretz was trying to convince the world, it wasn’t so easy. He and his colleagues were able to figure out where the flood came from and how it formed most of the landscape, but one major piece of evidence was missing: how could a great flood create those crazy, undulating hills? The hills were present in the Scablands and the Camas Prairie near Missoula, the epicenter of the ancient lake, and geologists had discovered them in other spots along the theoretical flood path as well. These hills could get up to fifty feet high and went on for miles. Pardee had said they looked like giant ripples, but that theory hadn’t been proved. Then, in the 1950s, some intrepid soul went up in an airplane and snapped photos of the Camas Prairie hills from above. And those photos changed everything.
Viewed from 3,000 feet in the air, the wavy hills looked exactly like ripples on a beach. The pattern was the same as beach ripples, and it was incredibly obvious to Bretz and his colleagues that only a massive amount of water could have caused such a pattern. The hills beyond Dry Falls—the ones Bretz had anguished over for many a year—also looked like water ripples when photographed from the air. They finally made sense. They might be a thousand times larger than ripples on a beach, yet ripples those hills were, caused by the rush of water draining over the falls and scouring the land beyond. The floodwaters rippled the earth like ocean waves ripple sand.
With this last, irrefutable piece of evidence, Bretz was vindicated. His fellow geologists awarded him their top honor—the Penrose Medal—in 1979. Those scientists who’d once scoffed at his idea were now convinced: the Great Missoula Flood and the cataclysmic deluges that followed during the last Ice Age were responsible for shaping a huge swath of the northwest into the amazing geological wonder we know today—the stunning, beautiful, wondrous and immense Channeled Scablands, including the hugest water ripples this world has ever seen and the largest waterfall in history, Dry Falls.
If you visit the Scablands with all its geological marvels, pretend you’re J Harlen Bretz contemplating this extraordinary place, and stand in front of that immense cliff. Close your eyes, and listen. Listen as the air around you pulsates with the roar of 500 cubic miles of water crashing over those falls. Feel your eardrums shatter from the thunderous boom as that water smashes into the earth, tearing apart the land around you.
Then open your eyes and stare with amazement at a land shaped almost instantly by a flood of a magnitude this world has never seen since.
Works Cited
Mystery of the Megafloods. NOVA, PBS. 2018. Video.
The Great Flood. Washington State University and Lake Roosevelt Naitonal Recreation Area, National Park Service. Video.
Tate, Cassandra. “Bretz, J Harlen (1882-1981), Geologist.” HistoryLink. September 29, 2007. Web. Retrieved: October 2, 2016.