· / Page 24 RAIN June 1976 A Habit At Teatime The legendary Bridge of the Gods near Hood River before the big flood. Drawing by Jimmie James. There are signs, plain to see, in many parts of the Northwest, pointing to a great and catastrophic flood in the not-fardistant past. The rushing waters have worn deep channels down to bedrock in the country southwest from Spokane. These districts are called the Channeled Scablands, and the channels themselves are called Scabland thannels-a rare case of logical, consistent nomenclature. The Grand Coulee itself is one of these channels, the greatest of all, in fact, and for a few hours the ledge across the Coulee was host to the planet's mightiest waterfall at the place now known as Dry Falls. Other easily-recognized scabland channels are just south from Arlington, at Shutler's Flat, and Sullivan Gulch in Portland itself. The turbulent flood waters boiled and tumbled into all parts of the lowland Northwest, entering the Tualatin Valley, for example, by way of the scabland channels at Tonquin (as well as the gaps at Oswego and south of Gaston). There is a question of grammar here: ought we to say that this flood "did" this or that, or that it "does"? English provides us with a special tense, the "habitual" or "on-going present:" "I am skiing" is the "momentary present," but "I ski a lot" is the "on-going present" of the same verb. These floods recur at intervals of many thousands of years, so we ought to use the "on-going present" in referring to them. They are not past, they are past-and-future, or "habitual." Every twenty thousand years or so, it seems, the various cycles of the earth's perihelion, the precession of the equinoxes, and the moon's perigee, not to mention several others still less well known, conspire together, as all cycles must, to bring about an extreme of weather conditions for North America. Most of Canada goes under ice, the Rockies spawn great glaciers which fill the intervales between the ranges. The vast trench which we know as the Kootenay and Flathead Valleys becomes, for a long time, a sea of solid ice, and then, as the climate moderates, an ice-locked lake the size of Lake Erie. For many centuries an ice dam, remnant of the glaciers, keeps the lake a prisoner. Then, as the cycles creep, a certain August afternoon swells to a torrid crescendo, the ice dam breaks, and Lake Kootenay spills out over Idaho, Washington and Oregon. What heights of civilization the pre-Indian inhabitants of the Columbia may have reached, what towers they may have erected, what circuses watched, we shall never know, for all were swept away (are swept away, will be swept away) between teatime and dusk of that awful day. (Bob Benson) RAIN 2270 N.W. Irving Portla.nd, OR 97210 Address Correction Requested Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Permit No. 1890 Portland, OR
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