A Narrative of Montreal Geology (III)
Geomythologies
BY NATHAN FERGUSON AND MICHAEL KISHCHUK
Part three of our three part blog series on Montreal geology. The oldest histories of a place are written not in words, but in rocks. What do the rocks of Montreal tell to those who try to listen? How can we translate their stories, and share this lithic narrative? Co-written by an anthropologist and a geologist, this series includes an introduction and two complementary myths of Montreal.
Island of the archipelago by Kregg Hetherington
The oldest histories of a place are written not in words, but in rocks. What do the rocks of Montreal tell to those who try to listen? How can we translate their stories, and share this lithic narrative? Co-written by an anthropologist and a geologist, we present here an introduction and two complementary myths of Montreal. These are origin stories as told by strata and sediment. Drawing upon scientific understanding and a deep sense of place, this is an early effort in convergent poetry, inspired in equal parts by swarm ethnography, standpoint feminism, convergent evolution, and the prolific artistry of biodiversity. We hope you enjoy.
What kind of narrative for a narrative of Montreal geology?
First there was nothing, then there was everything. God stepped back from the canvas and saw that it was ground.
Or, God stepped back from the ground and saw that it was grinding, and groaning, and growing in its slow and knowing ways; they stepped back from the canvas and knew that it was good.
***
Now sing, muse — sing, goddess:
Sing the story of the archipelago, the aquapelago,
Sing the story of the islands, rising out of the water like a bird.
Sing the story of the ancient and tortured waters, the trouble of the faults and fluencies.
Rage — tell the story of the islands at the raging convergence, the rage of the confluence,
Tell the story of the two great rivers,
Outaouais and Saint-Laurent, Ottawa and Saint Lawrence,
Kitche Zibi and Kaniatarowanenneh, great river and big waterway.
Mud — tell the story, muse, of the plain, the soft and flat plain
Below the shield, the great and boundless shield,
Below the shield and between the chains, two spines lifting up out of the muscular earth.
Retreat — tell the story of the old Archipelago gathering new siblings,
Sing the story of the new mudsoft islands piling up like filth among the elder rocks,
An old sea bed churned and turned by the raining and the draining,
The low chain extending with the current as a minor sea retreated into the vast Atlantic.
Pressure — tell the story, muses, of the great and hidden pressures,
The tectonic urges breaking out against the surface, the thick liquid rock piling up against the sky.
Tell the story of the unfolding pressures, under a thousand and a thousand rosy-fingered retreats of the dawn,
Tell the endless story of the days and the ages, the long birth of Montreal, Tiohtia:ke, a thousand other names; our home.
***
Our islands belong to the foot of what they call the Grenville province. Grenville, a chunk of the shield — the granite swamps and tangled woods that go on and on, above the River, above the Great Lakes, above the Plains and the Prairies, the shield stretching like the lover’s back, all the way to the distant peaks of the Rockies. Grenville, a shoulder on this back, born of collision. This ancient shield, the remnants of an older-still mass, a continent from the deepest past: they call it Laurentia. And as Laurentia wandered through the ocean waters, wandered under the oldest skies, the great traveller would meet with others; imagine now the fury of great Laurentia’s collisions with these ancient eyeless lands. In the heat of these collisions, mountains upon mountains were piled up to the heights. Here is Grenville, the ancient roots, all that remains of those old and lost towers.
Grenville stretched and widened; the hidden forces of the darker depths pulled it apart. The rock obeyed the laws of its going, and the water obeyed the laws of its flowing, and the waters flowed in to the waiting basin, and an ancient sea was born: they call it Iapetus (Iapetus, the titan, son of Ouranos and Gaia, son of the sky and the land; Iapetus, father of Atlas, the Atlantic, father of Prometheus; old god of craft and of death; pillar of the Western sky — but these are other stories). Iapetus digested the mud and the silt and the rocky filth of a thousand ages; storms beyond belief and before the memory of the oldest creature rocked its thoughtless waters; and Iapetus digested this ancient mud into rock, the belly of the waters giving birth to stone.
Laurentia sailed on. Its next collision was with what today they call Africa — as friend or foe, the legends tell the story in many ways. And it is at this meeting of lands that the next great chain was born: today they call it Appalachia, others know it still as Shaconage and Wobanadenok. As these noble and friendly peaks broke a new horizon, up rose as well a flat and sturdy platform. Now they call the platform Saint Lawrence, a broad land stretching out towards the mouth, the gulf, the sea.
Upon this platform is written the latter history — the newer history — of our islands and the lands around. The years in their hundreds of millions came and went. From the hot depths of the earth, below even the blades and plates that cast Laurentia around on its odyssey, there came the time of the Igneous Intrusions. The unthinkable shafts, their magmatic flow: hot rock from the burning at the centre of things shot up like joy through the caverns and the passages, breaking into the sight of the sun and crystallising like ice into hills and pillars. They call these forms the Hills of Monteregia, bearing rare gifts, jewels of the uprising.
And then — and this is even in the memory of our inheritance, its traces are in the genetic code, that most familiar and strangest of texts — there was the last great freezing. The ice caps fell from the North like a heavenly host, the ice came to cover the shield and the plain, the world was frozen and the great glaciers piled up for miles and miles, the vast blue towers carved below the surface in the sharp and severe architecture of the cold. The cold came down, the ice piled up; and then the foundations of the world shifted again, the heat returned, the air thickened, life exploded (now, again), and the ice retreated.
Receding north, the polar caps carved the landscape again: Grenville and Appalachia surrendered their softer parts to the longly grasping claws of the ice sheet, and the glacial pilgrims traced their way across the earth. We can still see the rubble they left behind, strewn across the landscape like trash: the pebbles, the sands. But who can imagine the weight of the ice? In its wake, the platform was sunk in a great depression, and before the rebounding of the rock in its slow way could come to pass, the stubborn law of the waters drew a new sea into a new basin. And so was the birth of the sea they call Champlain.
But the way of water is to flow: slowly, the sea became a lake; slowly, the lake became a marsh — peat bogs and swamplands for miles and miles, out to the crest of the continent, out to the shores of the ocean. Lakes still remain from this great migration; you can still swim in the afterwaters of this ancient sea. And just beneath the surface, waiting to be exposed by the unflinching forces of erosion, our platform remained — rich now with the marine sediment, rich and ready to be turned into life by the sun.
***
What are the forces at work in this story? The faults, the fluvial, the glacial: these are the forces. But force leaves no trace, no mark without resistance. What resists? The rocks resist, each kind differently. Where do the kinds of rock come from? Who can explain the difference and variety of forms? The rocks, born from the endless transit and gravity of the continents, pressed and cooled into different densities: some resist the beating of the waters, some resist the scraping of the glaciers. The contours of this ground of differences is the land we are given to know; and the slow rock and its mud, according to the incalculable chemistry of the sun, gives home to us, the quick creatures of flesh and bone, to the quickness of life, the patience of change.
***
We who know the islands know the three kinds: the ancient men, from the time before gender, the crags and withered remnants of forgotten mountains (they are called Montreal, Jesus, Perrot); the slick and current-drawn sisters, deposits from the silty withdrawal of the Champlain sea (the Bouchervilles, Saint-Therese); and the new ones, drawn up from the quarries and piled up not by the hands of the gods but by the hands of man (Saint-Helen, Notre-Dame) — these are the three kinds.
But who is this ‘we’? Anyone who tries to name multiply, name differently, name otherwise. The ‘we’ are those of us who, like children, have private or wordless names for every special dell and every curl of a river. We know that no one name can be the true name, but that some names are richer than others — more capacious, more generous, less steeped in violence. Then who belongs to the ‘they’, who know these places only in English, or only in French, only as they are described by the official maps? The boundaries between these groups are as inconstant and immaterial as the lines those maps might try to draw over the face of the earth. Radical namegivers in one spot recite tired conventions in another. (In the morning I might remember Tiohtia:ke and Kahnawa:ke, in the afternoon I imagine strange names of the future, by evening I will forget them all again.)
***
But see also the famous greystone densify over the ages, carved into blocks and arranged according to the worked-up order of human space. See also the brecchia, dredged up from below the bridge, the famous rock of Stewart Museum. See the parks above the hidden quarries: Miron, yes, but also Villeray, Des Carrieres, Laurier, Pere-Marquette. See the arteries and capillaries of the waterways; the new artificial organs, the fake liver in the mountain, the pools just below the surface rising and falling to the breathy rhythm of our building and digging. See the new tunnels with their snaking trains carved into the rock like so many branches of nerves. See the great canal, spilled over with thoughts and hours of play, the feeling of belonging and the knowledge of surf. See the confluence still peeling away layer upon layer, see the three-headed hill lifted out of the plain. Stand atop the hill: see the Laurentians to the north, the thin and weathered strip of the Appalachians curling away towards the cradle of the civil war or out towards the bright houses of the Maritimes. The landscape is a story older than kept time — touch the rocks, learn its language.
