Like the imagination itself, a poem can be a time machine, allowing the user to move freely between the present and the past—even the very distant past—and the future. 

The setting of my poem “Dry Falls” is a deep coulee, or ravine, in what is now the dry, central desert of Washington State. Between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, when the earth’s climate was very different from what it is today, this area was repeatedly scoured by floods unlike any in our current era of relative climatic stability.

What is now North America was nearing the end of the most recent ice age. Conditions were such that the following cycle developed, repeating itself with some regularity every fifty years or so. An ice dam would form, trapping water in the area that is now northwestern Montana. The resulting lake would grow until it became a vast inland sea, covering up to 3,000 square miles, with roughly the same volume of water that Lake Ontario now contains. Eventually, the ice dam would fail, allowing the waters of the lake—which we now call Lake Missoula—to find their way to the sea. These floods—which lasted from days to weeks—were unimaginably catastrophic to everything in their path and powerful enough to completely change the landscape.

The Missoula Floods scoured the land to bedrock, carving the coulees that now snake through parts of the Pacific Northwest. At Dry Falls, the floods formed a water fall that would dwarf Niagara. The cliff is visible today, 400 feet high and 3 ½ miles wide.  (By contrast, Niagara Falls drops about 165 feet. The Canadian Falls are about 2,500 feet wide —a little over half a mile—and the American Falls about 1,000 feet.) 

Imagine a river with ten times the combined flow of all the rivers of the modern world, rushing to the ocean at 65 miles an hour. If it happened today, the city of Portland, Oregon, would be buried under 400 feet of water!

“Dry Falls,” first appeared in the 2005 issue (Vol. 26) of Blueline:

 DRY FALLS

In the morning we arrange ourselves
along the stone fence staring
at the colossal stone crescent of cliff

imagining weeks’ worth of roiling water
raging through the landscape
prying up the prairie

where mastodons grazed, carving a coulee
where rhinoceroses roamed
tearing out trees of the temperate forest,

revising. “Can you see it?” a man asks
his young son, pointing. Can you see
the rampage of water?

In the evening we follow the track,
two dusty ruts that thread their way
into the heart of the coulee, and park

where the road ends at a little lake,
one of a string of primeval puddles
left by the passing of an unshackled sea.

A swath of scorched land simmers
on a nearby hill, and hoses snake
into the lake like sipping straws

as firefighters in yellow slickers
soak and poke at the steaming ash.
Blackbirds cling to cattails and watch.