To the Death of a Glacier

Today, I took a stroll along an old lake bed. The valleys left by lakes are the most interesting to me. This one was a glacier that was trapped, melted, and slowly evaporated away year by year, 'til only a few scattered frozen marshes remain.

But that is not all that is left. Here, the glacier left scars on the valley. Granite from thousands of miles away, great vertical slabs, not pebbles, picked up and carried, like a child pocketing everything that glitters, and the lake bed the backyard where his mother shakes out his clothes for laundry.

Here is where I dusted off the snow from a sand stone. You can clearly see the fossil of the gaping mouth of a fish, perhaps a small shark, its gills choked with mud, pinned by the weight of its own weakened body.

Fishes, unlike humans, are not so bothered by the cold. I vaguely recall that they have a particular sugar in their blood that retards the growth of ice. I wish I had that today, whilst watching the ice tangled with waterweeds churn and bobble over my head.