Black River Suite Poem by Lynn Powell Narration by Richard Anderson, Associate Professor of Singing
	back to the main story		I. SHALLOW SEA Narration: Beneath our fields of corn, our sugar-maple woods and green backyards, fossils of fish swim in a river of rock. Before humans chipped flint and summoned fire, before woolly mammoths grazed and dire-wolves prowled, before Tyrannosaurus thundered-- water was already ancient. Once upon a time, before human time, Ohio was a shallow sea, teeming with strange life. Rivulets and creeks, rivers and torrents emptied into that sea, bringing with them tiny souvenirs of far-off peaks and rain-washed ridges. For hundreds of millions of years, those water-carried specks of sand and silt settled into seafloor. Now, far beneath our homes, that ancient seafloor has hardened to shale and sandstone: recycled mountains, our bedrock, a story water left behind . . . .   WATER'S SONG   (By the children's poetry group. Note: this is the original collaborative poem from the children's work. Anna Rubin excerpted from it for the suite.) I am the great one, I am the ancient one. I begin and end over and over again. I have watched Earth change from the beginning of time. I am the breath of trees. I am the ghost that clouds your path. I am tiny white pearls glistening in the morning. Listen: I giggle like a newborn baby. Animals drink me. Jewelweed and cattails root beside me. Once I fell on a woolly mammoth! Once I fell on a mountain lion! Once I fell on you! I battle the rock and force my way through the hill making cliffs 100 feet high. I am the most famous sculptor of all! I shoot out lightning from my dark hand! I leap and plunge and sink into the rolling sea. Once I touched a glistening glacier! Once I danced in a swirling whirlpool! Once I fell on you! I am the great one, I am the ancient one. I begin and end over and over again. I have watched Earth change from the beginning of time. II. GLACIER Narration:   Imagine Ice.   Magnificent, terrible, Ice Age Ice. Ice a mile high & half a continent wide. Glacier: Gift of the Arctic, Weight of an ocean. Ten thousand years of the slow-motion high tide of Ice-- smashing sandstone, erasing hills, grinding bedrock into clay. And as warmth returned, Ice began to slink back north and leave behind a leveled landscape, a flood of clay and rubble, & a vast basin filling with ice-melt.   Soon a great lake lapped at the edge of what we now call Oberlin. As Ice continued to thaw, the lake's frozen outlets to the sea unplugged slowly, one by one. Each time an outlet opened, water rushed out, and the lake shrank to make new shores. We know that line of ancient shores as ridges now-- crescendos of sand rising up out of level clay: Butternut, Middle Ridge, West Ridge, North Ridge . . . At last, the ice plugging up Niagara softened and let go-- and freed a massive waterfall to thunder toward the sea. And so our Great Lake fell again to find its present shores: Lake Erie, memento of a mighty glacier.   III. LIFE RETURNS Narration: The glacier left a bare and scoured landscape. But traveling north, ready to reclaim the land that ice had altered, was Life. And Life, in its own green-and-animal way, transformed the land again. Litany of Plants & Animals: Hornbeam, hemlock, willow, yew, Elk, coyote, caribou Red-winged blackbird, turkey, quail, Flying squirrel, garden snail   Mastodon & hummingbird, Mammoth, monarch, moth, bluebird Cattail, clover, tulip tree, Milkweed, moss, & chicory Flicker, goldfinch, junco, grouse, Short-tail shrew, white-foot mouse Osage orange, Queen-Anne's lace, Aster, snakeroot, thistle, maize Carp & alewife, darter, eel, Toothwort, crocus, daffodil Bullfrog, woodchuck, mourning dove, Sugar maple, sour gum   Pronghorns, ermines, snowshoe hares, Wolverines & grizzly bears Linden, beech, & sycamore, Goosefoot, gourd, false hellebore Nightshade, poison ivy-- oak, Self-heal, speedwell, yarrow, poke Larch, arbutus, robin, loon, Heron, beaver, wolf, raccoon Porcupine & honeybee, Mountain goat & chickadee Buckeye, sundew, lily, phlox, Opossum, vulture, chipmunk, fox Rabbit, wood frog, bobolink, Skunk, woodpecker, cricket, mink Bison, cougar, moose, bobcat, Ring-necked pheasant, earthworm, gnat! IV. THE ARRIVAL OF HUMANS Narration: The glaciers froze and locked up so much of Earth's water, that, for a while, the sea went dry in the Bering Strait. A species unknown to this continent crossed over then on that dry sea pathway, from what we now call Asia and to what we call Alaska. But, for millennia, the Great Ice blocked their movement further south.   As the glaciers melted, that species roamed and spread across this continent, until 11,000 years ago humans first walked along the river we drink from now. Human: Hunter extraordinaire, surprising and devastating the big game. Then: Gatherer and preserver of wild grains, roots, berries, nuts. Fishers with spear, net, weir, fishhooks of bone & antler. Cultivator of native goosefoot & sunflower. Then: a Golden Age for a thousand years, from 500 B.C.E. to 500 A.D. Potters. Mound Builders. Artisans of copper. Farmers who cleared forests to make fields of squash, beans, and maize from seeds brought up from the South we now call Mexico. Traders who obtained silver from the North, mica from the East, obsidian and grizzly teeth from the mountains of the West, seashells from a far-off ocean gulf. And always they lived near water: soother of thirst, canoe's road, sustainer of corn, giver of fish, life's source.   V. SETTLERS, INDUSTRIALIZATION, URBANIZATION Narration: Then, two hundred years ago, Europeans arrived. They, too, traveled paths along the ancient lakeshore ridges, high and dry above the swampy lowland clay the glaciers left behind. They, too, planted corn on those sandy rises.   For them, too, water was the soother of thirst, boat's road, sustainer of corn, giver of fish, life's source.   The great lake, they called "Erie." And the river the Wyandots called "Canesadooharie," they called "Black River." They made their lives along the lake, the river, and its tributary creeks, and with their lives they brought: plows & wagons, cabins & barns, grindstones & sawmills, smithies & silos, meeting halls & churches, lumberyards & markets, fisheries & factories, furnaces & steel plants, ore ships & shipyards, courtrooms & firehouses, conservatories & observatories, libraries & printing presses, tractors & fairgrounds, hospitals & nursing homes, junkyards & courtyards, gas pumps & landfills, flea markets & drive-ins, orchestras & power lines, train depots & airports, country roads & highways, limousines & racetracks, smokestacks & sewage plants, duplexes & high-rises, condos & subdivisions, art museums & cinemas, railroad tracks & runways, restaurants & shopping malls . . . And Earth was changed again. VI. RECLAMATION Narration: Ask a child where water comes from. Ask how the rain that falls outside finds its way into our homes. Ask what happens to the rain that falls on rooftops, blacktop, concrete. Ask what happens to the waste we spill down drains and pour in creeks and rivers. Ask that child: what sustains the corn and the fish, the red-winged blackbird and the sycamore, the bullfrog and the fox, the crocus and the eagle? Ask: what is your own life's source and substance? Ask: what will you do when you are steward of our land and water?   Now, go ahead. Ask all these questions of yourself. CHORAL CONCLUSION I am the great one, I am the ancient one. I begin and end over and over again: clouds rumbling into rain, raindrops dropping from leaves, creeks gathering to river, river longing for lake, and from lake's breath-- the clouds . . . . Look around and read my ancient story: the shale and fossils left by shallow seas, a flat land scraped and sculpted by glaciers, a vast lake, the legacy of great ice, and a river your life depends upon-- Canesadooharie, Black River, home.
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