Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the
World
Glacial erratics stud the Adirondack landscape, granite boulders
dropped in place when the glaciers got tired of rolling them and
melted their way back home to the north. The granite in these parts
is anorthosite, among the oldest rocks on earth and resistant to
weathering. Most of the boulders have been rounded by their
journey, but some still stand tall and sharp-edged, like this one,
which is as big as a dump truck. I run my fingers over its surface.
Veined with quartz, its top is a knife edge and its sides too steep to
climb.
This elder has sat silently in these lakeshore woods for ten
thousand years as forests have come and gone, lake levels ebbed
and flowed. And after all that time, it is still a microcosm of the
postglacial era when the world was a cold desert of rubble and
scraped earth. Alternately baking in the summer sun and snow-
blasted in the long winter, without soil in a world still treeless, the
glacial till provided a forbidding home for pioneers.