| OCR Text |
Show 202 wash down the gutter. But I felt guilty for mangling its body so I dug an early morning grave in the yard it was in front of as fast as I could, hoping whoever lived there wouldn't walk out and see what I was doing. I'm not a person who could be described as spiritual, or even peaceful or respectful but stepping on that bird's body with all of my weight left me feeling like I needed to balance that violence with something more graceful. 20,000 square miles of western Utah used to be covered with water-not just night as water, but fresh, blue water-including most of the areas in which I walk. According to the Utah Geological Survey, that was "32 to 14 thousand years ago." I love the numbers used to describe Bonneville, in which 14 to 32 thousand is a manageable gap. I vividly remember being fifteen years old and hearing my father complain about a ward member who had lived in the Pleasant Grove area for "only twenty years" and yet thought he knew everything there was to know. That was one of the first times I thought of him as old and near death. My interest in science and biology is amateur but earnest and I'm appreciative of slowness and gradualness-how long it takes for continents to slide apart while nobody above them realizes anything is changing, for example. But I also come from Mormon, Noah's ark people, which means we have precedent for a sudden flood of Bonneville magnitude. True, the second coming is supposed to be a baptism of fire rather than water, but no one really knows when that is going to happen, and I see no religious evidence that suggests God couldn't start another flood if he felt like it. |
