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By Root 441 0

from the north about ninety thousand years ago and covered the northern tier of what is now the United States. Thousands of feet thick and enormously heavy, the burden of its weight depressed the surface of the earth. Ice reached from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans, and in the east as far out as Georges Bank. Eventually, as the earth’s climate warmed a few degrees, the monster glacier began to retreat and, about twelve thousand years ago, melted its way out of Maine. In its exit, water flowed from the glacier’s base and spread sediment of varying textures, from fine clay to bony gravel, over the landscape. The result was a kind of geologic layer cake of soils that rested atop the earth’s crust. The hillside was a good representation of the layer cake. Its bottom layer was a fine dense clay, the next layer was sand and gravel, and the shallow top layer, which began to form after the glacier’s departure and while giant mammals still roamed the region, was a mat of organic material, black soil made from the decomposition of the forest and webbed together with the roots of small plants. The layer cake was strewn with big rocks that floated freely in the clay and gravel. These rocks had been scraped from the earth’s crust to the north and carried south by the wall of ice during its advance and then held in its belly until it began its crawl back to the north. In its retreat, the glacier dropped its rocky baggage here, around my cabin site, and of course, the rest of New England. Those rocks had then slept deep in the ground for millennia, but once the land had been cleared of its trees and cultivated by the first European settlers, frost was able to reach farther down into the ground, and slowly the freezing and thawing of moisture in the soil worked the stones to the surface. The early farmers found themselves with a new crop of stones each year. They lifted them from the fronts of their plows and piled them into stone walls. The stones are still working their way up and out of the ground as any New England gardener knows.

A close look at the mountains to the north and west of the cabin elaborates on the glacier’s story. The northern slopes of the mountains are relatively smooth. The ice sheet simply rode up and over them as it moved along. But the opposite, southerly slopes are ragged and sometimes sheered off. The ice sheet had grabbed these leeward slopes in its frozen underside and ripped off the faces as it inched forward, grinding the bare rock into pebbles. The contours of the land around about the cabin could nearly all be explained by the descent and retreat of the giant ice sheet.

At the cabin site, what was happening as I dug the holes was this: the water that had fallen on the hillside through the fall and summer had collected in the soil and percolated into the gravel. Some of it stayed there; some of it ran down the slope over the smooth dense surface of the clay. There had been plenty of rain, of course, so the hillside was saturated like sponge. When we opened the holes, we gave all that water in the gravel a place to run to and collect. Each hole had become an inground cistern, a muddy, sloppy mess of gravel, clay and soupy water.

There was no way we could set cardboard tubes into the holes. In an hour, the paper would be as limp as a wet slice of bread. So here on the first day of construction, we had a big problem. For builders, there is no problem like a water problem. I watched the holes fill with water and wondered when I would get cut a break. There had been the driveway problem, the ledge problem, the rain problem, the excavator problem and now the water table problem.

We talked it over. Paul suggested we come back with a mud-sucking pump, a device that is half gasoline engine, half lamprey eel, to empty the holes of water and substitute precast piers for the cardboard tubes. We would forego pouring the concrete ourselves. The precast piers would not reach below the frost line since they were only four feet long and needed to extend at least a foot out of the ground, and sometimes more where the