A Communion of Discovery

Dedicated to Estella Leopold, conservationist

Melting ice washed gravels down,
burying the mammoth—hiding it through the ages.
And I found a rock at its grave,
with secrets deep inside.
I broke it, crushed it, sifted it;
dissolved it in a beaker,
spun it by a centrifuge,
and peeled back layers of time.
 
Now only hidden fossils remain:
Pollen grains and mossy spores—
once floating on an Ice Age breeze.
 
Now in that communion of discovery
these small fossils yield
the deepest glimpse through time
to the world before we came, and warn
of a future we must face—
while just outside forests change,
species die,
and life recedes.

Spruce (Picea) palynomorph from the
Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument,
image by David Jarzen.

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Estella Leopold assisted me in the actual research of Pleistocene pollen from Florissant. A layer associated with the burial site of a Columbian Mammoth at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument was found to contain Ice Age pollen and spores. This research resulted in a paper presented at the Geological Society of America in Denver in 2013. Estella was one of the original “Defenders of Florissant” and was instrumental in the Florissant Fossil Beds in becoming a national monument. Estella is the daughter of Aldo Leopold, who wrote the Sand County Almanac.