Somewhere around here stuffed in between books on a bookshelf there is a poem I jotted down on a sheet of paper years ago about the arrival of September. I haven’t seen it in a while. I’m not even sure it made it through the last couple of moves. But the gist of it is this — the sun is just as high as it was in August. But now that September is here, it feels so much more comfortable. That was back in the days when it started cooling off by the middle of September. I don’t know if climate change is man-made or just a normal cycle of nature, but it really wasn’t this consistently hot back when I was a kid.
I did a story with my friend geologist James Starnes in a gravel pit out in west Hinds County a few years ago. He was showing me evidence of glaciers that he had discovered in the gravel.
When our school started the day after Labor Day it was still warm in the classroom, but not unbearable. By mid-September, it was comfortable, and by the end of football season, we had already started to bundle up for post-season games.
I did a story with my friend geologist James Starnes in a gravel pit out in west Hinds County a few years ago. He was showing me evidence of glaciers that he had discovered in the gravel. Some very rare rocks were scoured flat on one side where glacier ice had sanded them down over the eons. Plus, there were some pretty good size boulders in with the gravel. The boulders were carried by the glacier ice close enough, so the precursor of the Mississippi River brought them here. All of this is evidence of an ancient ice age.
On top of the gravel was about a 100-foot-thick layer of loess soil. This soil was blown into this part of the country from rock dust ground up by glaciers out west. As the glaciers warmed and melted, the prevailing westerly winds picked up the rock powder, carried it across the continent in dust storms, and deposited it here in what are now the Mississippi bluffs.
The far wall of the gravel pit showed a thick layer of rocks put here as one ice age was thawing. There was another layer of fine spoil on top of that deposited here as a different ice age was thawing.
So, there before our eyes were the leftovers of two ice ages. Odds are other ice ages have come and gone before those. So, maybe the warming we are going through right now is the earth still climbing out of the last ice age. With, logically, another to follow at some time. (So don’t get rid of your winter coat just yet)
All of this ice age stuff is good fodder for day dreaming. Day dreaming is something else I remember about September and the beginning of school. I did my fair share of that in the classroom on those warm, sleepy days of early September.
