Father Briar and The Angel by Rita Saladano Read Free Book Online Page B

an
Ojibwa woman named Millicent. Father Briar had a half-dozen pairs
in the closet of the parish house, inherited from various members
of the congregation, given as Christmas gifts, or taken as
donations.
    “ In addition to
distributing the weight, snowshoes are generally raised at the toe
for maneuverability. They must not allow snow to pile up on top of
them, hence the interior latticework, which allows it to fall
through!” Cedric sometimes explained things that didn’t need
explaining. It annoyed Julianna sometimes but to complain about it
felt rather petty.
    They trudged through the
snow. Here, it wasn’t really deep enough for them to need the
special footwear, but that was sort of the point. “You wouldn’t go
swimming in the deep end of the pool first, now, would
you?”
    “ You were the Navy man.
Didn’t they just throw you boys in head first?”
    He laughed and they fell
into silence as they walked. The landscape felt ancient, immutable,
unchanging. That was untrue, but time here did move on a geological
scale, on the scale of epochs and ice ages.
    As the glaciers moved down
from the north, overtaking most of the continent, burying under a
mile or two of ice, they remade the landscape beneath them. As
these unimaginably huge things advanced and retreated through the
area that would become Minnesota, some of the ice became harder,
thicker, and more stagnant. These stubborn chunks were slower to
melt than others and the glaciers continued to deposit sediments
around and sometimes on top of these isolated, icy holdouts.
Finally, as the ice blocks melted, they left behind depressions in
the landscape. The depressions filled with snowmelt and rainwater
producing kettle lakes.
    There was such a kettle
lake just south of Brannaska that Father Briar and the pastor from
the church in Mille Lacs fished for walleye pike in during the
summer months. As they’d sit in the little aluminum boat, Cedric
would often think of the origin of it, how deep it was, how old,
and yet how malleable and fragile. “How wonderful was God’s power,”
he thought, “that he can so easily shape the land.”
    In northeastern Minnesota,
the glaciers were over 12,000 feet thick.
    That number is so enormous
it requires a moment of pause to contemplate. There are just over
5,000 feet in a mile. During the great ice ages, Brannaska was two
and a half miles under the ice. “And this wasn’t even that long
ago,” Julianna marveled. She’d read in one of those tourist manuals
that it was only 14,000 years ago. That didn’t seem like very long
ago and she wondered if another one was coming soon.
    Fire wasn’t hell to
Julianna, ice was. Out of morbid curiosity she imagined herself
that deep, immobile, and cold. No air, no light, no sound other
than the cracking as the glacier inched its destructive way across
the continent. This sounded like hell, like Dante’s hell, like
Biblical hell.
    As the glaciers moved
through the area, they ripped and tore away the landscape, the same
way some muscular man was tearing away the bodice of a buxom woman
on the cover of the romance novel she’d stashed under the winter
survival kit in the trunk. She was embarrassed to have Cedric
seeing her read it. “But who cares!” she thought, “those stories
fire me up! They give me what I want. They let me escape from a
life where I’m in love with a man that I can never
marry.”
    Like love, ice itself is
not very abrasive. But like love over time, it can grow in power
and passion; it can change the very shape of the world. By picking
up and moving boulders and gravel, the glaciers were able to scrape
away flora and fauna and everything else beneath it.
    “ In the past, snowshoes
are essential tools for fur traders and trappers. Brannaska still
has a lot of both, although it is an old man’s game now. Mainly,
though, I just use mine for fun,” he admitted.
    “ Before people built
snowshoes, nature provided examples. Several animals, most notably
some