I submitted this story fragment for a literary contest in the Star Tribune in 2014. Who knows where it would have led?
Imagine standing on the brink of Niagara Falls: the clouds of mist, the thunderous roar, the hair-raising plunge. That’s about what downtown St. Paul must have looked like at the end of the last Ice Age, if you were viewing the Mississippi River gorge from about where City Hall stands today. Except that St. Paul’s waterfall was even larger. Geologists refer to this waterfall as the Glacial River Warren Falls after the Civil War general, G.K. Warren, “the hero of Little Round Top” at the Battle of Gettysburg, who was also a military engineer and wrote of our local topography.
The waterfall began life near what is now the Robert Street Bridge but the torrential churning undercut the waterfall’s limestone ledge, hollowing out caverns in the softer sandstone below, causing the ledge to collapse repeatedly, so that the waterfall migrated upriver over thousands of years. About 10,000 years ago, upon reaching what is now Fort Snelling, a smaller waterfall, St. Anthony Falls, branched off, and began its own migration upriver to its present location in Minneapolis, where it was stabilized by the Corps of Engineers beginning in the 1870s.
But St. Paul’s great waterfall exists no more—having departed the city limits, it disintegrated into a series of rapids along the Minnesota River. There’s a nice painting of this primeval waterfall at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, together with some of the extinct megafauna, like giant beavers, that graced the forlorn landscape.
Those are the facts, now for a strange dream that I had one night. In my dream, I saw the sweeping 4,000-foot wide crescent of the Glacial River Warren waterfall arrayed before me like a steel-gray curtain enveloped in mist. The dream continued as I explored a series of caverns behind and underneath the mighty waterfall, the entire scene illuminated by flaming torches. The thundering reverberations of the cataract shook the ground. I recall being amazed at the complexity and intricacy of these caverns, how they wound about behind the curling sheet of water. And that was all—woken up by my cats, but otherwise I probably would not have remembered the dream in the first place.
Archeologists have documented the presence of Native Americans in Minnesota as far back as 12,000 years ago, during the time when St. Paul’s great waterfall was in existence, so it’s at least possible that such romantic, torch-lit scenes indeed played themselves out millennia ago, but we have no way of knowing for sure, because the waterfall caverns themselves—more likely a series of caverns over thousands of years—were of course successively created and destroyed as the waterfall migrated upstream. No trace of them remains today; they have vanished like a dream.
Or so I thought.