Canoe: My Dad has a canoe, but I don't think he's named it. I will name it now. I dub it: Heron Startler
Tribe: Pepperpot
Sub-tribe: Husky
Family: The Rochester DeRan Heissenbergers
Geological Features:


Genesee River

The river flows through my hometown of Rochester, NY. Historically, the river was important to the city, connecting the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario and providing important transportation connections for the growing flour city. Sam Patch, a Nineteenth Century Daredevil, met his demise at the High Falls in the river. Now they brew beer there and on summer nights there is a laser light show.


Pleistocene Epoch Ice Sheets

To quote wikipedia: "Rochester's geography comes from the ice sheets during the Pleistocene epoch. The retreating ice sheets reached a standstill at what is now the southern border of the city, melting at the same rate as they were advancing, depositing sediment along the southern edge of the ice mass. This created a line of hills, including (from west to east) Mt. Hope, the hills of Highland Park, Pinnacle Hill, and Cobb's Hill. Because the sediment of these hills was deposited into a proglacial lake they are stratified and classified as a "kame delta." A brief retreat and readvance of the ice sheet onto the delta piled unstratified (moraine) material there, creating a rare hybrid structure called a 'kame moraine.'"

Since I live right off of Highland park and Mt. Hope Cemetery, it's really cool to know why the land has such an odd shape, round hills and strange round depressions I haven't seen elsewhere.


Lake Ontario

Because the lake has always been there for me. Until the year I graduated from college, my family lived a mile away from the lake. As a kid I would go to parks on the lake and swing or skip stones. My Dad would tell me stories about the British bombarding the American shore from the lake in the war of 1812 and look for cannonballs. As a slightly more grown up kid, I would storm off to the lake after fights with my parents. The lakes was always soothing without being condescending. As a thinking-I'm-a-grown-up-but-not-really college kid I would dine at restaurants on the lake and affect a veneer of refinement. A few years ago, I watched a cousin get married on a bluff overlooking the lake at dawn. Occasionally a friend will invite me out onto the lake in a boat, but generally I'm confined to the shore.

Here in America, we don't have a lot of old buildings, so it's nice to go somewhere like the lakeside and reflect. I like to think about how the lakes formed eons ago through glaciation. I like to think about generations of all different kinds of people living on the lake, from Native Americans, to frontiersmen (and women) to turn of the century holiday bathers. I like to think about someone a hundred years ago standing in the same spot and thinking the same thing. And perhaps another person, in another hundred years, continuing the cycle. It reminds me that some things are more permanent than others, the lake is more permanent than me, but in time, everything fades, even the lake. And it tells me that that's OK.

The End.