The Paddock Review

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Deep into rural Illinois the world has been turned inside out, the aftermath of more than twenty-five years of strip mining: blasting, drilling, hauling to the surface deposits of coal buried three hundred million years ago. My grandfather used to bring our family to this place, where the company he worked for owned mines. By then the giant machines that had scooped out soil and rock were long gone, and the raw pits they slashed into the earth had filled in with water. The ugly wounds had turned into lakes surrounded by new-growth trees and stocked with bass and bluegills and bullheads that we fished for. Docks and ramps had been built for swimming and boating—and for forgetting what had been here before, what had been done to the land.

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But a harvest of memory had been left as well. Long before coal, lush forests of ferns and mosses emerged across this midsection of the continent out of a retreating prehistoric soup of mosses and shallow seas. Coal would take shape from the remains of life, from the soft, porous peat created by decaying vegetation and then compressed over millions of years. My father and I would head out each morning to search for ferns that had been lifted to the surface by mining, preserved in stone exactly as they had grown, delicate as ever. We’d hold each one in the palm of our hands, the rock warmed by the summer sun, and admire the ancient life that it revealed. And we’d trace the tiny veins that fed the still-translucent leaves from the thicker stems, the difference between them palpable beneath our gently exploring fingertips.

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This is a excerpt from the prose chapbook In the Photic Zone by Joanne Jacobson (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/in-the-photic-zone-by-joanne-jacobson/