The View from Castle Rock

authoritative-sounding names they have been given-Lake Warren, Lake Whittlesey.
    Up on the Bruce peninsula there is limestone under a thin soil (pale gray), and around Owen Sound and on Cape Rich there is shale, at the bottom of the Niagara Escarpment, exposed where the limestone is worn off. Crumbly rock that can be made into brick of the same color it shows on the map-rosy pink.
    My favorite of all the kinds of country is the one I’ve left till last. This is kame, or kame moraine, which is a chocolate burgundy color on the map and is generally in blobs, not ribbons. A big blob here, a little one there. Kame moraines show where a heap of dead ice sat, cut off from the rest of the moving glacier, earth-stuff pouring through all its holes and crevices. Or sometimes it shows where two lobes of ice pulled apart, and the crevice filled in. End moraines are hilly in what seems a reasonable way, not as smooth as drumlins, but still harmonious, rhythmical, while kame moraines are all wild and bumpy, unpredictable, with a look of chance and secrets.

    I didn’t learn any of this at school. I think there was some nervousness then, about being at loggerheads with the Bible in the matter of the creation of the Earth’. I learned it when I came to live here with my second husband, a geographer. When I came back to where I never expected to be, in the countryside where I had grown up. So my knowledge is untainted, fresh. I get a naive and particular pleasure from matching what I see on the map with what I can see through the car window. Also from trying to figure out what bit of landscape we’re in, before I look at the map, and being right a good deal of the time. It is exciting to me to spot the boundaries, when it’s a question of the different till plains, or where the kame moraine takes over from the end moraine.
    But there is always more than just the keen pleasure of identification. There’s the fact of these separate domains, each with its own history and reason, its favorite crops and trees and weeds-oaks and pines, for instance, growing on sand, and cedars and strayed lilacs on limestone-each with its special expression, its pull on the imagination. The fact of these little countries lying snug and unsuspected, like and unlike as siblings can be, in a landscape that’s usually disregarded, or dismissed as drab agricultural counterpane. It’s the fact you cherish.

    I thought that the appointment I had was for a biopsy, but it turned out not to be. It was an appointment to let the city doctor decide whether he would do a biopsy, and after examining my breast and the results of the mammogram, he decided that he would. He had seen only the results of my most recent mammogram-those from 1990 and 1991 had not arrived yet from the country hospital where they had been done. The biopsy was set for a date two weeks ahead and I was given a sheet with instructions about how to prepare for it.
    I said that two weeks seemed like quite a while to wait.
    At this stage of the game, the doctor said, two weeks was immaterial.
    That was not what I had been led to believe. But I did not complain-not after a look at some of the people in the waiting room. I am over sixty. My death would not be a disaster.
    Not in comparison with the death of a young mother, a family wage-earner, a child. It would not be
apparent
as a disaster.

    It bothered us that we could not find the crypt. We extended our search. Perhaps it was not in Bruce County but in next-door Grey County? Sometimes we were sure that we were on the right road, but always we were disappointed. I went to the town library to look at the nineteenth-century county atlases, to see if perhaps the country cemeteries were marked on the township maps. They appeared to be marked on the maps of Huron County, but not in Bruce or Grey. (This wasn’t true, I found out later-they were marked, or some of them were, but I managed to miss the small faint C’s.)
    In the library I met a friend who had dropped in to see us last summer shortly after our discovery. We had told him about the crypt and given him some rough directions as to how to find it, because he is interested in old cemeteries. He said now that he had written down the directions as soon as he got home. I had forgotten ever giving them. He went straight home and found the piece of paper-found it miraculously, he said, in a welter of other papers. He came back to the library where I was still looking through the