A Vinyl County Almanac

During the last Ice Age, New England, like much of the northern hemisphere, was covered by a massive glacier up to a mile thick. When the Ice Age ended and temperatures started to rise again around 18,000 years ago, this glacier began to melt and the resulting flood waters slowly filled the Connecticut Valley, forming a massive, but skinny glacial lake (Meszaros 2019). This lake, named Glacial Lake Hitchcock by the geologists who first discovered evidence of it, stretched at its height from what is today St. Johnsbury in Vermont all the way down to Rocky Hill, Connecticut, where a large sediment dam blocked the water from flowing into Long Island Sound. Much like the glacial lakes that we still see today in the far north, Lake Hitchcock would have been a dynamic place, with large chunks of ice regularly breaking off from the glacier in the warmer months and floating away through cloudy, turquoise waters. Along with its stores of frozen water, the glacier would also have released tons o

Green Carptetweed (Mollugo verticillata), also known as devils-grip, originated in Central and South America, but has now become a common resident of parking lots, sidewalks, and driveways throughout temperate North America. What would you say that the opposite of a meadow full of wildflowers is? How about a shady forest full of big, old trees? Answers will probably vary, but I suspect many people reading this will say that it is some variety of paved surface. On the spectrum of land cover types, paved areas such as parking lots, sidewalks, freeways, or city centers seem to offer the most striking contrast to the green spaces and wilderness areas that most people picture when they hear the world “nature.” Whereas lawns, parks, and gardens represent spaces in which humans attempt to shape communities of plants and animals in ways that aligns with our own wills, paved areas seal off the major sources of nature’s vigor — the sun, the rain, the soil — from each other and in doing so, appea