The present age of the Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years (give or take), a figure so mystifying that were it twice that, it would be no more difficult for wise apes to comprehend. The Moon was formed by ejecta blasted out of the Earth in a collision with a Mars‐sized object 4.5 billion years ago. One theory under examination today asserts that beginning 4.1 billion years ago, the Earth was bombarded by asteroids launched sunward from the outer Solar System, caused perhaps by complex gravitational effects produced through interactions between the ice and gas giant planets as Saturn and the Sun engaged in a tug‐of‐war dragging Jupiter around the ecliptic. Asteroids and comets bearing water did bury themselves into the Earth, while the water they had brought boiled off into the atmosphere, from which it would later condense and precipitate. Volcanism destroyed any nascent landforms until the Earth cooled sufficiently to allow a crust to survive. Oceans formed. A developing magnetic field spared the atmosphere from being blown away by solar wind. Undisputed evidence of the earliest life on Earth is found in fossils that are 3.8 billion years old, and much indirect evidence exists suggesting life began hundreds of millions of years earlier than that. In the latter Archeon era around 2.5 billion years ago, unicellular bacteria appeared that could absorb infrared light instead of visible light and emit oxygen: photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria followed, infusing the atmosphere with oxygen for the first time. The increasing volume of oxygen in the atmosphere caused the temperature at the surface of the Earth to drop, and glaciers formed as part of the first of five ice ages, beginning with the Huronian ice age that ended 2.1 billion years ago. To learn that the Late Cenozoic Ice Age began 33.9 million years ago and is still ongoing is to be reminded of the scales required for measuring geological time; scales that cannot resolve the 80 trips or so I will get to make around the Sun because more time than that is required to create even a single rock.

The Quaternary glacial periods — which began 2.58 million years ago — include the Fraser glaciation, which began 19,000 years ago when the Cordilleran ice sheet advanced out of the mountains of British Columbia. The Vashon Stade was a period of glaciation extending from the Fraser Lowland to cover the Puget Lowland, achieving its maximum position roughly where Tenino, Washington, may be found today. The ice that covered the Puget Lowland was the Puget Lobe of the Cordilleran ice sheet, and it gave the region its present landscape.

As the Puget Lobe retreated 14,000 years ago, an edge of the glacier that was once 3,600 feet thick at our point of interest deposited a large erratic on a hillside one rainy evening in what is today Skagit County. In the years to follow as the hillside became forested, short‐faced bear used the rock as a scratching post, and persistent rumors of itinerant Columbian mammoth pissing on the smooth sides of the stone cannot go unmentioned. The soil of the hillside is younger alluvium from the Holocene, up to 10 meters thick in places, and includes volcanic material, much of which was deposited by eruptions of nearby Glacier Peak. Coast Salish, Nuwhaha, Stillaguamish, Sauk Suiattle, and Skagit people lived in the area during the centuries, and many stood atop the rock as an outpost while hunting game. The territory was seized from the autochthonous peoples by Euro–Americans, who eventually repopulated the area in the late nineteenth century. The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway was bedded on the hillside in the winter of 1890 within 100 yards of the rock as the rails advanced their way toward Sumas and a connection in April 1891 with the Canadian Pacific Railway. On December 19, 1898, a small town was incorporated at the foot of the hill upon which the erratic lay.

The Al G. Barnes Circus arrived in town on May 15, 1922, accompanied by Tusko, its famed elephant. Tusko broke from its confinement that night and led a merry chase through town, according to legend after the elephant had helped itself to moonshiner’s mash. Tusko was brought to heel hours later at the bottom of our hill.¹ In 1968, the town claimed the title Gateway to the North Cascades when legislation was signed creating North Cascades National Park, and it has largely remained undisturbed by national attention in the decades since.

I enjoy reading signs at the edge of small towns that Chambers of Commerce erect inscribed with mottos, or the names of native sons and daughters gone to war, or to the medals platform at the Olympic Games. Such signs are meant to convey the impression that here is a town that is Going Places. I think often of lines written by Fernando Pessoa, Some have a great dream in life that they never accomplish. Others have no dream, and likewise never accomplish it.² At one time I would have said the great dream of my life was to have carnal knowledge of the actor Barbara Eden, but that had much to do with how well miniskirts and Shalwar flattered Ms. Eden on our family television in the 1960s, long before I was introduced to the work of Mr. Pessoa. The notion of having a great dream vivifying my actions does not suit me, though I fret there is not an equivalent to Pascal’s wager I might make as a hedge against being shamed by Charon for failing to live in service to the ascendancy of a dream; rather, a recapitulation from Camus having examined the purpose of life — The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.³ — claims from me a nod of recognition. Yet I acknowledge demonstrations that the power of dreams is at work among us.

In 1978, a member of our family began to make wine as a hobby in the basement of his family’s home. He became good at it, and as years passed and his skill and passion increased, the great dream upon which he fixed as his answer to the question, What am I going to do when I retire? was to create his own estate vineyard and winery. To that end, he purchased some acreage — reached by driving on Garden of Eden Road, the neighborhood where Tusko was captured — on a hillside above the small town that calls itself the Gateway to the North Cascades, where he discovered amid the trees that stood on the land a large stone and, steps away, an active branch of the BNSF Railway. He and his wife cleared the land and built a house, then planted a vineyard and began preparing for the time when the vines would yield a harvest of grapes. When that day came, they picked and crushed the grapes, coaxed them through fermentation all the way to bottles of wine filled and corked in their new winery, and then opened a tasting room where the public could sample and purchase this fruit of labor. They have today repeated the cycle of growing, harvesting, winemaking, bottling, and selling for several years. There is no question that he has accomplished the great dream of his life.

Yesterday I joined a group that picked bunches of Pinot noir grapes from the vines and ran them through the crusher. Some of those grapes may be seen in the above photo. The erratic is between rows just beyond the tractor seat, and the train tracks follow the line of trees on the far side of the vineyard. A glacier once intruded on this spot, and the hillside it sculpted affects the expression of terroir in the wines produced from these grapes. I wondered what the land will look like when another Ice Age has come and gone in a future geological era and was glad to be present for this moment, where a dream has been lived and a half‐billion years is a long while from now.