Compiled by The Bedford Citizen
The Bedford Recreation Department, Town Historian Sharon McDonald, former elementary school principal Ralph Hammond, and members of the Job Lane House board have collaborated to offer an archaeological dig as a one-week summer camp on the museum’s property for several summers.
This year the dig moved to Sweetwater Avenue, along the edge of Fawn Lake. In addition to scouring the earth for historic treasures, Hammond and McDonald created an epic geology lesson, a time line of Bedford’s natural history utilizing every day materials.
The beginning of time was marked with a stick and a sign near the tents that shaded the actual dig. With knots at carefully measured intervals, the line extended for 100 hundred yards along the shore to an end point near the property’s outcropping of large rocks, many which were pushed up or at least broken up by the last glacier according to McDonald and Hammond.
The campers walked along the line, starting at the beginning of time and adding another historical point at each knot along the way.
The second point, the formation of our galaxy, and the third,the formation of our sun and solar system, was roughly a quarter of the way along the line.
As time marched forward, the points got closer and closer together until present time, when the markers were on top of each other. The next to last 1.25 inch is where human life first began and the last knot, 6/1,000 of an inch from today, included the last ice age and all human life as we know it.
Continental plates shifted and the Taconic Mountains began to build; campers lined up and gently shoved one another into new alignment. Hammond pointed out that land forms higher than Mt. Everest were pushed up, and a portion of North Africa is still attached to Bedford.
Much later, during the last ice age, that glacier was 88 to 100 times higher than the nearby condominium tower, once the laboratory for the Hayden pharmaceutical corporation.
Returning to the beginning of time, Hammond introduced a new kind of “clock” using a battery-operated drill that offered an even motion, comparable to the rotation of the gears in a clock.
The drill bit of the ‘clock’ was inserted into a roller and a knot representing the beginning of time was attached, As the drill/clock began to wind up the string, campers called out “NOW” as each of the knots approached.
There was a long wait for the first “NOW” and the second, but soon the points on the timescale came fast and furiously as the final knots and “NOW”s brought the present into view.
From the time of the dinosaurs until the present it was not possible to say “now” fast enough to actually “measure” the time. At a football field scale, the time from the last ice age to today is much thinner than a blade of grass.
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