The Ice Age

The Ice Age is the deep-time force that Jorgen Knudsen invokes to explain how the land beneath Queens and Brooklyn came to exist as it does. In his account, the Laurentide ice sheet is both a geological agent and the first immigrant to leave a lasting mark on Queens: it reshaped the coast before human borders or city histories existed. The novel sets this immense span of time beside the shifting, layered histories visible in the modern city, where each landscape carries traces of what came before.

Jorgen Knudsen’s account

While speaking with Apollo Kagwa in his home, Jorgen begins his local history not with human settlement but with a glacier. He places its arrival around twenty thousand years ago, when an ice sheet spreading from Labrador moved south through Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. By the time it reached New York, he says, the ice was a thousand feet thick—nearly the height of the Empire State Building.

Jorgen describes the glacier as an overwhelming presence that moved rock and split the earth. After it stopped advancing, he says, it remained across what would become New York City for another twenty-five hundred years. The scale of his account makes familiar geography feel contingent: the city’s present terrain was formed by a force that preceded its names, boundaries, and inhabitants by millennia.

A coastline made by ice

In Jorgen’s telling, the glacier’s most consequential work was not simply to cover the land but to alter the relation between land and sea. As it shifted stone and earth, it created a barrier that pushed back the Atlantic Ocean. He argues that without this geological change, Queens and Brooklyn would still lie underwater—and that the ground beneath the room where he and Apollo speak would be submerged too.

This explanation turns the Ice Age into an active part of the novel’s urban setting rather than a distant date in a textbook. The land that supports streets, homes, and human encounters is itself the outcome of immense physical change. Jorgen’s account also prepares for his later explanation that Queens’s hills and pockets of forest contain caves where a large creature could hide: the terrain’s shape matters to the story’s present dangers as well as its ancient history.

The city as successive histories

Apollo’s thoughts at Jamaica Station offer a parallel way of experiencing time. The station was renovated in 2006 with new platforms, street-level elevators, escalators, and a pedestrian bridge to the AirTrain serving John F. Kennedy International Airport. Its steel-and-glass canopy gave it a distinctly European railway appearance, markedly different from the station Apollo remembered from the 1980s. The scale of that change brings to mind Dresden after its bombing and Dresden in the present.

Yet the rebuilt station does not wholly erase what came before: Apollo can still picture the old platforms and the earlier Jamaica at street level. He wonders whether Lillian Kagwa would have remembered yet another version, from her arrival in the United States as a young immigrant. He imagines that someone a thousand years old would remember the area as marshland, and Jamaica Avenue as the Old Rockaway Trail used by the Rockaway and Canarsie Indians. These are layers of local history and speculation, not all the same kind of evidence; together, they make the present appear as one revision among many.

The same passage reaches further back through material remains. In the 1800s, city workers dredging nearby Baisley Pond found the remains of an American mastodon, and a mastodon sculpture was later erected at Sutphin Playground. Apollo’s reflection that history is a series of revisions connects such remnants to the changing station around him. The past is not told once and left behind; new discoveries and new constructions alter how the landscape is understood. That openness to revision also prompts Apollo to wonder whether witches might once have been there.

Geological time beneath human movement

Jorgen’s story of migration likewise places human decisions within a landscape whose formation long preceded them. He explains that Nils Knudsen left Norway with Anna Sofie and Petra Mikkelsdatter after doubting that the small sloop planned by the Sloopers could carry his family safely. The Sloopers continued upstate, while Nils and his family remained in Queens, then farmland with thousands of acres of forest and green space. Jorgen identifies that wooded terrain as a fitting habitat for creatures from the natural world of his homeland.

By 1898, the land for Forest Park had been bought and plans for golf courses and hiking paths were underway. Jorgen stresses that the country remained hilly and full of pockets and caves—features that development did not simply make disappear. His account thus moves from the Ice Age’s alteration of the coastline to the persistence of terrain within a cultivated, inhabited borough. Geological history does not dictate every later event, but it supplies the physical setting in which settlement, park design, and concealment become possible.

Deep time and the changed landscape

The novel also places the city’s recent histories beside ecological and architectural change on North Brother Island. By 1981, the smallpox patients and evacuated war veterans were gone, and drug addicts were no longer treated there. Black-crowned night herons then occupied the island for more than twenty years before abandoning it in the early twenty-first century; the reason was unknown until Apollo discovered that women and children had returned and displaced them.

Those inhabitants were repairing the Nurses’ Residence, a U-shaped Gothic Revival building completed in 1904 to house 125 nurses. Clear plastic over its ruined window frames caught the firelight, making the building’s second-floor flame look like a signal marking a base camp. This island history is not presented as a consequence of the Ice Age. Its juxtaposition with Jorgen’s geological account instead underscores the novel’s broader contrast between long and short durations: coastlines take shape over millennia, while institutions, buildings, animal habitats, and human refuges change within recorded history.

The Ice Age therefore serves as a measure of how much lies beneath the apparent stability of the city. Jorgen’s glacier makes Queens’s present geography the result of an ancient transformation; Apollo’s recollections and observations show that human and ecological versions of the landscape continue to replace one another. The novel’s urban setting is neither fixed nor merely modern: it is a layered ground, repeatedly remade and newly interpreted.