“Next services 90 miles.” The white letters glare on a blue highway sign.
It means the next ninety miles will be pretty quiet.
No cell towers.
No trees.
No signs of life.
No water.
Just dirt, for ninety miles.
This is the Mojave Desert. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin might call it Magnificent Desolation.
It is a far cry from Greenville, where it is raining. Again. Greenville is typically bathed by about fifty inches of rain per year — an eighth inch per day, approaching the climate of a rainforest. Rain is so normal, and we have so much vegetation sopping it up, we forget how devastating it can be until a hurricane approaches. Thunderstorms routinely drop an inch of water.
But there are places not so far away where a thunderstorm is catastrophic. In parts of the Mojave Desert there have been years without any rain at all. One inch of downpour in a desert scours the landscape, avalanches the dirt, rills the badlands, carves through the roads, flushes the valleys.
Death Valley National Park, in the Mojave in California, typically gets just two inches of rain per year, only 1/25 of our rainfall in Greenville. Two thunderstorms make a summer monsoon. The rest of the year is deathly dry.
A one-inch thunderstorm can really hose a steak. In 1973 the Moses family was in Nevada, near the Mojave, after driving through droves of dust devils on the way to a campground. Now Dad was grilling dinner when a full-blown dust blizzard set in, gusting gales of grit into eyes, nose, teeth — and steak. We lost sight of him staggering toward us with the dust-crusted steak on a fork. Inside the camper, visibility dropped to just inches. Outside, sand blasted man and meat.
Ironically, some of the Nevada desert dust came from beneath an ancient ocean, from a time when the mountain ranges of primitive North America were just tropical island tips and the future desert was undersea, since then heaved up, washed down, and ground to sand. These were bits of grit from the abyss that were burnishing our beefsteak.
Minutes later, it was monsooning. Dad and the steak were washed clean and meal-ready.
Death Valley is deep as well as dry. Its climate comes from seven sets of summits stabbing into the sky to the southwest, including the spiky and soaring Sierra Nevada. Seven times, the mountains interrupt the sweep of Pacific storms into the area. Seven times, the clouds ride up the western slopes of those mountains, cooling and spilling out rain. Seven times, the ex-clouds slide down the east slopes, warming and sopping up moisture in the next valley. By the time they slide down the final Panamint Mountain, they are parched figments of vapor. Dried-out basins like Badwater in Death Valley, and Bristol Lake to the south, trap the waterless air within their steep walls, desiccating the landscape.
Death Valley, bottoming at 279 feet below sea level, has more valley, but Bristol Lake has more death. In Death Valley, visitors swarm every prominent pinnacle of the proximate Panamint peaks. The badness of Badwater is never borne alone. Outside the park, just over the Providence Mountains, is the real bad water. Outside the park is Bristol Lake.
Bristol Lake is the illusory name for a strip of salty sand near the ghost town of Amboy along Rte. 66 in the Mojave in California. It is midway across the 90 mile expanse to “next services” at the prickly pillars and nettles of Needles, California. Most of the Mojave soil supports some spindly sage and saltbush sprouting out the surface. But at Bristol Lake, the sand stands alone. It is mostly quartz, the silica stuff of sunglasses and seasides, that once stood as massive monzogranite mounds but now saltates across the supine sweeps of sand.
Greenville is no Bristol Lake. It has sandy sediment layers, like the desert: meters of mountain minerals off the Piedmont and morphed marine muck from the early mid-Atlantic. But Greenville has rain. Again!
I stand on the Canadian Shield. It’s hot in Greenville in August. It’s not in Canada. The Canadian Shield is just right! The Canadian Shield isn’t just coolness. It is stability. It is solidity. It is solace. In a crazy world, the Canadian Shield is a rock. Even in an uncrazy world, the Canadian Shield…
A Peace of the Plain In a time of vitriol and venom, peace seems long ago and far away. But it is actually in Minnesota. In the heart of the continent, rippling outward in a thin reddish marrow of sedimentary rock, ten feet beneath the amber waves of Minnesota, sweeps a vein of florid catlinite. …
“Next services 90 miles.” The white letters glare on a blue highway sign. It means the next ninety miles will be pretty quiet. No cell towers. No trees. No signs of life. No water. Just dirt, for ninety miles. This is the Mojave Desert. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin might call it Magnificent Desolation. It is a…
Aren’t the rocks in North Carolina good enough?
That was the question I had when I came across a NC home-school group traveling to West Virginia for a geology field trip.
The answer I got, from geologist Rob Greenberg of the Hawbridge School in Chapel Hill, conceded that the surface rocks in southeastern West Virginia and the surface rocks in western North Carolina are really not all that different from each other. They were laid down in the same ancient seas from the same types of ancient marine dirt and debris, then deformed by the same brutal forces of continents slowly smashing together. If anything, the fossils in the North Carolina rocks are older. But here in the twenty-first century, in the Holocene Epoch, a sunny day in West Virginia can be quite lovely, and I tagged along.
My own early experience with rocks had mainly been in trying to avoid them, or at least one, when sledding as a child in New York State. The same Appalachian rocks that ground West Virginia and North Carolina share a history with the Catskill Mountains in New York, but in New York, now-gone glaciers left behind a mess of erratic rubble. The profuse Catskill rocks are loathed by both gardeners and sledders bowled over by boulders. Our family garden sprouted nice broccolis and gniess breccias from the same packet of seeds. Out back we had a great sledding hill: long and steep and sometimes snow-covered into May, but it ended at a rock the size of a bus. OK, a small bus. Steering was not much of an option, so sledding was an act of tilt and terror. Perhaps in West Virginia I could make peace with the rocks.
The group — it doesn’t have a name; I stumbled upon it when Googling “geology field trips” — originated with home-schoolers, but has evolved into a clast of rock hounds and geophiles accompanying the occasional youngster. Exploration has taken them all over the state and beyond, observing road cuts and stream cuts and ancient flood streams, piecing together the history of a place from the scars of the soil. This trip, which included three of us from Greenville, was to examine the large folded mountains leading westward from Minnehaha Springs, WV, to the Greenbrier River, and farther west to the Allegheny Front, using rock hammers and chisels and magnifying lenses to peer into the past.
The Appalachian Mountain folds, Greenberg explained, are continental wrinkles squeezed up as the ancient North American continent collided with the ancient African continent 450 million years ago. Like a stack of newspapers squeezed edge toward edge, rock layers that had lain flat at the bottom of those long-ago seas buckled, leaving a dramatic fold in the storyline. The wrinkles are visible from above in a Google Maps satellite image, and from the side, at road cuts and streams.
The landforms in Greenville, North Carolina, by contrast, are relatively young. Layers of beaches and mountain runoff lie atop ancient bedrock that was gently squeezed 250 million years ago into small folds a thousand feet below the topsoil, folds so small they don’t break the surface in a road cut or river bend.
In West Virginia, shale that formed beneath the oceans in a time when the dry land was still barren accumulated shell and coral and, later, leaf fossils, many of which were identified by geologist Mary Watson, a rock star from Central Carolina Community College. At a time 200 million years before the dinosaurs, she said, the climate was different and the configuration of the continents was different and the living species were different, but the processes of earthquakes and volcanoes and floods and erosion were the same as now, here in the Holocene, here in West Virginia and back home in North Carolina.
Timing is important, even on geological scales. Had we ventured out just a week later, we would have seen geologic processes at their worst. Five days after our exploration, the Greenbrier River, along whose banks and tributaries we had looked for evidence of multi-million-year-old floods, flooded again from a 10-inch deluge of rain that flashed down the mountain folds and killed 24 people, here, in the twenty-first century, in the Holocene Epoch.
‘No Man is an Island’
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
John Donne
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