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.
Catlinite is the stone that peace pipes are made of.
The pipestone is surprisingly soft. A butter knife scratches it. Catlinite is reincarnated mud, tiny particles of clay and silt from beneath an ancient sea. When the mud is squeezed dry, as it is when more mud piles on top, the particles glue together. Pipestone is as hard as rock but as soft to carve as a fingernail or quill. Native peoples of the Great Plain prize it.
At an ancient time (in the words of George Catlin, recounting a Sioux legend in 1836) the Great Spirit, in the form of a large bird, … called all the tribes around him …
Dad empathized with birds. His passion was to fly, to soar over the Earth. He could put an engine in anything and make it soar, including a homebuilt airplane. For forty years, bits of wings and – feathers? – adorned the basement of the house as he crafted, tack by cam by fiber, a one-seat monoplane. For years, odors of epoxy and primer permeated our living quarters in the way that residues of fried onions and fish linger in normal houses. On weekends, the shrieks of the band saw and cavitations of the grinder shivered our timbers. Punched-out disks of airplane frame, reducing the flying weight, were stacked on top of Mom’s piano. A quality airplane is rigid and strong yet ethereal.
What distinguishes Minnesota pipestone from other carving stones is its lack of quartz. Quartz is the mineral of glass, and it is very hard. It makes a stone harder to sculpt. Catlinite is prized because of its carvability, and its ruddy color. Its redness comes from iron; a hemoglobin coursing through the veins of the Earth entity. Quality pipestone is reddish and strong yet etchable.
… and breaking out a piece of the red stone formed it into a pipe and smoked it, the smoke rolling over the whole multitude.
Dad was born to fly. A veteran of WWII, he joined up for the chance to touch airplanes and nurture airplanes and breathe in the vapors of airplanes and not so much to take part in war. A pilot imagines soaring through the haze, above the fray, beyond the pale, seeing the Earth as astronauts see Earth: from afar, its peoples thrown together on a gossamer globule of gravel, all for one and one for all, flocced together forever.
Far below, under the clouds, beneath the birds, deep in the bedrock of the prairie, the pipestone is capped by steel-hard quartzite, laid down as sand and debris 1700 million years ago. It is a rigid armor shielding the catlinite from the whims of humans and hinterland. The pipestone can only be reached by chopping through the quartzite that seals it away.
He then told his red children that this red stone was their flesh, that they were made from it, that they must all smoke to him through it … and as it belonged alike to all the tribes, the ground was sacred.
Three thousand years ago the peoples of the American plain first came across the catlinite pipestone along a buffalo trail in a hollow where the quartzite was worn through, and word spread far and wide, even to enemy tribes, of how favorable the stone was for pipes and effigies. All tribes came to quarry in peace, and still do, every autumn.
Peace is cast into the very nature of catlinite. Only the calmest, least turbulent waters drop such fine muds. Any hint of turmoil stirs in sand and pebbles, graveling the grains and destroying the prized softness.
An unfinished airplane is like an unfinished peace pipe: there is still work to be done, but the soaring possibilities drive it forward. In the basement, the wings hang ripe from the joists; the cockpit sports an undimpled cushion; the camshaft arms for first crank; the canopy frames a preamble of the flocced.
All these peoples, and all the things of the universe, are joined to you who smoke the pipe.
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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