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 is a rock. A very old rock.
Many scientists consider the Canadian Shield to be one of the earliest pieces of continent on the Earth. It is older than Grandpa. Older than George Washington. Older than dogs, older than dinosaurs, older than dirt. Almost as old as the Moon.
Four thousand million years ago, geologists say, the Earth had cooled enough for rain to collect in oceans and not boil away. The continents were aberrations that stuck up. Variations deep inside the Earth caused volcano bumps and earthquake jumps, making the Earth lumpy. The Canadian Shield was one lump of island in that early ocean, and seems to have remained above water. In the billions of years since, its features have been washed by erosion, edged with new land, topped with sediments, squeezed by other continents, riddled with fresh magma, scraped bare by glaciers, and cracked by earthquakes over and over again, but the 1500-mile-wide shield of modern-day eastern Canada has continuously protruded from the sea.
In a fraction of that history, Canada is inextricably linked in my mind to the Moon. I grew up in a village eight miles from Woodstock, NY, which in the summer of 1969 was considering hosting a little rock concert. The Moses family had no intention of setting the sights and sounds of psychedelic songsters on its sensitive offspring. We fled to Canada.
So we were in Quebec at the greatest moment of all history. In July of 1969, a species transported itself, deliberately, from one globe to another. After centuries of human enlightenment and decades of human industrialization, on a countdown to zero that began with Galileo Galilei and ended with “one small step for man,” the United States launched a fragile-skinned, spider-bellied, fire-tailed missile on a journey of 240,000 miles across empty space to land on a hot and cold, dark and light Moon, with humans aboard. The world watched, spellbound.
We watched, spellbound, on a small black and white television as President Nixon spoke to the astronauts in French subtitles.
This year, the travel is mundane. No missiles, no astronauts, no psychedelics. We came to stand on the rocks and feel the washed and edged and topped and squeezed and riddled and scraped and cracked history.
It is tough forensics work to retrace the journey of a continent through that history, unwrapping the folds and unwinding the flows and distinguishing the wash from the riddle, and it is fraught with scientific argument, but every rock interaction leaves a distinguishing scar behind as a clue. Determining the exact saga of a continent is like estimating the precise path of a raisin kneaded through a loaf based upon its character in today’s buttery toast, using grill lines and bread crumbs, cinnamon residue and yeast bubbles, raisin wrinkles and slice patterns to guide one’s deductions. The Canadian Shield is such a raisin toasted into the Earth.
The Shield began as a blister of magma swelling from deep in the Earth, feeding volcanoes that no longer erupt or even exist. Over time, wind and rain sanded them, and the dust settled to the flanks of the Shield. Hot magma below roasted the granite, and deepening dirt overhead squeezed it, baking much of it into gneiss. The gneiss bent and cracked from those pressures. Liquid magma seeped up through those cracks. Repeatedly, offshore volcanoes inched against the Shield. Glaciers came and went, grinding the Shield surface, and weighing it deeper into the hot mantle on which it floats. Rivers carried dirt and rocks from upstream to downstream. Earthquakes ripped rifts and cliffs as the land stretched and squeezed. Several times, the crust froze nearly worldwide. Continents slammed against the Shield, rippling up new mountains. The Canadian Shield is a rock, but it is taffied with other rocks, a topsy turvy tumble of terra cotta firma.
Then, in 1969, humans traveled skyward from a fingery, Florida flange on the newer ledges and edges of the Shield, traveled beyond the continent, beyond the Earth, to leave a new layer of dust and dirt and debris on the Moon.
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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