Wednesday's postcard, and Time in a small bottle
October 10, 2024
The Four Dimensions, September 2024
A planet, if you can keep it….
"Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Elizabeth Willing Powel asked, after reading his speech.
“A republic. If you can keep it.”—Benjamin Franklin, 9/17/1787
The first place I wanted to take my companions Jim and Eric last week was to the site of the epic ice dam that held back Lake Missoula some 15,000 years ago. They wanted to visit the channeled scablands in late summer but we slid the outing into early October, to improve the odds we could hike without getting light-headed from the heat, or inhaling wild-fire smoke.
I proposed going north, first, to the Idaho mountains where you get to see the scablands story in its first devastating act—the colossal burst(s) of the Clark Fork ice dam, unloosing what some would classify as a biblical flood. Margo Hill taught me (and others) that the great flood is a central tragedy to the modern Spokane tribe re-creation story, so it is more than geology. In a very real sense, it is in the gene pool of our region.
Between here, and there, I have favorite places.
One of them is at Spirit Lake, Idaho, on a road that crosses the northeast tip of the lake and invites you to a magnificent hillside cut into ancient (1.45 billion year-old) Belt Basin rock that forms most of the mountain bedrock in the Idaho panhandle. The exposure faces south, into the autumn sunlight, and it is layered in pages of rock such that it is like looking at a massive book on its side. The “pages” are thin bands of highly compressed sediments laid down long before complex life forms existed. You will not find fossils among them—the Belt’s compressed sediments precede dinosaurs by hundreds of millions of years.
“The Precambrian sedimentary rocks of northern Idaho give us a narrow glimpse through dimmed and discolored glass into a strange and unknown planet. They show us an Earth so strangely different from our cozily familiar world that it could be a planet as distant in space as it is in time.”—(Alt & Hyndman, Roadside Geology of Idaho, 1989)
Rationally, if you’re coming from Spokane to visit the ice dam you would do well to stop at Trestle Creek on state highway 200, along the northeast shoreline of Lake Pend Oreille. From there you get a full view of Green Monarch Ridge which, in the late Pleistocene, served as a giant doorstop, of sorts, for the Purcell Trench glacier that dammed the Clark Fork River, creating glacial Lake Missoula. Buoys mark a place to swim at Trestle Creek but the highlight for me is just above the high water mark on the east side of the park—big slabs of gold and blue Belt Basin rocks like the one in the photo below. You can plainly see the laminate layers, and when you feel the rock you can feel its density, its hardness, and imagine how a mountain core of it could stop a glacier.
I don’t know how or why the slabs got here. They don’t match the nearby road cut on the highway, which exhibits the relatively drab, rusty color of the Pritchard Formation, the very bottom of the Belt. I’m not a geologist, but in their “Roadside Geology of Idaho” David Alt and Donald Hyndman write about a primitive life form that does make its way into the many pages of the Belt—blue green algae. And I speculate that this is what this is, the compressed remnants of algae blooms from a time when the Earth was much different than it is now.
I could be wrong. For once it really doesn’t matter. The point is the compressed layers, the long ago pages of time—those are as real as can be.
There’s something that comes over me when I see and touch something this old. As best I can describe, it tingles my brain. On one hand, it tells me how incredibly short our time is. The rock on the shore at Trestle Creek is older than 18 million human lifetimes. On the other hand, it reminds me that we evolved from these ingredients, the dust of exploded stars; the vital water that hydrates our chemistry and embraces our gestation. Life doesn’t require sentiency, but we evolved to it and our capacity for love, poetry and intelligence is miraculous.
It won’t last forever, at least not here. The exquisite instruments that allow us to see the stars of distant galaxies do so by allowing us to look back in time, not just to the birth of stars, but to their deaths. In a few billion years, our star, our sun, will succumb to a natural death when it runs out of hydrogen to fuse into helium. In short, it will swell up, toast and engulf the inner planets, including ours.
As physicist Stephen Hawking bluntly reminded us near the end of his life, there are lots of other ways we can be extinguished (several by our own hands) in the meantime. But life on Earth is ultimately finite. If we are successful in avoiding suicidal nuclear war(s), deflecting or destroying incoming asteroids like the one that took out the dinosaurs, and waking up in time to realize that our present carbon emissions will doom the biosphere, we will continue to evolve. In a million years (a small snip of time on the cosmological scale) we will actually look different than we look now. If we survive. And it should be crystal clear, by now, that whether we survive depends on how we answer the question of whether we can love each (and humanity itself) with enough sincerity to shed tribalism and work in community to solve our challenges, rather than inflame them.
Honestly, it wasn’t that long ago that I thought we had more time, and that the answer to the future was in the capable hands of my children and their peers. But I was wrong about that—not about their capability, but about the velocity of the havoc headed our way. Our biggest challenge is in the now, and what I experience in my circle of the now—is dread, like I’ve never witnessed. I’ll take it a step further— if you’re not frightened at some level, then you’re probably not paying attention.
Noose intended for former Vice President Mike Pence, at the nation’s Capitol during the 1/6/2021 insurrection.
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