A recent article, in The New Yorker—“Studying Stones Can Rock Your World,” by Kathryn Schulz— reviewed Marcia Bjornerud‘s new book, Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks. It’s about the ages of the Earth, as revealed by its geology, but it’s also a memoir of self-discovery.
I’ve always been a fan of the earth sciences (much to the dismay of my family, who do not share my enthusiasm—and would rather not hear about it, especially when trapped on long road trips). Not only does geology directly address the mysteries of deep time, and the origins—no matter how remote—of everything that interests me; it does so by drawing upon most of the other sciences: physics, chemistry, biology—and even astronomy. It’s also the most visually-accessible of the sciences; much of it can be understood only by careful looking—which is exactly what artists do. How could I resist?
Plus, the study of sciences indirectly inform us about our own nature as well. Schulz’s article compared Bjornerud‘s personal history with successive layers of stone. It struck me as a metaphor for my own history. You see, I began writing many years ago because I had been illustrating children’s books, and thought I should try writing them as well. I wrote three of them; unpublishable beginner’s writings. I then switched to writing about food. Layer-upon-layer of food books accumulated (forty or fifty or so, if counting encyclopedia entries and other collaborative work), only to be followed by the deposition of some twenty volumes of fiction.
Believe me. I fully understand the crushing weight of all those layers now. I’m only surprised that the pressure hasn’t caused some of the lowermost layers to metamorphose into entirely different genres.
The antediluvian story, below, is from that early period of writing. Ostensibly a children’s book, it was intended for young adult readers—at least those who were old enough to be bored and exasperated by parental blathering. Never-before-published, I include it, here, because it is painfully geological, but also because it’s from those deepest, most primitive, layers.
It might (I hope) show that my writing has improved in the last thirty years.
A Pain in the Butt
She sat, cross-legged, not too close to the edge of the cliff.
She knew exactly where the edge was, even when she was looking the other way. She was old enough to know that the edge was dangerous. She was also old enough to know that there was no danger as long as she didn’t forget that edge.
It was windy, but the girl didn’t feel cold. If anything, she was glad for the breeze. She was still quite warm from the long uphill hike that had brought them to the top.
While it wasn’t the edge, or the wind, or the hike that made her uncomfortable, there was no doubt about it—she was uncomfortable.
The girl squirmed uneasily.
Her father looked down at her, without saying a word.
She had asked a simple question, but she had a feeling that she wasn’t going to like the answer. Her father turned staring into the distance, as if there was actually something to see there. Something like a television suspended in the air. She slid out of the shoulder straps of her brightly colored day pack. This was not going to be easy. She’d known that it would be hard hiking to the top, but she wasn’t really prepared for this. He turned around to face her. This was it. There was no stopping him now.
He sat down.
“Well,” he said, after taking a deep breath, “about a billion years ago there was lot of melted rock underground. I mean way underground, maybe a couple of miles down. Gradually it cooled off enough to begin to harden into solid rock. As it cooled, crystals of minerals called mica, and feldspar, and quartz, formed and the rock began to look speckled. It was a rock called granite. It could have been pink, or gray, or black, depending on what kind of feldspar and mica it contained… but it didsn’t really matter because no one could have seen it, anyway.
“There were no people yet. There weren’t even any dinosaurs yet. Even if anything lived on earth, it wouldn’t have been able to see the colors because the granite was miles below the surface.
“Besides, eyes hadn’t even been invented yet.
“In the middle of all that granite was a small crystal of quartz. Like most of the billions of other quartz crystals in the granite it had practically no color. It looked sort of like glass. For a long time, not much happened to the crystal. It was stuck deep inside a chunk of rock about the size of a small state. The crystal was very good at waiting, though.”
The girl was beginning to feel a little like the crystal, only she was trapped inside the story of all that granite. She knew that her father was going to go on with his story… even if she squirmed and sighed and tried to look as pathetic as possible.
She did try, of course, and he didn’t notice.
He just kept on talking.
“Eventually, something happened to the quartz crystal. You see that granite was part of a huge chunk of lightweight rock called a plate. The plate was as big as the whole country. It floated on the heavier, half-melted rock below it. Ever so slowly, the plate drifted across the Earth’s surface. Finally, it ran into another plate. Where the two plates scrunched together, they squeezed up a ridge of rock. It was a hundred miles long and perhaps twenty miles wide. The quartz crystal was in the middle of the granite that was in the middle of that ridge of rock. It was higher than it had ever been before.”
In her mind, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches moved slowly, menacingly, closer to each other across a table. As one pressed into the other, a truly gross gush of strawberry preserves shot out of the buckling bread. “Yuck!,” she said, not quite realizing that was speaking out loud. Her father gave her one of his irritating, patented, sideways looks. It gave him just enough time to catch his breath.
“Were there any volcanoes?” she asked. “Maybe,” he replied, still watching his imaginary TV in the sky. He closed his eyes, and the story continued. She guessed that he didn’t need to have his eyes open to watch imaginary TV.
“Of course, the crystal was still way underground, but things were changing, now. The miles of rock above the granite were stuck up in the air. They had become a mountain range.”
She wondered, for a moment, if there was anything better on other imaginary channels. She wished she had remembered to bring along the imaginary remote. An imaginary couch would have been nice, too.
“Now, mountain ranges may seem pretty sturdy to you. I mean, they’re really big, and they’re made out of solid rock and all, but they‘re not as tough as you think. Whenever something sticks up above the surface, time and weather start trying to wear it down. Frost cracks the rock. Ice, and wind, and rain drag away the broken pieces. Then the next layer of rock begins to be worn away. Eventually, all those miles of rock are gone.
“Imagine that you have a boat filled with heavy rocks. It will still float… but it will sit very low in the water. If you start throwing out the rocks, what happens?”
The girl could tell that he didn’t really need an answer. He only wanted to see if she was listening. She made sure that she looked bored, but held out her hand, anyway. She squeezed her fingers together, so they made a shape that looked something like a rowboat. With her other hand, she plucked imaginary rocks from her “boat hand.” To her surprise, her boat hand slowly rose.
“Exactly!” he said. “The boat floats higher than the water around it. That’s just what happened to the granite. Once the weight was removed from the granite, it rose up above the surrounding countryside. It stood shining in the sunlight for the very first time ever.
“The granite was tougher than the soft rocks that had covered it for so long, so it didn’t wear away as quickly as they did. But there is no resisting time and weather. They always win. One day a boulder the size of a house broke loose from the top of one of the mountains. The little quartz crystal was right in the middle of that boulder. As it tumbled down the mountainside, pieces of rock broke off at every bounce. When it came to a stop, the boulder was much smaller.”
The girl was only half listening. She was toying with a nice-looking rock she had picked up earlier on the hike. She decided that it wasn’t as interesting as she thought. She tossed it off to the side. It made one bounce, a little skip near the edge, then hopped over, plunging out of sight. It made a very satisfying clatter, all the way down. Even its sound became smaller as the rock dropped farther away.
“Every winter, water would get into tiny cracks in the boulder. It would freeze and expand, prying off bits of the boulder. Eventually, all that was left was a pebble. Inside that pebble was the crystal. The next spring, a heavy rain washed it down the slope into a small stream. More rain flooded the stream, its swift current carrying the little pebble along.
“As the pebble rolled along in the water, more and more of the granite wore off. Eventually, the pebble was worn down to practically nothing. The dark parts of the original granite, mica, and feldspar, were softer than the quartz. They wore away faster. The quartz crystal was the size of a grain of sand, but they were much smaller, nothing but fine gray mud.”
Now that her rock was gone, the girl had nothing to distract her from her discomfort. Her father’s story wasn’t really helping, although she did wonder for a moment, in spite of herself, if there was a crystal inside the rock she had thrown away.
She imagined that it was eager to get out.
“Still, they traveled along in the current. The stream grew into a river. Then the river emptied into the sea. The water flowed so slowly that it could no longer carry the weight of the sand. The little crystal sank to the bottom, not far from shore. The smaller particles, the clay and silt, traveled farther. At last, they dropped to the bottom in the deep quiet water, far from shore. Only clean white sand remained by the shore.
“The grain of sand was, of course, not alone. Billions of grains of sand were gathered together along the shore. The waves pushed them back and forth, gradually piling them upon the shoreline. The little quartz crystal became part of a beach. Every year, more and more sand piled on top of the crystal, pushing it down under the surface. After millions of years, the little quartz crystal was again deep inside the earth. The weight of thousands of feet of soil and stone squeezed the sand tightly together. Heat and pressure caused the grains of sand to stick together. The quartz crystal became part of a layer of stone again. This time in a rock called sandstone.
“Far overhead, more and more layers of soil and stone were piled on top of the sandstone. The heat and pressure were enormous. The sandstone was squeezed more tightly than ever. Tiny bits of the sand began to melt slightly, gluing the particles together so strongly that practically nothing could break them apart. It was no longer just sandstone. It had been changed into a rock called quartzite. It was incredibly tough, tougher than the original granite the quartz crystal had come from.
“Again, the quartz crystal had to wait for millions of years. Again, the huge chunks of stone—called plates—drifted together, squeezing up a new range of mountains where the earlier range had been ground to dust. Again, the immense thickness of rock that buried the quartz crystal was washed to the sea. Again, the quartz crystal got a chance to shine in the sunlight. Again, the rock was broken into smaller and smaller rocks. Once again, the quartz was part of a pebble.”
The father stopped for a moment. He rubbed the toe of his hiking boot lightly across the rock. The girl wiggled a little, trying to find a smoother place to sit. It seemed like her father was coming to the end of the story. She wouldn’t admit to him, but she liked the way his stories found their way back to their beginnings, no matter how complicated they became along the way. This particular story was longer than usual. That was sometimes a problem with his stories. They just went on and on.
And on.
Her father took another deep breath, as she knew he would, and continued. “This time there was a difference, though. The pebbles were much heavier than sand, so they weren’t really carried by the river. They just rolled along the bottom, getting rounder and rounder, all the way. Because quartzite is so hard, the pure white pebbles made it all the way to the ocean without being ground into sand. They collected in a narrow band right near the shore. Once again, the burying process began, pushing the crystal back into the earth. Once again, a new rock was formed. This time it was not granite, or sandstone, or quartzite. It was made of millions of white pebbles cemented together into a thick layer of tough white stone. It is called quartzite pebble conglomerate. That little quartz crystal has been part of four different kinds of rock.
“Lots more time went by, and again the plates came together. This time, instead of crashing directly together, they met in a kind of sliding bump. They rubbed as they slipped past each other. Instead of raising a towering mountain range, the bump just tilted the layers of rock at an angle. That sideways pull ripped across the layers. It formed a giant crack along the direction of the glancing blow. The layer of hard white stone was pushed up in a twenty-mile-long straight line.”
As he spoke, he bent over and held his hands out at her eye level. His palms face downward, the fingers of each hand jammed together like little “rafts” made of four fingers each. His thumbs were hidden underneath his palms. He put his hands together, forming one “raft” that was eight fingers wide. He slid one hand along the other, his left pointer finger snug against his right. Just before his right hand passed his left, he shoved the right slightly under the left. This allowed the left to tilt a little, and slide up on top of the right. It formed a tilted step, just like the one he described.
“Of course, no one could see it because it was still deep inside the earth. This was ages ago. The dinosaurs had come and gone by then, but there were still no people on earth.
“Gradually, the white layer of stone worked its way to the surface again. The soft stone above it washed away in the winds and rains of millions of years.
“Then, only ten thousand years ago, a great sheet of ice moved down from Canada. Compared to the billion years that have passed since the quartz crystal first formed, this was just yesterday. Maybe the day before. Anyway, the ice was a mile thick. It pushed like a bulldozer, shoving loose materials in front of it. As it moved south, it picked up huge rocks and soil and gravel along the way. This made the ice act like giant sheet of sandpaper scraping everything underneath it. It dug all the soft rock from the front of the crack where the white stone had moved, deep in the earth.
“But the white rock was tough, too tough for the ice. It stood there, even under the weight of a mile of ice. It could not be scraped away. Finally, the ice melted, leaving a cliff of pure white stone. Where boulders rubbed along the top of the cliff, they carved grooves in the rock. Just like the ones you’re sitting on.”
“But…” she complained. She stopped and looked down at the rock. She looked up at her father in amazement. She could hardly believe that she had to sit there all afternoon, listening to his pointless story. Frustrated, she complained that “…all I wanted to know was why I couldn’t find a comfortable place to sit!”
“I know,” he replied with a grin, “the pain in your butt is that little quartz crystal.”
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He DOES like the sound of his own voice....
Clever ending -- but I don't think he was really talking to her at all.