29 May 2003

Sedimentary Layers

I took a class in Geology back in college. It was a hard science requirement imposed on the lit students that I had to kill and it looked like an interesting way to do it. I was impressed by the atomic numbers of the elements, and looking through the microscope at thinly shaved pieces of rock stained to show the fundamental structure was cool. It was a neat course, and of all my education is still one that I remember well. The part I remember best though was the when they told us how to read the rocks. It literally blew me away, the realization that the earth we lived on is as fluid as toothpaste. The living rock is just that- it melts and folds and hardens in bands as though it had life.

I read in fascination about the process. The basic tenet of the discipline is simple. What is old is on the bottom, and what is new on the top. That is the unifying field theory, anyway, and there is an art to finding out where the old rock is. Sometimes the earth has moved, the material heated and become molten, flowing, and been folded and twisted like caramel candy. Then the wild swirls have been eroded and sunk beneath a primordial sea with organic deposits in neat and predicable bands, hardening over the eons and then exposed by a road-cut or a sea shore or some dramatic riverine erosion. That is the art of stratigraphy, to be able to read the swirls of ancient history, rework the catastrophic change and conjure in the minds eye the history of an earth so far beyond the human time that the epochs become palpable.

I loved it the course. The folds in metamorphosed rock can sometimes hold pockets of valuable former dinosaurs in the form of crude oil or natural gas. Salt domes of ancient seas can provide the needs of modern society, if you can find them. So aside from the elegance of the science, there was real money associated with being able to read and predict the strata of the rock- they call the field "stratigraphy." I sometimes wished, as the protests against the Vietnam War raged around us, that things were a little calmer and there was more time for contemplation. Maybe that was a path I could have walked down and wound up somewhere else altogether.

I recall the field trip we had to take one weekend in 1969. There was a course requirement to conduct an actual hands-on examination of a site. It was a football Saturday in Ann Arbor, a home game, no less, and still we boarded buses to drive to Canada. We took the Blue Water Bridge crossing at Sarnia to visit a place called Arcona, on the East shore of Lake Huron. We were to look at Silurian Epoch formations and study the revealed stratigraphy and paleobiology of the Niagara escarpment as revealed in that part of Ontario. It took the majority of the day, causing me to miss my only home game of the year. Missouri whipped us 40-17, but those were the days when only 63,000 fans showed up at the Big House and on the whole it I considered the day well traded.

On the shore of the lake was revealed the bands of soft crumbling back shale that once had been the seabed of a Silurian sea. Millions of years crumbled in our hands, and from the dark flakes came fossils that had once been something like our modern sea-cucmbers, simple animals without a care or enemy in the world. They told a mute story that was so evocative of an ancient world that it made the time pass swiftly. I kept some in my backpack and they traveled with me for years before time and travel made me shed them, as it does all things in the end. Our time is brief in this world, filled with sound and fury of course, but not even a nanosecond in the course of the world, not even a mote of dust to be deposited on the strata of time. We slept on the bus coming back.

I was considering that long-ago trip last Friday. It was raining, of course, since it has done nothing but rain here for a month. The drought is long gone, the water table coming back up and washing rich soil away to be deposited someplace where it might, over time, harden. I was looking in the trunk of my car, which I had to empty in order to load it for travel. I had been avoiding this for a long time. I used the trunk as a sort of suitcase as I moved from place to place in the city. After the separation from my ex I literally lived out of the car, never staying any one place longer than a few days. Then I had a small efficiency apartment and lost the lease after a year and had to move again. The convertible has an abbreviated storage area in the rear in order to accommodate the accordion folds of the roof. It is a known deficiency to all rag-tops, and my deficiency was filled with layers of debris from the moves. The lack of space was something all convertible owners accept in exchange for the pleasure of putting the top down and having the wind blow through your hair.

There had not been much wind-in-the-hair lately, not with the rain or the long cold soupy winter filled with liquefied salt and snow that preceded it.

My current apartment is so small that I sometimes think I have to go out in the hall to change my mind. I keep the golf clubs in the trunk. It is handy that way, just in case the opportunity arises to play hooky and smack the ball around. But the trunk being so small, the bag and the pull-cart I have to use since my knees went south take up just about every available space. But there was other stuff in there, and I had to haul it out just as if I was mining a precious resource. I unfolded the cart, an elegant contraption with a third wheel to make it easier to pull. I put the bag on it and found the rolling luggage rack I use to pull boxes to and fro from the building.

Under the rack were five or six three-ring binders that contained stories. I looked at them, trying to remember what office they had been in and why they wound up in the car. They might have been in the Pentagon, before the attack, or they might have been at Langley when I worked at the Company. In any case, they wound up here in two layers. The upper layer was from no more than 90 days ago, I estimated, when the great replacement of the modular furniture caused us to box all our belongings, and then me to un-box it to fit in the trunk, layering it. There was strata of detritus composed of a thin layer of the little blue wallet pads from the Day Timer Corporation. There were dozens of them, little wire-bound books intended to fit in the wallet alongside a little pencil. They permit you to compose tiny memoranda or copy notes and phone numbers for follow-up action. The covers had a dizzying spectrum of months, years worth of them. I opened one at random to see what I might have considered important in February of 1998. There were some cryptic notes about who was on a promotion board, and a diatribe I must have composed in a particularly boring meeting about women and fate.

Below this layer was a framed picture with the image of the Pentagon captured in a rearview mirror, a prized possession for anyone who ever worked in the building and successfully escaped. I was surprised that the glass had not shattered. Then there were some roller blades that dated to before my knee surgery, and a tennis racket and some winter clothes in case the car went off the road from at least two years ago and some unopened lotions and potions I had apparently purchased to maintain that new-car look and feel and never used.

At the very bottom were two magazines, pristine, that dated to 2001, before the world turned itself inside out. One had a feature article on Saddam Hussein, and I vaguely remembered that I wanted to have something to read in the car in case I arrived at an appointment a half hour early. How were magazines from 2001 layered below wire-bound notebooks from 1998? Old is always below new, any stratigrapher can tell you that.

There must have been a massive upthrust in the earth's crust, I thought. That was the only answer. A huge tectonic shift had occurred, mighty pressures moving stable layers, bending them upon one another and twisting them into something new and startlingly unlike what had lain stable for so long. I pondered that as the rain intensified and I realized I needed to get the clubs and binders back into the building if I was to keep them from becoming sodden. I considered the issue, wondering if I should just skip the middleman and let them be pressed into a layer in a dump somewhere.

In the end I wheeled them into the building, pushing a cart with each hand. Then I took the freight elevator five layers up and piled them in a corner on top of some magazines from some other time.