WASHINGTON ROADTRIP / ONLY TWO CDs

A plaintive yodel emerges from static on the radio as my car crests another hill. I think it could be Hank Williams and marvel that a human voice in a scratchy recording can cross time, defy death, and thereby interact with the living. I snatch snippets of song from the static like moments of sunlight streaming through the dappled shade of an immense oak. The road descends into a valley and the static roars and the strident condemnation of some holy faker (adopting the cadences of a Martin Luther King speech) overwhelms simple beauty with bankrupt religiosity (apparently content doesn’t matter as long as it’s punctuated with plenty of ‘Jesuses).

I punch the console and switch to one of only two CDs I find in the newspaper, maps and camping miscellaneously slowly growing in the unoccupied passenger seat. Regina Spektor sings:
“He stumbled into faith and thought,
‘God, this is all there is?’”



This lyric out of context launches a cascade of fledgling responses.

He stumbled into a scientific world view and thought, the world is full of mysteries, and we can’t even adequately define life…time to think of an experiment.

Or

Later that night after parking at Palouse State Park, I set out the sleeping bag in the bed of my pickup and lay there looking up at a shockingly incandescent Milky Way (there being no nearby hub of light pollution). It’s just a portion of an arm of our own spiral galaxy in a universe of such galaxies and overwhelmed, I quietly asked, ‘God, this is all there is?’ and enjoyed the irony of it and fell asleep smiling for a change.




Some time ago, I went to a lecture/presentation at the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center (in The Dalles) that dealt with Ice Age Floods. It gave Bruce Bjornstad, author of On the Trail of the ICE AGE FLOODS, a promising venue to peddle his book. Evidently, back at the end of the last Ice Age, when huge prehistoric ice beavers roamed the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, substantial glacial lakes formed behind their poorly engineered ice dams. When the dams failed, walls of water so tall that you’d think Mr. Bjornstad was just making crap up would rush across Washington and carve unique river canyons along tectonic faults in the layered basalts of the Mid-Columbia Basin. Palouse Falls and its canyon are said to be artifacts of this dynamic process.

Plumber’s Crack National Monument
(An example of a fault)

You’d think a story like that would draw big crowds of voluptuous geology coeds but most of the people at the lecture were evidently on some field trip from an old folk’s home and were under the mistaken impression that they had entered the cafeteria. When Mr. Bjornstad opened the floor for discussion, the first question he got was from a cranky old man who demanded to know why the chairs had been rearranged. That spurred a little bewildered blue haired lady, craning her head up and down to peer through massive bifocals, to ask where the tables had gone, what were they to do with their plates when they got them, and speaking of plates, when were they going to be served.




Ice dams failed so often and so completely that the prehistoric beavers who depended on them eventually became extinct. Even so, gnawed basalt sculptures stand in mute testimony to the giant rodent’s resilient front teeth.

Hikers in the Columbia Gorge are often coddled by trails that have about as much to do with getting in touch with the wilderness as does an amusement park ride for very stupid children.

This is not so much the case in Podunk Washington where ill defined trail systems tend to weed out outdoorsmen who can’t tell the difference between an established path and a marmot trail.

Following a marmot trail back around a ridge to the top of the falls, I found myself in a zigzag canyon that tended to support the idea that opportunistic descending water long ago took advantage of faults and other weaknesses in stacked basalt layers to pursue a path of least resistance.

Still, if something half of the size of Lake Michigan scoured out this landscape as it poured to the ocean in a cataclysmic flood, the scarred cliffs have since been busy methodically hiding the evidence by tossing down rocks now and then to soften the harsh edges.

This I imagine is part of god’s great plan to lure evolving hominids back into proximity of life sustaining water and fertile valleys where new cities and cultures can take root and grow up for the next great cycle of apocalypses.

Regina Spektor lyrics arc from synapse to synapse,
“God can be funny… … when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini

Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus"

“…God can be so hilarious”

Regina Spektor

“The pictures in his mind arose

And began to breathe

And all the gods and all the worlds

Began colliding on a backdrop of blue…”

Regina Spektor

Today, we sit atop windblown dunes of silt and dust and clay (loess) that with a little prodding have become some of the most productive agricultural lands the world has ever seen.

This also is the fruit of the last Ice Age, when the glaciers descended from the north, chewing and regurgitating the mountains in their paths – tenderizing stone.

…processing the layers of lava and crust laid down from the beginning…

…so that in an instant of time - a blink in the history of a universe - life dances across the surface of a rock hurtling through the vastness of space...

I stumbled into Washtucna seeing miracles in every direction.

Stars collapse and explode, comets slam into Jupiter and whiz past our orbit, volcanoes detonate, the earth quakes and folds…

… floods periodically scour the land…

…the pattern of decomposition is written in the crystals of formation…

…and the first replicator’s imperative to multiply and be fruitful is passed on in an unbroken line, encoded and kept safe in the heart of every living cell.

GEOLOGIC TIME

Driving east of Pasco

A cold wind blows – buffets the car like a boxer - seemingly inhospitable

Migrating bushes recklessly play chicken with cars – end up as grill decorations - gather together at barbed wire fences - share tales of their exploits



The land ripples and undulates as if it were water




Postulate God.
Does God watch the continents flow like we watch streams in the sand?

Second-hand topsoil – courtesy of Montana? Silt and dust blown across half a continent and some significant portion of an epoch

Palouse Falls State Park - Washington

Mindlessly following gravity’s imperative, water probes faults and chips away at basalt barriers. On one hand friendly and supportive of life, water is three faced and fickle and remains god’s tool of choice for wiping the earth clean of humanity – though fire is certainly in the running.






Magnificent floods spawned by an ice-age lake helped scour out this canyon to reveal early flows of lava – rivers of once molten rock that stretch all the way to the ocean.

Uncle Jon – Geologist - somewhere in West Texas

(Click image for somewhat larger view)

What could I see with a geologist’s eyes?

The telltale signs of a fortune in oil?

(Click image for somewhat larger view)

...a landscape from the Cretaceous?

(Click image for somewhat larger view)

...a resting place for creatures from the Oligocence?

We walk on top of many lost worlds, where life multiplied and thrived and was wiped away…

…almost.

(Click image for somewhat larger view)

Any Garden of Eden must be a temporary illusion – a window in time – a delicate balance of environmental factors that may cradle life, but could never support the excesses of a species.

Clone Tree Farm on the way back to Portland

Giants steal power from the river…

…and carry it away beyond the horizon.

We reach to catch the invisible currents flowing in the sky.

(Click image for somewhat larger view)

Racing westward on the freeway, the car hums.

“This has all happened before…and it will happen again.”

-Cylon hybrid-

These leaves that unfurl to greet the spring…

…are only just beginning to realize…

…they’ve been screwed by a beaver.

Speaking of geologists....this is my uncle Jon's book. I was privileged to accompany Jon on a fossil survey of sorts in West Texas back in 2004. I wrote a review of the book once, but I don't think Jon liked it very much. But the book is good and my review was heartfelt and so I'm reprinting it here.

Adventures in the Bone Trade:

The Race to Discover our Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression.

Adventures in the Bone Trade does the same thing for science that a stint on a church council does for one’s appreciation of organized religion. Namely, it reveals how our greatest accomplishments all rest on an unlikely scaffolding of both our best and our worst character traits.

This book is a curious mixture of Mr. Kalb’s expertise in geology/paleontology, and his amazing experiences in Ethiopia. But most striking of all is his self-deprecating honesty. He tells his stories by laying out events as matter-of-factly as he can, and then lets the reader make the judgment calls. If one must vicariously experience the drama that occurred in the Afar depression – become a vicarious-experience-parasite in other words - one could do a lot worse than use Mr. Kalb as a host.

The best thing about this ‘science’ book is getting a first-hand glimpse of scientists and what it is they do in-between those periodic headlines in the daily newspaper. It is one thing to read a scientific textbook filled with facts and theories. It is another thing entirely to watch scientists drink out of a baboon’s toilet.

Ideally, somewhere, paleontologists all work together as brothers and sisters, speaking the international scientific language and cooperatively advancing truth and knowledge…but not on this planet. Adventures in the Bone Trade reveals some of the dirty tricks that can be used to secure both grant money and prime fossil-rich real estate. Sadly, Mr. Kalb seems none to proficient at underhanded dealing (although one probably wouldn’t want to lend him one’s mosquito netting) and ultimately, his dreams must suffer for it.
The next time some kook walks up to you and says something like, “I successfully initiated cold fusion in this glass of water, but the keepers of the established scientific paradigm are engaged in a vast conspiracy to cover up my discovery.” Tell him to piss off. Because after reading Adventures in the Bone Trade, you’ll realize that the greatest prize in science is finding something new.

I'd put a link to Jon's Website here, if he had one. The book is still available at Amazon.