HARD TRUTHS – The Telling Face of Rocks

This gray Keweenawan basalt, whose fifty-foot ramparts flank this stretch of the St. Croix River, is unfathomably old, dating from the Precambrian Eon, somewhere between 500 million and a billion years ago.

It is also the hardest basalt-type rock in America—so hard that boulders of it were used by NASA to test the drills employed on the moon probe.

And yet, these rocks are far from the static, silent objects they seem. There is movement here; those sinuous lines—visible only when the sun shines at just this angle—bring to the moment red-hot lava’s flow when life on earth consisted of little more than algae.

 There are distinctly human 
 utterances here.

VOICES OF TIME
These rocks speak volumes of a broad swath of history. Cracks and fissures recount epic battles between ice and stone, heat and cold, forces commanded by gravity. Lichens, some of their species nearly as old as the rocks themselves, bear testament to those ancient algae. For, in the face of otherwise untenable circumstances, only the subsumption of those algae by the lichen has enabled them to survive.

Near the cliff's base, the St. Croix’s natural scums and dissolved tannins have ranked water-level horizons on the rock face—a subtlety captured in just the last nanosecond of geologic time.

And, perhaps most compelling for their flesh-and-blood kinship with the likes of me, there are distinctly human utterances—portrayals of hands, a buffalo head and other symbols—likely made by Dakota or Ojibwe hunters nearly 1,000 years ago.
 

LAYERS OF IMAGINATION – A Geologic Mystery Unfolds

I’ve walked this route, just a few blocks from my home here in Minneapolis, countless times. I always find something new, beautiful, amazing. Today, it was this elegant stacking of rock layers, encountered as I scaled the path down some
70 or 80 feet to the base of the Mississippi River gorge.

Here in the upper reaches of the great river, the water has, over the last 12-14,000 years, incised the earth’s crust, laying bare strata of ancient sedimentary stone. How did these layers form? What was happening around here back then?

I’ve always believed such geologic records, like a tree’s rings or layers of glacier ice, bear chronological evidence of changing seasons and climate trends, floods, fires and volcanic events. So is that the case here with what I think I’ve identified as Platteville limestone?

Could that possibly explain the wide range of thickness in these layers—from five or six inches, to a phyllo-like eighth-inch, and back again? Was there really that much difference between the amount of sediment or water flow from one year (or whatever the cycle was) to the next?

          During this period the land that is 
          now Minnesota lay along the equator.

ROCKY NOTIONS OF TIME AND SPACE
In reading up on the subject, I’ve learned that, instead of looking at this in terms of yearly cycles, I should be thinking much, much longer-term. This Platteville limestone formed between 488 and 436 million years ago—a period of some fifty million years.

Hard as it is to comprehend, the land that is now Minnesota then lay along the equator. Tropical seas ebbed and flowed over the area in cycles spanning not years, decades or even centuries, but millions of years, depositing silt and the shells of marine organisms which, with time, pressure and chemical reactions, eventually turned to stone.*

So what is the answer to the wide variance in these layers’ thickness? It turns out that this is actual not all the same rock. According to geologists, the thick, topmost layers are indeed Platteville limestone, a chemically-affected, calcium-carbonate, sedimentary rock comprising mostly-pulverized marine fossil remains.

The much thinner middle-layer strata, seen about three-fourths of the way down my photo, are Glenwood shale, another sedimentary rock made up of much finer particles of mostly mineral-based mud.

Finally, the thickest layers—seen at the bottom of my photo—are St. Peter sandstone, a mix of mostly granular quartz and feldspar with a binder of silica- or calcite-based cement. **

ILLUSTRATION: United States Geological Survey

A BRIEF STROLL…IN PRIMORDIAL TIME
Some folks might ask me why I’d be interested in how rocks formed half a billion years ago. If you believe in your soul, as I do, that everything—animals, plants, microorganisms and, indeed, the earth—are connected, you might understand.

If you’re susceptible to awe—like the kind you might experience observing details of the moon’s surface through a powerful telescope, or getting close enough to touch the plate some passenger was eating from when the Titanic struck that iceberg—then you most certainly get it.

I thought I was going down to the river for a walk. I ended up witnessing—no, actually touching—something that happened hundreds of millions of years before human beings’ earliest ancestors existed. The awesomeness of that is still sinking in. To me, that was a good day.

* Paul Nelson, “Minnesota and Wisconsin’s Own Platteville Limestone Totally Rocks” - MinnPost, 8/30/16 
** geocaching.com
 

ART OF THE AGES – Lichen Painting on the St. Croix

The canvas: eons-old basalt. The medium: lichen, some of whose individual organisms may well have been here when the first European laid eyes on these cliffs. The artist: well…the Artist was here before there was a “here.”

It takes a moment of reflection to grasp the age of these rocks. They date from the Precambrian Eon, somewhere between 500 million and a billion years ago.

         The brushwork...looks wild and free 
         for work rendered so patiently.

This bluish-gray, Keweenawan altered basalt is the hardest basalt-type rock in America—so hard that boulders of it were used by NASA to test the drills employed on the moon probe. Since this type of basalt is found almost entirely on ocean floors, these terrestrial outcroppings in the Upper and Lower Dalles of the St. Croix River (which forms 169 miles of the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin), are considered quite rare, if not unique.

Some lichen species*, incredibly, are nearly as old as these rocks. First appearing on earth some 400 million years ago, they are here represented in at least five colors—including jet black. (Since there are hundreds of varieties documented along the St. Croix Valley, I won’t pretend to identify them.)

The brushwork—ranging from broad splashes, to wispy dry-brush, to seemingly random spots and drips—looks wild and free for work rendered so patiently. For that trick of time, for the composition of form and color and texture, the technique is breathtaking.

I am in awe.

* There are more than 10,000 species of lichen. They are composite, symbiotic organisms often comprising both a fungus and an alga. The former provides structure; the latter, sustenance, through photosynthesis. Most species grow less than a millimeter per year, and, given a durable substrate like this primordial basalt, can easily live for centuries.

BEST NIGHT OF MY LIFE – Boys Alone In the Wilderness

We were barely old enough to go out on dates. Gangly little brats still getting used to our hairy armpits and manly voices. Yet there we were about to embark on one of the greatest adventures of our lives.

I and a couple of my 15-year-old classmates had attended summer camps whose focus was on canoeing and camping. With that modest experience under our belts—and with our parents’ astonishing faith in our abilities and judgement—we planned and executed an eight-day canoe trip in northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). (They did require us to take an industrial-grade first aid class, learning how to deal with the kind of medical challenges most likely to come up on a trip like ours—think broken limbs, knife or hatchet wounds, hypothermia, etc.)

Back, l. to r.: Charlie McMillan, Gordon Brown, Jeff Willius. Front: John McMahon, Todd Otis, Rob Linsmayer

In fact, we were so young that our parents had to drive us the six hours north to our put-in point, and then come back for us a week and a day later. It was a little like having your parents drive you to a movie with a girlfriend, but somehow we knew that this girlfriend (the wilderness) would make it well worth the embarrassment.

I’ll never forget the mix of exultation and dread I felt as the six of us stood there at that landing, our two canoes and gear piled beside us, and watched those two sensible station wagons drive away.

   While the less-impulsive among us weighed the 
   risks and benefits of such an idea, the decision 
   was made.

ON A WISH AND A DARE
There were countless great moments during this, the first of many self-guided, self-outfitted BWCAW canoe trips I would take: lying down after supper on rocks still warm from the afternoon sun and smoking one of my ill-gotten Lucky Strikes; swimming in cold, crystal-clear Kekekabik Lake where we could see fish swimming among the rocks 15 feet below us; providing dinner for the whole crew with a huge pike I caught. But the greatest of the many tales told about this trip is that of our all-night paddle.

One late afternoon, we’d stopped paddling for the day at a wonderful campsite featuring one of the rocky BWCAW’s rare sand beaches. Before tackling the many chores of setting up camp, we took time to let off some steam, staging a mini-“Olympics” along the sandy stretch, with races, broad-jumping, shot-put, discus and javelin events.

I don’t remember whose idea it was, but someone pointed out that tomorrow’s leg of our route wouldn’t involve any portages—unusual in the BWCAW’s intricate web of waterways all interconnected by them. What if, he asked, instead of pitching camp that night, we just keep going? Besides the opportunity for portage-free cruising, another boy added, it promised to be a perfect night for paddling since it had been warm, clear and nearly calm all afternoon.

While the less-impulsive among us weighed the risks and benefits of such an idea, the decision was made.

We threw together an easy dinner from one of our pre-packaged bags of dehydrated ingredients. Over cups of cowboy coffee,* we played “Name That Jingle,” one of us humming or whistling one note at a time of a popular product jingle, and seeing who could guess the brand first.

     I got this strange and wonderful feeling, 
     like how a child might feel entering a deep, 
     dark forest alone, without a path.

By nine, after sunset, our exuberance had started to fade with what was left of daylight. In its place a quiet resolve settled over us. We washed our dinnerware and started loading up the canoes. I got this strange and wonderful feeling, like how a child might feel entering a deep, dark forest alone, without a path.

Flashlights in hand, we put our heads together over the map, once again reviewing our route and setting down a few rules—staying together, how to switch paddling positions, what to do if the weather changed. Finally, after drawing straws (actually sticks) for the two duffer positions,** we stepped in and shoved off into the darkness.

ABOVE ALL, WONDER
As we paddled off, still there was not a cloud in the sky, just a sea of stars and a half moon about to settle into the silhouetted tree line of the far shore.

Once the moon had set, it was is if someone turned up a rheostat on the stars. And the Milky Way—it shone as none of us had ever seen before, stretching across the vast blackness like a shimmering pathway for all those characters conjured in the stars by the Mesopotamians and Greeks 3,000 years ago.

And then, as if that weren’t enough to dazzle a bunch of hot-shot teenage boys, the Northern Lights came on. Like the broad strokes of a cosmic watercolorist, they splashed across the northern half of the night sky, the blues and greens running in vertical streaks before absorbing into the pitch-black canvas.

PHOTO: Jerry MagnuM Porsbjer

For nearly half an hour we drifted silently, spellbound by the incredible spectacle. I lay back onto the small stern deck of my canoe and soaked it all in. Never before, and never since, have I witnessed such a display of Aurora Borealis.

The next hour or so settled into the quiet rhythms of paddling. Dip… pull… feather… swing… dip… The liquid sounds, the mild exertion, the gentle surge and glide—all made for a fine meditation. For the rest of the night, as boys will, we told tall tales, sang camp songs, and challenged and ribbed each other at the slightest vulnerability. We also tried to scare the piss out of each other.

NIGHT HOWLS
I don’t know who started it, but word was that one of the FBI’s ten most-wanted fugitives*** had last been seen up here heading into the Boundary Waters. You know how it goes; we all contributed to the absurdity of the fabrication, yet not one of us, even as we upped the ante, could help but tune in to every sound, every shadow, in the deep woods along the shore.

It started getting cold. Those of us paddling managed to keep warm enough, but my buddy, Gordon, duffing just in front of me, had to wrangle his sleeping bag out of his pack and bundled up in the scant space between gunwales, thwarts and stowed gear. (The plan had been to rotate paddlers as the night went on, but, as it turned out, we never saw a place to safely pull into shore for the change.)

As the chill gradually penetrated, Gordon’s blissful snoring just five feet in front of me began to wear thin. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t that I envied his sleeping, all snug as a bug like that—I hate duffing, and was glad I hadn’t drawn the short stick—but that snoring...

By about five AM, shivering wracked my body. I put on all the clothes I could dig out of the nearest pack. I paddled harder, trying to keep my arms pressed to my sides to preserve my core body temperature the best I could. I put a fishing line out, hoping that fighting a fish might warm me up...or at least take my mind off of my misery. And still I shuddered. There was nothing for it but to wait for sunrise…and listen to Gordon.

For what seemed like hours we eyed the spreading glow in the eastern sky. A light fog forming over the relatively warm water, though beautiful, only seemed to deepen the chill. And then, finally, a spark of light ignited the treetops, then grew to a ball of fire. As the mist burned off we felt the full effect of the sun’s blessing percolate through our sweatshirts and reach our anxious, goose-bumped skin.

PHOTO: Chris Huber, Daily Republic

As if in celebration of the moment, the fishing rod I’d been trolling with suddenly bent over to the water. Barely able to feel the handle, I reeled in a gorgeous, two-pound smallmouth bass, its golden-bronze sides lit, as if from within, by that precious early sunlight.

I lifted my rod, swung it around and carefully lowered the dripping fish down right to the cacophonous opening of Gordon’s sleeping bag, where it flopped its wet, slimy way right in next to his head.

                                                      //---//---//---//

A Maryland couple has been charged with child neglect for allowing their ten- and six-year-olds to walk home alone from the neighborhood park.

I hold these memories all the dearer in a world, an era, in which human beings’ connections with Nature seem as endangered as the many rare species disappearing on our generation’s watch. In the six decades since my adventure, the circumference around home within which a child is allowed to roam freely, without parental control, has shrunk from miles, to blocks, to yards. Recently, a Maryland couple has been charged with child neglect for allowing their ten- and six-year-olds to walk home alone from the neighborhood park.

Rewind to 1960, an age when, in general, parents had a pretty good handle on raising kids right. And yet, when it came to the out-of-doors, they understood and valued the positive effects it had on children. They understood that, in light of all the benefits, the risks were relatively small. And today, as hard as the sensationalist media, the video game industry and a legal liability industry gone amok try to convince us otherwise, statistics say those risks (of injury, abduction, even getting lost) are no greater than they were back then. 

Now, all that being said, would I allow my own 15-year-old son or daughter to go on an eight-day, unguided canoe trip into the wilderness, some 300 miles from home and miles from any help? To be honest, I’m not sure.

But I’m immensely grateful for the faith our parents placed in me and my buddies. They trusted us, and they trusted in Nature not to throw more at us than we could handle. I only hope I was effusive enough in thanking them for this while they were alive.

                                                      //---//---//---//

* Cowboy coffee is made by just adding an approximate measure of ground coffee to a pot of boiling water, removing it from the heat, waiting until the grounds settle to the bottom, and then carefully pouring the finished brew so as not to disturb the grounds. Its enjoyment hinges on one’s appreciation of occasionally having to chew one’s coffee.

** Considering the optimal efficiency of portaging canoes and gear from lake to lake in one pass, the ideal numbers for a BWCAW canoe trip are two canoes and six paddlers—four of them paddling at any one time; the other two duffing (sitting in the bottom of the canoe along with the stowed gear).

*** Our point of reference at the time would have been someone like James O’Kasick, who, with his two brothers, had just dominated local news with their murderous exploits and partial demise at the hands of police after a dramatic manhunt. (Two of them were shot and killed by police; James tried to take his own life, but survived.)

AS IF FOR THE FIRST TIME – Sun

It was a very long winter here in southeastern Minnesota. It takes a certain kind
of internal strength—some might call it insanity—to weather those five months
of short, too-often-gray days. Now, spring’s crept in tentatively…and seems
reluctant to leave.

It seems like just a few weeks ago that it finally hit me, even if the air wouldn’t yet admit it, that we were finally out of the gray winter woods. That day, I brushed my arm against the black wrought iron frame of a bench I was sitting on and nearly burned myself.

You can see why, around here, we might take the sun less for granted than most.

Few of us have ever experienced more than 
a few days without the company of shadows.

CAN’T STUMP WONDERMAN
Like so many of Nature’s omnipresent wonders—like water, trees and air—even if it sometimes seems in short supply, the sun is still awfully easy to disregard. After all, few of us have ever experienced more than a few consecutive days without the company of shadows, not to mention natural warmth, light and all the sun’s other gifts. In fact, the sun’s so integral to life on earth, that its absence is utterly unthinkable.

That familiarity, no matter how we might try to fight it, breeds apathy. Like food
or water, unless we were to experience life without the sun, none of us can ever
fully appreciate its wonder. But hey, do you think that will keep this WonderMan from trying?

WHAT’S THAT STRANGE GLOW?
So how often do you think about the sun? Can you imagine how it might look and feel if you’d never experienced it before? If all the ambient warmth, light and plant-growing energy you’d ever felt had been somehow man-made?

It turns my skin darker, but has 
the opposite effect on my hair.

Here are just a few of the reflections I can imagine one might have on the wondrous novelty of natural sunlight, seen for the first time:

• How can anything so small—it takes up only about .0005 percent of the sky—be so bright, so warm, so all-enveloping?

• That tiny orb’s glow heats things it lands on, but not the air it passes through on the way. (Kind of like how your microwave heats your cocoa but not the mug.)

• When I face it with my eyes closed, it turns my eyelids into fiery orange lighting gels (a perfect background to show off my little, black, stringy eye floaters).

• It moves across the sky all day and then, apparently, sleeps somewhere at night.

• Just after turning in, its glow lasts a while, turning clouds amazing shades of pink and orange.
• It seems to do something to my plants that grow lights can’t—like they’re on steroids or something.

• It turns my skin darker, but has the opposite effect on my hair.
• The thing’s so powerful that if I let it shine on me for an hour it burns my skin.
• It uses the spaces between trees’ leaves like lenses, focusing its light into so many circular pools, like thousands of tiny spotlights.

Can you imagine experiencing natural sunlight for the very first time? Could you see it the way a five-year-old would? What observations might you have?

AWESOME, SCHMAWESOME – The Slow Death of Superlatives

Awe is the most transcendent of all human emotions. That makes it hard to talk or write about. After all, words are all we have, and they are so inadequate. That doesn't keep us from trying, though—sometimes, perhaps, a little too hard.

ILLUSTRATION: Katy Farina

HYPER-HYPE
For example, in my lifetime the word awe in all of its manifestations, as well as other terms used to describe profound emotion, have been rendered virtually powerless by their misuse and overuse. The media—especially the entertainment media (which now apparently includes journalism)—seem afraid that if they don’t out-awe the competition, they just won’t get noticed.

Awe, awful and awesome...roll off people’s tongues like so many watermelon seeds at a July picnic.

And it’s rubbed off on everyone; just listen to how people talk. Awe, awful and awesome, not to mention ambitious words like disaster, horrific, unbelievable, extreme or mega-fill-in-the-blank, roll off people’s tongues like so many watermelon seeds at a July picnic.

CALL THE AWE POLICE
My children’s generation managed to attach awesome to everything from Nikes to Napster, rendering that word, in particular, powerless to describe much of anything that’s truly important. Come on now, if everything’s awesome, then nothing is.

So how do we describe something that really is rare and awesome—or unspeakably bad—when the words we once reserved for such occasions have gotten so threadbare?

I suppose we could try to restore those words to their long-lost potency. Under threat of arrest, we’d reserve them for describing—or should I say trying to describe—only things that really matter. Like an experience (good or bad) we can never fully understand, and which truly humbles us. Short of that, very, very little of what most of us are or do or see qualifies as either "awful" or "awesome."

Wouldn’t the truest, most articulate expression of an emotion this powerful be utter speechlessness?

THE ELOQUENCE OF SILENCE

The other solution, one that makes more sense to me, would be to just accept the fact that some words, especially those derived from awe, have simply become too frivolous to be used or believed any more. After all, wouldn’t the truest, most articulate expression of an emotion this powerful be utter speechlessness?

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." ~ ALBERT EINSTEIN

EAGLE EYES – A Conversation of Spirit

A flurry of enormous wings, black between splashes of pure white, gathers atop a tall dead tree trunk.

A hundred yards ahead, the bald eagle has already spotted me working my canoe slowly upstream toward him in the narrow slough. Is it the same wary one I've been spotting in here all summer? The one that flees each time I round a bend, only to spurn me again 'round the next and the next?

Oh my, a silent voice wells up from my ancient spirit, You beautiful creature! This time, please don't be afraid. This time, let me share a moment of wonder with you.

I paddle silently against the high-water current, gaining a foot or two with each careful stroke. My intentions, as well as my eyes, are fixed on the bird. I know you see me, I breathe. Don't be afraid; I won't harm you, my noble friend.

  At the very moment my emotions overflow in 
  tears the bird turns his snowy head and looks 
  down knowingly into my awestruck eyes.

Soon, I'm passing the spot where the roots of his pedestal grasp the grassy bank. Concerned now with being too close, I've averted my eyes and kept to the far side of the channel. Still, I repeat my mantra. You are safe with me. All I want is to admire you, celebrate with you the splendid freedom we share.

When I've gone a ways past the eagle, I turn my bow out into the main current, crossing the narrow stream and drifting right toward his perch.

Again I'm staring at him, having to look nearly straight up now. He's looking around. Do you still notice me, or have you spotted something more interesting to an eagle than I? Do you share even a hint of the fascination I feel?

Directly under the magnificent bird now—maybe 30 feet away—my heart swells with a sense of privilege, gratitude for the knowing acceptance this splendid wild being has shown me. Emotion moves up through my throat, and at the very moment it overflows in tears the bird turns his snowy head and looks down knowingly into my awestruck eyes.

The eagle turns his head and looks right down at me.

NOTE: I repeated this little dance with my eagle friend twice more. Somehow I knew trying to take a picture would break the spell, but I couldn't help myself. Allowing me just this one quick shot, he let me know I'd been right and, with that breathtaking air-buffeting sound only big, powerful wings make, he was off.