August 25
Okanogan National Forest, northern Washington, the windward side of the Cascade Range. A high latitude rain forest at low elevation. Mosses and ferns covering the forest floor. Rotting logs suspended a few feet off the ground by the remnants of their trunks, absorbing the rainwater dripping from the conifers above until they collapse to the forest floor under their own weight. Streams flowed throughout the forest, flowing over rocks of all types – Eocene granite, Cretaceous sandstone, gneiss from ancient seafloors and basalt from archipelagos that smashed into western North America 40 to 100 million years ago. Up higher, elevation thinned the trees and eliminated the ferns. The alpine and Douglas firs shrank and clumped together as they neared the timberline, then stopped altogether. Shrubs and grasses didn’t climb much further. Above the greenline foot-wide streams, white in their fervor, pounded down from hanging glaciers and a pulver of snow lay over the austere rock between glaciers like powdered sugar over French toast. White clouds blew through the mountaintops, enveloping them and then leaving again.
Fifty miles east, in the rain shadow of the Cascades, grasses and sagebrush have replaced the mosses and ferns. Pines have replaced Douglas Firs, coulees have supplanted creeks and farmers irrigate their fields. The clouds have rifted for the first time since I arrived in Washington, and the stars out tonight that can compete with the moon glitter all the more brightly for their sabbatical. In the moonlight Squatter and I cast shadows.
Below us runs Douglas Creek, a rare perennial creek in this country. From where I sit Douglas Creek has incised its way through about 500 feet of rock to reach its current level. Now it runs through a soft rock – a sandstone, I think – and has sculpted a watercourse more imaginative than that of most commercial water parks. It plunges down parallel slides into deep pools, where it rests and breathes, lurking above a luge course of its own creation. Small trees grow on its banks, reeds bob in its current. Bubbles make circles on the surface. Then it dives. Douglas Creek twists and pivots, pounding and spraying, gouging cavities as large as grizzly bears in the stone that strains to contain it before splashing again into another pool where it swirls, pauses, pontificates. Then it rushes again, this time a straighter course, straight into what ought to be its bank and the creek carves out a room, a cave, this one big enough for two families of grizzlies. Inside the cave water laps against the shore, peaceful but persistent, calm. Above it bats fly in jerky circles, pursuing the latest insect hatch. And then the creek is gone, darting out of the cave on its way to the Columbia River along the path it has been carving for thousands of years.
Curious to know what it has carved through, I take my hammer from its loop and pound the rock that forms the creekbed. The rock is light brown and gritty. I have read that siltstone tastes creamy and sandstone is chewy, so I put some of the rock in my mouth and chew. Gritty to me. But I can’t imagine a rock I’d find “creamy.” Maybe that’s a method useful only for geologists, whose teeth are more accustomed to grinding stones. I pound out some more rock, pocket my sample and climb up the bank to a layer of dark gray-brown rock. The layer extends from the lowest point I can see, where the loose gravel meets the 500 foot cliff wall, and then up about eight feet. Erosion has sliced vertical scallops out of the rock, and the rock shows a tendency to fracture along those scallops. It fractures in six to eight foot lengths in such a way that if you were to view the severed piece from overhead it would appear as a lozenge with the corners rounded off. I whack it with my hammer. It sounds almost like a normal rock, and at first I don’t notice the difference. I do notice that this rock is tough. I have to whack it several more times before a piece the size of my head falls off. Fortunately the cliff does not tumble on top of me. I carry the piece I’ve secured – which is unexpectedly heavy – to a horizontal rock I can use as a workbench, then I hit it again. In its reduced size, the rock reverberates. It sounds like metal striking metal. I hit it once more. It sounds like a swordfight in the movies. With glee I hoist the hammer and hit the rock harder. More swordfighting. Sounds of a pirate battle resound in Douglas Creek’s canyon. Clang, clang, clang! Clang clang! At length I overcome my preoccupation with making sword noises and secure a sample small enough to fit in my pocket.
I don’t have to beat the hell out of the next layer to identify it. It is basalt, dark and porous, having pooched out in bulging lobes that look like pillows but feel different if you lay your head on them. I have taken a sample of this same rock earlier and looked it up in my rocks and minerals book. Basalt. That makes sense. Basalt is typically a marine rock, the primary constituent of seafloors. Much of this area – central Washington – was once seafloor, and was sutured on to the continent 40 to 100 million years ago like I mentioned in the last entry. Why it rode up onto the continent instead of subducting I don’t know, and I’m not sure geologists know either. But without these chunks Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase would have been a comparatively piddling acquisition. The North American coast once ended in Wyoming. Not all of the land that lies west of Wyoming today was added in this haphazard gluing manner – some was part of a shallow sea in the early Mesozoic, around 200 million years ago – but chunks of sutured-on land did make it as far east as central Wyoming. And such chunks do compose most of Washington. They pounded on North America with enough force, in fact, to create the Cascades.
Back at the top of the cliff and hot from the climb, I lay out my newest rock collection and open Rocks and Minerals. A southern breeze coming off the sage ruffles the pages. I open to the sedimentary section, hoping for something that resembles what I found in the streambed. I flip through, eyeing the pictures. The breeze smells good and feels better. But I can’t find anything in the book. “Sandstone” isn’t even in the index. Rocks and Minerals must only list fancier rocks. Traditional geologic rock names have become outmoded in some ways because discoveries made by peering through electromagniscopes have revealed distinctions too fine to be described by coarse words like “granite” or “sandstone.” Proper rock identification will require more education.
So I flip to the “Introduction to Rocks” and start reading. Darkness falls, and I switch on my lantern. I am pleased to learn that rocks rich in iron – like the one I was swordfighting with – are often of marine origin. This fits with what I already know. I keep reading. I read until 8:53 when the first coyote howls.
His howl is half throat and half violin, at once meticulously musical and crudely primal. It carries across the sage alone until it is echoed by another coyote on the other side of Douglas Creek, and then another far to the south. I have seen no game at all on this side of the Cascades, but the coyotes will find it. They will find game and chase it, chase it in a pack if necessary until the prey slows with fatigue and can run no more. Then the coyotes will immobilize it, its wide fearful eyes pinned against the dirt, and then the intestines will steam in the moonlight as the coyotes tear them from the paunch, maybe before the animal is dead. That is their way. Blood on their snouts, they will snap and growl at one another. They know not mercy and they know not malice. Like dashing streams and eastbound seafloors, they are part of a world in which actions and reactions are steady and inexorable, in which the transient concerns of ephemeral Homo sapiens sapiens hold no more sway than did those of trilobites.
Fifty miles east, in the rain shadow of the Cascades, grasses and sagebrush have replaced the mosses and ferns. Pines have replaced Douglas Firs, coulees have supplanted creeks and farmers irrigate their fields. The clouds have rifted for the first time since I arrived in Washington, and the stars out tonight that can compete with the moon glitter all the more brightly for their sabbatical. In the moonlight Squatter and I cast shadows.
Below us runs Douglas Creek, a rare perennial creek in this country. From where I sit Douglas Creek has incised its way through about 500 feet of rock to reach its current level. Now it runs through a soft rock – a sandstone, I think – and has sculpted a watercourse more imaginative than that of most commercial water parks. It plunges down parallel slides into deep pools, where it rests and breathes, lurking above a luge course of its own creation. Small trees grow on its banks, reeds bob in its current. Bubbles make circles on the surface. Then it dives. Douglas Creek twists and pivots, pounding and spraying, gouging cavities as large as grizzly bears in the stone that strains to contain it before splashing again into another pool where it swirls, pauses, pontificates. Then it rushes again, this time a straighter course, straight into what ought to be its bank and the creek carves out a room, a cave, this one big enough for two families of grizzlies. Inside the cave water laps against the shore, peaceful but persistent, calm. Above it bats fly in jerky circles, pursuing the latest insect hatch. And then the creek is gone, darting out of the cave on its way to the Columbia River along the path it has been carving for thousands of years.
Curious to know what it has carved through, I take my hammer from its loop and pound the rock that forms the creekbed. The rock is light brown and gritty. I have read that siltstone tastes creamy and sandstone is chewy, so I put some of the rock in my mouth and chew. Gritty to me. But I can’t imagine a rock I’d find “creamy.” Maybe that’s a method useful only for geologists, whose teeth are more accustomed to grinding stones. I pound out some more rock, pocket my sample and climb up the bank to a layer of dark gray-brown rock. The layer extends from the lowest point I can see, where the loose gravel meets the 500 foot cliff wall, and then up about eight feet. Erosion has sliced vertical scallops out of the rock, and the rock shows a tendency to fracture along those scallops. It fractures in six to eight foot lengths in such a way that if you were to view the severed piece from overhead it would appear as a lozenge with the corners rounded off. I whack it with my hammer. It sounds almost like a normal rock, and at first I don’t notice the difference. I do notice that this rock is tough. I have to whack it several more times before a piece the size of my head falls off. Fortunately the cliff does not tumble on top of me. I carry the piece I’ve secured – which is unexpectedly heavy – to a horizontal rock I can use as a workbench, then I hit it again. In its reduced size, the rock reverberates. It sounds like metal striking metal. I hit it once more. It sounds like a swordfight in the movies. With glee I hoist the hammer and hit the rock harder. More swordfighting. Sounds of a pirate battle resound in Douglas Creek’s canyon. Clang, clang, clang! Clang clang! At length I overcome my preoccupation with making sword noises and secure a sample small enough to fit in my pocket.
I don’t have to beat the hell out of the next layer to identify it. It is basalt, dark and porous, having pooched out in bulging lobes that look like pillows but feel different if you lay your head on them. I have taken a sample of this same rock earlier and looked it up in my rocks and minerals book. Basalt. That makes sense. Basalt is typically a marine rock, the primary constituent of seafloors. Much of this area – central Washington – was once seafloor, and was sutured on to the continent 40 to 100 million years ago like I mentioned in the last entry. Why it rode up onto the continent instead of subducting I don’t know, and I’m not sure geologists know either. But without these chunks Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase would have been a comparatively piddling acquisition. The North American coast once ended in Wyoming. Not all of the land that lies west of Wyoming today was added in this haphazard gluing manner – some was part of a shallow sea in the early Mesozoic, around 200 million years ago – but chunks of sutured-on land did make it as far east as central Wyoming. And such chunks do compose most of Washington. They pounded on North America with enough force, in fact, to create the Cascades.
Back at the top of the cliff and hot from the climb, I lay out my newest rock collection and open Rocks and Minerals. A southern breeze coming off the sage ruffles the pages. I open to the sedimentary section, hoping for something that resembles what I found in the streambed. I flip through, eyeing the pictures. The breeze smells good and feels better. But I can’t find anything in the book. “Sandstone” isn’t even in the index. Rocks and Minerals must only list fancier rocks. Traditional geologic rock names have become outmoded in some ways because discoveries made by peering through electromagniscopes have revealed distinctions too fine to be described by coarse words like “granite” or “sandstone.” Proper rock identification will require more education.
So I flip to the “Introduction to Rocks” and start reading. Darkness falls, and I switch on my lantern. I am pleased to learn that rocks rich in iron – like the one I was swordfighting with – are often of marine origin. This fits with what I already know. I keep reading. I read until 8:53 when the first coyote howls.
His howl is half throat and half violin, at once meticulously musical and crudely primal. It carries across the sage alone until it is echoed by another coyote on the other side of Douglas Creek, and then another far to the south. I have seen no game at all on this side of the Cascades, but the coyotes will find it. They will find game and chase it, chase it in a pack if necessary until the prey slows with fatigue and can run no more. Then the coyotes will immobilize it, its wide fearful eyes pinned against the dirt, and then the intestines will steam in the moonlight as the coyotes tear them from the paunch, maybe before the animal is dead. That is their way. Blood on their snouts, they will snap and growl at one another. They know not mercy and they know not malice. Like dashing streams and eastbound seafloors, they are part of a world in which actions and reactions are steady and inexorable, in which the transient concerns of ephemeral Homo sapiens sapiens hold no more sway than did those of trilobites.
posted by Jeb Butler at 10:13 AM
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