jumping mountains
Posted: June 15th, 2011, 5:41 pm
“Jumping Rock” (18)
Mountains jump in Nevada. Literally. They lie still for millennia, build up stress and jump up in one terrible instant on faults between mountain and valley. So you're on a campstool one evening, medicinal chalice at hand, counting ravens or clouds, or mighty corrugations rising, scribbling a disposable manifesto under the influence of silent immense. And then, a sudden rumble of deep energy, a booming locomotive along the base, as the base unzips at shocking velocity down basin and fissures spread closer, spill your drink. In 1915 a sixteen foot gap opened in the sagebrush between Tobin Range and Pleasant Valley in Nevada for more than twenty miles. Not epic as these things go, though plenty fearsome as one might expect in a random hundred-year window on rock time.
Mountains in Nevada have jumped for eight million years. Mere toddlers. Not even a credible foothill on the leading faults; the scarps are too fresh, though savagely beaten. The crust here is a series of behemoths tilting at deep fractures, agitating on white-hot mantle below, the rock engine, which boils up in the cracks and margins, the evil cauldron-springs, and the whole thing is pushing up. Mountains rise about as fast as wind and rain dismantle them, an inch per century. So Tobin Range gained about twenty thousand years when it spilled your drink.
But those are absurd numbers, the type geologists might rattle off, and geologists have no clue about time, tossing out exponential figures mainly to render us a blip on their charts . . . A hundred years of insanity. Six thousand of history. Two hundred thousand of prehistory. Eight thousand thousand year old toddler mountains. And sometimes deeper eons emerge in these rock events . . . as far back as five hundred fifty thousand thousand years, the oldest known rock surface, and yet far short of earth's four and a half billion (four thousand five hundred thousand thousand) years. When Oquirrh Range jumped it lifted remains of sixty million year old "ancestral" mountains. So they say. No time timidity among rock tappers.
And space presents more exponential madness . . . you, a speck on a great sweep of sagebrush, itself a fleck on rock circling a star, itself a speck on the span to that star, itself a particle of space to the next nearest star, itself a particle of galaxy, in turn a particle of near cosmos, in turn a particle of far universe, and all less than a particle of infinity as you zoom out. And what's beyond it all? But that's an old brain tweak from way back, of a trickster sort; don't take space so literally. Odd how you coexist with infinity, similar to how "that which cannot be divided further" coexists with the infinity of you. Or so you imagine. Jeez, not again, oldest Zen trick in the book, everything and nothing from a point on both.
Farther south mountains don’t jump but sink into their own waste, weather down closer to eye level, playful, deadly roundscapes poked by peculiar nubs. And washes drop further into depths of strata, hard passages where the dregs collect and fry, a wasteland where rogue men with wild eyes received the word and railed against idolatry, foretold of cities in ruins, of desolate altars, of dead land and dust and a coming oasis, a river in a dry place, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, in a place where where mountains come to die, naturally. You expect to unearth wisdom in the strata; mostly it is solid rock being wasted.
Mountains jump in Nevada. Literally. They lie still for millennia, build up stress and jump up in one terrible instant on faults between mountain and valley. So you're on a campstool one evening, medicinal chalice at hand, counting ravens or clouds, or mighty corrugations rising, scribbling a disposable manifesto under the influence of silent immense. And then, a sudden rumble of deep energy, a booming locomotive along the base, as the base unzips at shocking velocity down basin and fissures spread closer, spill your drink. In 1915 a sixteen foot gap opened in the sagebrush between Tobin Range and Pleasant Valley in Nevada for more than twenty miles. Not epic as these things go, though plenty fearsome as one might expect in a random hundred-year window on rock time.
Mountains in Nevada have jumped for eight million years. Mere toddlers. Not even a credible foothill on the leading faults; the scarps are too fresh, though savagely beaten. The crust here is a series of behemoths tilting at deep fractures, agitating on white-hot mantle below, the rock engine, which boils up in the cracks and margins, the evil cauldron-springs, and the whole thing is pushing up. Mountains rise about as fast as wind and rain dismantle them, an inch per century. So Tobin Range gained about twenty thousand years when it spilled your drink.
But those are absurd numbers, the type geologists might rattle off, and geologists have no clue about time, tossing out exponential figures mainly to render us a blip on their charts . . . A hundred years of insanity. Six thousand of history. Two hundred thousand of prehistory. Eight thousand thousand year old toddler mountains. And sometimes deeper eons emerge in these rock events . . . as far back as five hundred fifty thousand thousand years, the oldest known rock surface, and yet far short of earth's four and a half billion (four thousand five hundred thousand thousand) years. When Oquirrh Range jumped it lifted remains of sixty million year old "ancestral" mountains. So they say. No time timidity among rock tappers.
And space presents more exponential madness . . . you, a speck on a great sweep of sagebrush, itself a fleck on rock circling a star, itself a speck on the span to that star, itself a particle of space to the next nearest star, itself a particle of galaxy, in turn a particle of near cosmos, in turn a particle of far universe, and all less than a particle of infinity as you zoom out. And what's beyond it all? But that's an old brain tweak from way back, of a trickster sort; don't take space so literally. Odd how you coexist with infinity, similar to how "that which cannot be divided further" coexists with the infinity of you. Or so you imagine. Jeez, not again, oldest Zen trick in the book, everything and nothing from a point on both.
Farther south mountains don’t jump but sink into their own waste, weather down closer to eye level, playful, deadly roundscapes poked by peculiar nubs. And washes drop further into depths of strata, hard passages where the dregs collect and fry, a wasteland where rogue men with wild eyes received the word and railed against idolatry, foretold of cities in ruins, of desolate altars, of dead land and dust and a coming oasis, a river in a dry place, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, in a place where where mountains come to die, naturally. You expect to unearth wisdom in the strata; mostly it is solid rock being wasted.