Appalachian Time Machine
excerpt from Fred’s book in progress, One Place Understood
Through the glass floor of my Time Machine at thirty thousand feet above the sea level of that geological age, I see the jagged thrust of bare rock rising towards me, tops of the highest peaks only a few thousand feet below my craft. I know that someday many millions of years in the future — after wind and water and gravity and heat and cold have done their work — we will call the rounded remnants of these soilless crags “the Appalachians.”
From where I look, feeling the gentle hum of the machine under my feet, I follow this line of rucked-up continent that extends to the vanishing point northeast of me, and likewise, turning to look out of the window-wall behind me, to the southwest.
These young-sharp jumbled mountains fall off abruptly to the east, toward the body of water we would much later call the Atlantic Ocean. It shines in the morning sun just visible a few tens of miles away. A young piedmont is just forming from the eroding ocean-side slopes of upthrust granite and quartz as this continental plate rises and sea level falls, sending sand, grain at a time, to the widening ocean that is forming between our future North America and a someday Europe.
Turning to look towards the interior of the morphing continent, I can’t see all the way across to the far shores of a shallow sea that covers today’s western Allegheny Plateau. It is slowly emptying by way of nameless braided streams, and later by the named New and Tennessee rivers as the continent is being pushed up from below by forces made visible in mountain ranges, volcanoes and earthquakes. Under that tranquil sea are the layered remnants of age after age of life, death and decay that will leave behind the carbon of a hundred million summers. We will call it coal. We will call it the Marcellus shale.
I look briefly at my chrono-spatial monitor to confirm I have reached the correct coordinates in time-space: the time, 200 million years before what we call our present. The place: home. Directly below me on the uplifted landscape is the longitude and latitude of the future headwaters of the Roanoke River. That is where I live in “modern times.” From this long-ago point on until my day, and well beyond that, this river’s tumbling waters will wear away those saw-toothed mountains, softening the slopes, reducing the gradient from retreating mountain peaks. Bare cataracts will crumble, one sand grain, pebble, cobble or boulder at at time, carving fissures from the rock over millions of years. Those of us who know these Appalachian fissures call them hollers. We have chosen to live in one of them.
This is a recurrent fantasy. All it takes to launch this craft is the almost-daily sight of moss-and-fern covered boulders or grains of creek sand in my sandals. They tell the story of time, passing. Nameless Creek and Goose Creek lie at the bottom of two of those confluent fissures whose streams meet just beyond and below the front porch. It is the genealogy of continents that has given us this rocky, sandy, ravine-laced wonderful-terrible “mountain land” where we live. Wind and water and gravity and heat and cold have abraded and scattered the old bones that chemistry and nature have fleshed out in humus and cellulose, sinew and bone within the deciduous forest of humankind’s short habitation.
The foundation of really knowing a place lies beneath our feet. For that purpose, in addition to the Time Machine, I have a tool called the GeoRay. You might not be familiar with it. This tool — basically an x-ray for the landscape — renders the planet’s soft tissues: soil and sand and water and wood — practically invisible so that only the rocky backbone of a place shows through prominently. It is a curious and wonderful device that I carry with me at all times. Seeing the bare frame of this place shows me much I would not have known looking out through my regular lenses.
Nameless and Goose Creeks are pocked with deep scours — plunge pools that once received torrents of water — huge volumes of it — directly off the steep western flanks of the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains. I see through my GeoRay that plunge pools here are ten to fifteen feet deep. They were worn smooth by the abrasion of sand and larger grit, scoured round and round in place over the millennia by a frenzied blender of water with thousands of feet of fall behind it.
I am filled with regret and longing: today it’s hard to get your knees wet in those old kettle pools on Nameless Creek. In a land once with forest and soil intact, so much land upstream is now disturbed by roads, agriculture or construction that the pools have silted in. They no longer support the native trout we saw here in their last days around the year 2000.
A tiny vestige of those old scours and kettles is the Green Hole more than a mile downstream. There a tall guy can stand up to his chin — if he can man up to the spring-fed chill of it. It’s a popular getting-wet and party place, often trashed by empty beer cans and fast-food debris. Human nature has blighted the venerable geology of this hole in the rock without any recognition of the unimaginable quantity of gallons and moments it took to create this plunge pool in this holler for their brief pleasure. This particular feature formed eons ago when Goose Creek was blocked by a tumbled-down chunk of original-mountain rock the size of three SUVs. If only a stone could talk. Where did it come from?
Best I can figure, the high spine of those ancient new mountains we now call the Blue Ridge would have been miles further toward the coast than the high-elevation crest now followed by the Blue Ridge Parkway. Erosion worked harder on the steeper face, peak above to Piedmont below, than it did peak to inland sea on our Roanoke River side of the mountain. But even on our west side of that massif, the gradient of fall would have started at some twenty thousand feet — a cutting force more like today’s Himalayas to the braided waters of the Ganges below.
Then too, the crest at that elevation in those days would have held a snowpack whose meltwaters did some of the demolition, carrying enormous volumes of sand. They also moved into place the moss and fern-covered remnant room-sized boulders that today rest on the bedrock of Nameless Creek Gorge. It seems as if they have always — and would always — be there. My time machine knows better. It is all moving downstream.
Even if my favorite boulder is safe from a future flood with the power to push it even one more inch along towards the Atlantic, it wears away nonetheless, and will get there eventually. Relentlessly, imperceptibly my boulder is being worn to bits. Those lichens, mosses and ferns that now live there are turning this chunk of mountain — and all the other exposed crumbs of a mountain’ bones — into small particles that will find moving water. Pioneer species — many of them new to the planet since the time of Blue Ridge orogeny (mountain-building era) are so called because they are the first to establish colonies in empty spaces. The lichens are especially able to make their way on bare rock in the absence of any soil whatever. Their life and death add more humus for mosses and ferns and ultimately to sustain the roots of seed plants. And the roots of seed plants are the jack hammers of erosion.
We are reminded of this every time we walk down the New Road. An outcrop of layered rock (schist I think) looms above the trail. Or falls into it. Chunks barely moveable without machinery regularly calve off into the grassy roadway that is our footpath. The forces at work are the snaking roots of a well-established poison ivy plant. It lives in the soil made available long ago by pioneer lichens, mosses and ferns plus eons of freeze and thaw. Its roots tendril down into the thin crevices and pry the black rock into sharp-edged slabs that gravity sends downhill — obstacles to our travel but signposts in our awareness of constant movement and change to our mountains and hollers.
While pondering the life of my favorite fern-fuzzy boulder from the trail, I turn around and look behind me. I lift the bill of my cap to find high above me the top of a mountainside of moss-lumpy irregular mounds. A a few small trees struggle to find the soil somewhere below. I don’t know quite what to make of it until I reach around into my pack and pull out my GeoRay goggles. Suddenly this green irregular slope becomes a gray and silver jumble of granite boulders — huge stones not unlike the one that made it all the way to the creek bottom for me to admire.
This is an odd sight in all these hills and hollers of southwest Virginia, I think at first, but maybe more common than I had recognized before I found my goggles. This steep slant of boulders makes me think of being near the base of western mountains like the Rockies. They call such a formation a “talus slope.” There, spreading out as gravity would have it below sheer vertical faces of (relatively) young rock, is the fall zone of wind-water-freeze-thaw slabs and chunks and odd polygons of rockface that have calved into space like the advancing, crumbling front wall of a glacier.
Where is the mother mountain? The crest from which these boulders fell is gone now for millions of years. Only its leavings remain for the pioneer species to turn into mountain soil. My goggles show me just how many voids there are in this confusion of rock, empty pockets obscured by a carpet of moss and dead leaves. And only a fool eager for an inversion ankle sprain or worse would venture into this beautiful green rubble. But our agile exploring dogs for some reason seem to find this mountainside fascinating. I remember that they have their own lenses I am not privy to.
Coming home from my excursion, I take the creek path instead of staying in the open pasture. We often make this choice for the variety of flowering plants it offers in the spring and the shade it provides in the summer. Snaking its way beside this path along Nameless Creek, visible or invisible for most of the gorge trail until the confluence with Goose Creek, is a rock wall. It has fallen off into the creek in places and is covered by the detritus of a hundred autumns in others. This winding low pile is a mix of old hard quartz and granite and sandstone-conglomerate, recipe made possible by old meeting new geology in a complex way I will never sort out.
What I do know is that every one of these stones — weighing up to several hundred pounds — was heaved by human hands long ago onto a low-slung sledge on wooden runners, drug by work horses or oxen to the edge of the new pasture. This was hard work few men today are familiar with. Each large rock — an impediment to plowing — was added to a low line of stone along Nameless Creek. Our five-acre pasture through the goggles shows that they did not get all of them.
The flat of our little wedge of orchard grass and timothy is a stream-deposited fan between two rocky ridges. Over the ages as the distant crest eroded, it sent its bits in floodwaters that cut deeper and deeper into bedrock, scouring deep kettles and green holes. Where the water’s flow slowed as it fanned out, it dropped its burden of sand, cobble and boulders, making work for those who knew and loved this holler long before we came to admire it and walk its paths every day.
Floods most every year have cut back the house side of the pasture along Goose Creek, and we see the story clearly. The top foot or so is sandy loam. Below that, a raisin cake of mountain chunks and bits so that you’d be taking a risk to plow very deep at all. No wonder I couldn’t sink a T-post the first year here, when I thought my garden would go over by the barn.
My GeoRay goggles show me the bedrock of the ancient ravine lies far below today’s grassy surface. In between, sand and cobbles and boulders wait their turn to make their way to an Atlantic beach.
