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I learned a lot about the geology, ecology, archaeology, paleontology and recorded history of Texas - particularly Central Texas - growing up and living my life there. I wanted to know how the Hill Country formed, who lived there before me, who lived there before them, and what fantastic creatures roamed the landscape in eons so distant that they may just as well be fantasy. Though they didn't have the grandeur of Rocky Mountain National Park, the little jewels of Central Texas - McKinney Falls State Park, Enchanted Rock, Hamilton Pool - all have amazing stories to tell anyone willing to listen.
For example, consider the obscure little Blunn Creek Preserve hidden right in the middle of Austin. To anyone driving along Oltorf, it probably wouldn't even be noticed. To the casual recreational hiker, it may not be much more than 40 acres of trees and a few trails. But if you look more closely, you'll find Blunn Creek trickling through a cut in the limestone shaded by oak trees. In those white walls you can read just a few sentences of an ancient story. Gerard and I have found large ammonites - prehistoric seagoing creatures that lived in a world inhabited by dinosaurs and in which most of Texas was a warm shallow sea - eroding from the rocks. A little further along you can find compacted ash, a glimpse of a time when volcanoes blackened the sky and scorched the earth in a place now famous for cowboys and cattle.
So what secrets must Colorado hold? What might now be read in the rocks and the soils beneath my feet? I sometimes hike South Table Mountain in Golden. It's an easy escape from work, and being up there makes it easy to imagine I'm the only human on the planet, wandering a windy, grassy landscape free of roads and tract houses and deadlines and center meetings. The trail going up the mountain is crumbly and soft, and the top is flat and solid. I could see that the top was volcanic in nature, but I didn't know much beyond that.
The Denver Museum of Nature and Science has a new exhibit called "Ancient Denvers." It piqued my curiosity. I already knew that just 10,000 years ago this area was cooler and wetter, with massive glaciers looming on the horizon and millions of bison, mammoth, camels, lions, saber toothed cats, giant ground sloths and other creatures roaming the plains. I also knew that Colorado was once under the same warm sea that covered Texas. But there was clearly a lot I was missing, so I set out to learn more.
Without going into too much detail, over the last 300 million years Colorado was mountainous, then flat, then mountainous, then under the sea, the dry, then under the sea again, then mountainous, then flat, then tropical rainforest, then desert, then frozen, and is now a semi-arid former grassland bordered by high mountains and covered in hundreds of thousands of tract houses. It boggles my mind to know that where I now sit typing on my Macintosh and sipping my chai, with snowy peaks just outside my window, there was once a thick forest of tall trees steaming in tropical heat and soaked by over 100 inches of rain each year. Or that, 70 million years ago, I'd be 600 feet below the sea among 40 foot long marine reptiles.
South Table Mountain, I learned, is indeed capped with a layer of volcanic rock from a massive volcanic explosion that occurred 37 million years ago and buried the area in TWENTY FEET of volcanic material. The soft crumbly layer of rock beneath it is the remnants of the deep rainforest soils. Beneath the Denver airport ancient swamps have been found, with layers of ash revealing that at least 42 separate volcanic eruptions occurred in the relatively recent geologic past. Boulder's iconic Flatirons are 300 million year old sandstone, the dusty remains of a mountain range that existed and was completely eroded away hundreds of millions of years before the present day Rocky Mountains were formed.
Before I came along, mountains grew and were erased, grew again and were buried and then unburied. Entire species - no, entire genera - of animals and plants evolved and went extinct many times over. The entirety of human history is merely a blip on the screen, literally a fraction of a second in a geologic day, and it fills me with awe and humility. What an incredible thing Earth is, and what an honor to have even a metaphorical milisecond in which not only to be a part of it, but to have a brain capable of comprehending a sliver of its magnificence and magnitude.
It makes me sad to think how many people in this world go about their daily lives never understanding even the slightest hint of the richness of this world. It's so easy for us to feel superior, or entitled, or believe that the world as it is always has been and always will be, but just scraping the surface of any earth science will quickly make you realize just how tiny we are, how new we are to the scene, and how fleeting our "civilized" little world truly is.
Scientists have calculated that, according to the average rate and circumstances of fossilization, if our entire civilization were to be wiped out tomorrow, less than one human skeleton would actually make it into the fossil record. Think about that. Out of 300,000,000 Americans, just a handful of bone fragments would likely be all that would be carried on through the ages. In fact, within just a few hundred years of our disappearance every single human structure, with the exception of those made from stone (such as the ancient pyramids of the world), would be completely erased by the forces of erosion and time. Where Denver now sits will once again be the bottom of the sea, will bask in tropical heat, and will again become a mighty mountain range. Humans and all of our petty problems and quarrels, all of our love and hate, all of our comings and goings, our history, our achievements and atrocities, will be lost in the shifting sands and the ambivalent winds of time. All that we are, all that we ever were, is to be nothing more than an odd blemish tossed between an ordinary ice age and whatever comes next.
But I don't weep for the human race because there will be no one to remember us after we're gone. I don't weep for the supposed "destruction" of the earth that environmentalists say we are causing. Instead I weep for all of the people in this world who will never know what it feels like to be deeply moved by the sight of elk grazing on an ancient landscape. I weep for the people who pave over the grasslands in arrogant disregard for the sanctity of the place. I weep for the people who don't consider the souls of the those who came before them. I weep for the people who know so little about and have so little respect for our air and our oceans that they fill them with trash and toxins. I weep for the people who are so concerned with their petty wants that there is no room in their hearts for the contemplation of the world. I weep for them because, I believe, our one true gift is the ability to see and to comprehend. We can gaze at the stars in wonder. We can stand rapt in awe of the marvelous variety of life and the complexity of earth's natural cycles. We can see and we can comprehend. We can appreciate. We can love. We can gaze upon the miracle of the Universe and we can say to it, "You are a thing of beauty and endless inspiration." Of all the billions of amazing creatures ever to walk upon the face of this planet, how many could tell the world how beautiful she is? I think that is our gift, and to squander it is the most tragic of all things.
I despise religion because it is the spiritual equivalent of factory farming and mass consumption. It is an attempt to control and compartmentalize, to label and to sell, to control and to dominate. But unlike cows, God cannot be stuffed into a box, labeled and sold with a set of rules and regulations. People who buy such a product are buying an empty box. They've been had. Yet they cling to the box until it becomes the thing they truly value. They will defend the empty box even if it means flying in the face of the very God they believe resides inside it. The fundamentalist Muslims do it every time they blow up a building or rail against the "infidels." The fundamentalist Christians do it every time they kill an abortion doctor or disown their children for being gay. They cling so tightly to the box they've forgotten the reason they bought the box in the first place.
I see God in the world, not in the church, certainly not in the cultural trappings of religion, and least of all in the fundamentalists of the world who've appointed themselves as the right hand of God. I see God in the timeless mountains, in the delicate flight of a spring butterfly, in the layers of coal and ash hinting at ancient swamps and rainforests where deserts and snowy mountains now exist. I see God in the movements of the stars and in the genetic code of an insect. I see God in the cycles of the planet, in the forces of creation and in the endless transformation of matter into energy and back again. But most of all I see God in someone who can look at it all and say, "You are a thing of beauty, and I am grateful to have the privilege of looking upon you and knowing it is so."
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