Susquehanna Meditations: Bald Top

Bald Top

That which we assume is fixed, isn’t.  Choose your poison.

What is fixed? 

Political parties?

The United States?

Church traditions?

Us?

God’s love?

How about mountains (which is itself a pun). For we mine ore from mountains.  Ore.  ‘Oros’ is the word for ‘mountain’ in Greek. 

Takes something remarkable to move, remove, a mountain.

But that which assume is fixed, isn’t.

Check out the fossil pit at Montour Preserve near the Chillisquaque Lake.  Join the Cub Scouts and Brownies in picking through the pit and finding shells and snail fossils millions and millions of years old.   We may view our earth as we would a still photograph.  For Father Time and Mother Earth, they’re watching a movie. 

Arizona once under water.

Descending toward Alamogordo out of the chilly heights of Ruidoso, a ski resort community, the vast whiteness glistened across the entire valley, the two travelers wondered aloud if wagon trains of pioneers were deceived upon first seeing this sight.  After hundreds of arduous miles of desert, trekked by foot, horse, oxen, would they have looked down up this scene and thought they were approaching an expansive lake?  What a cruel joke that would have been.  250 million years ago shallow sea did cover New Mexico.  70 million years ago the gypsum bearing marine deposits were uplifted into a gigantic dome.  10 million years ago the center collapsed creating this massive basin.  The Tularosa Basin.

Once upon a time the Nittany Range rivaled the Himalayas. 

Given our photographic window of time, we humans are prone to think the earth static, dependable, steady as a rock.  Too often we think much the same of family, society, institutions, customs, or civilizations, until reality proves otherwise. 

These rocks of Bald Top are anything but steady.  Earthquakes should teach us that.

Our window of time is very compact, more porthole than sun room and skylights.  Some facts we’d rather refuse to accept.  Or can’t.  Take a step back and think beyond minutes or years.  Think in the fluid ebb and flow of millennia.  From the view of eons, even rock is flux and fluid, change and unrest.  It is a matter of perspective.  And perspective can be unreliable.  The town you see when cresting a hill appears only two miles away when it actually is ten.  You squint at the boulder balanced at the base of a butte and assume it is the size of a car when it actually is the size of a cathedral.

Flux and change.  It is an anaconda of a realization:  once it embraces you, it won’t let you go. 

Do you feel it?

Flux and change.  What is permanent? 

Do you feel it?

Yellowstone is moving west across the entire Great Basin 12 millimeters a year.  Over centuries the hot spot deep below the plates will burn and bubble beneath Minneapolis. 

The tectonic plates are on the move.  It’s like we’re teetering on a skateboard. 

So too Mother Earth herself.  Heaving, convulsing, organic and dynamic. 

Our globe in our solar system is a top spinning, spinning, spinning…

Do you feel it?

We are rotating at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour.  No cosmic state troopers to pull us over.  A bullet from an AK47 travels 1,600 miles per hour.  Right now you are traveling ¾ the speed of a bullet.

The cruise speed of a Boeing 747 is only a measly 650 miles per hour. 

But that is only the rotation.  Spinning, spinning, spinning. 

Add to our rotation our revolutions around the sun.  67,000 miles per hour. 

Is anyone here dizzy?

I am. 

All in flux – we feel the earth move under our feet…

It might be love, and passion but with rocks?  …we call it Continental Drift. 

Our naturalist Van Wagner shared this:

Bald top (our whole area) is sedimentary rock that formed around 420 million years ago during the Silurian time period.  Then around 290 million years ago North America was crashing into Africa and Europe (plate tectonics) and the eastern part of America folded.  The Appalachian mountains formed.  It is like when you push a rug in from the sides and it wrinkles.  Bald Top is part of Montour Ridge.   When the land folds it can either fold downward like a “U”.  that is called a syncline.   Or it can fold up like an "n".   That is called an anticline.  Montour Ridge, bald top, is an anticline.  I was raised there.

Yes.  Just be careful not to assume a downfold means a valley and an upfold means a mountain.  When you add millions of years of erosion to the situation you can easily get mountains as land on both sides of the "U" erodes away...making the edges of the fold (“U”) mountains compared to the low, eroded lands next to them.  A drive down 11/15 to Harrisburg is a cross section through both types of fold.  Watch the rocks.

Watch the rocks. 

How do you move a mountain?

Simple:  either wait for a while (don’t hold your breath) or you can have faith and foolishness and defiance and courage enough to grab a shovel.