The Making of the Mountain
As I go walking on my footpath I've named the Rock Trail that winds down the side of Sunset Ridge into the cove below Air Bellows Gap, I often remind myself that the earth has circled the sun some 250,000,000 times, or so, since the Appalachian Mountains upon which I walk were formed when Africa separated from the American continents. The protruding rocks along the sides of the trail, as well as those that sometimes serve as footsteps in the trail itself, are typically of a banded sedimentary kind known as gneiss (pronounced "nice"). There's nothing particulary unique about them as rocks except that the earth has circled the sun about 50,000,000 times since they were formed from sediment when the surface of the earth shifted again, shoving them upward and producing the crinked appearance of the Appalachian Mountains we have today.
The earth has circled the sun about 3,000,000 times since the first animal walked upright as I do now upon the Rock Trail. The first of our ancestors that was not an ape-like creature appeared about 1,500,000 revolutions ago. Homo sapiens, our own species, has been around the sun only 250,000 times. And, finally, for Cro Magnan man with a brain the size of ours today, it's 35,000 times.
Come June 26, I'll have made the circumnavigation of the sun 60 times. Every time -- without fail -- I walk the trail, I'm astounded that the rock on which I am about to set my foot has been around roughly a million more time than I have and, for the mountain on which I stand, 250 million more times.
In that context, it boggles the mind to think how mankind could ever have conceived the notion that such a "Johnny-come-lately" as humans could possibly have dominion over the earth!
The earth has circled the sun about 3,000,000 times since the first animal walked upright as I do now upon the Rock Trail. The first of our ancestors that was not an ape-like creature appeared about 1,500,000 revolutions ago. Homo sapiens, our own species, has been around the sun only 250,000 times. And, finally, for Cro Magnan man with a brain the size of ours today, it's 35,000 times.
Come June 26, I'll have made the circumnavigation of the sun 60 times. Every time -- without fail -- I walk the trail, I'm astounded that the rock on which I am about to set my foot has been around roughly a million more time than I have and, for the mountain on which I stand, 250 million more times.
In that context, it boggles the mind to think how mankind could ever have conceived the notion that such a "Johnny-come-lately" as humans could possibly have dominion over the earth!
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