Where the Sky Touched the Earth

The Cosmological Landscapes of the Southwest

Don Lago

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780874174748
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The landscapes of the American Southwest—the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, the Sedona red rocks—have long filled humans with wonder about nature. This is the home of Lowell Observatory, where astronomers first discovered evidence that the universe is expanding; Meteor Crater, where Apollo astronauts trained for the moon; and Native American tribes with their own ancient, rich ways of relating to the cosmos. With the personal, poetic style of the very best literary nature writing, Don Lago explores how these landscapes have offered humans a deeper sense of connection with the universe. While most nature writing never leaves the ground, Lago is one of the few writers who has applied it to the universe, seeking ties between humans and the astronomical forces that gave us birth.Nowhere else in the world is the link between earth and sky so powerful. Lago witnesses a solar eclipse over the Grand Canyon, climbs primeval volcanos, and sees the universe in tree rings. Through ageless Native American ceremonies, modern telescopes, and even dreams of flying saucers, Lago, who is not only a poet but a true philosopher of science, strives to find order and meaning in the world and brings out the Southwest's beauty and mystery.

1

THE EXPANDING MESA

ON THE RIM OF THE VOLCANO I stood, propelled there by the volcano’s power.

I was standing on the backside of the volcano and looking down a steep thousand feet to its base. On the opposite, front, side of the volcano, its base was about six hundred feet below the rim, for on its front side, through a V-shaped gap, the volcano had poured out lava that piled up hundreds of feet deep, building a mesa two miles wide and four and a half miles long. At its edges the mesa dropped steeply, as much as four hundred feet.

The mesa left a large imprint upon the landscape, and upon human activities.

The main tracks of the Santa Fe Railway, running from Chicago to Los Angeles, approached the mesa from the east, aiming straight at it, but then veered around it, hugging its contours. The mesa’s volcanic layers funneled its underground waters to a spring at the mesa’s edge, and in the age of steam trains, when locomotives needed a lot of water, this spring was an essential stop amid hundreds of miles of Arizona deserts. The mesa’s waters nourished the westward dreams of a nation, floating the lumber, hardware, grain, minerals, and people that filled the West with towns. The lava’s ancient energy was transformed into the energy of iron wheels climbing mountain passes.

Half a century later, in the age of the automobile, Route 66 was built alongside the tracks of the Santa Fe Railway, so Route 66 too aimed straight at the mesa and then veered around it. Every passing car had to expend extra gas and time to pay tribute to the mesa and its volcano. The national dreams that now included California sun and Hollywood glamour and the grapes of wrath were still grounded upon geological sleep.

More decades later, Interstate 40 followed the path of Route 66 and the Santa Fe Railway, and it too bent around the mesa; the big trucks that carried the lifeblood of the world’s greatest economy still had to pay tolls to the mesa. Another highway, one of the main routes to the Grand Canyon, curved around the other side of the mesa, teaching a million tourists every year how and why rivers and canyons curve.

Around the base of the mesa was wrapped the city of Flagstaff. Every day thousands of residents curved around the mesa on their way to and from work and school and groceries, but sometimes impatiently, barely even noticing the mesa. From most of town the mesa hid the view of its mother volcano.

From where I lived I could see the volcano, including the V vent from which its lava had become the mesa, but I too was often guilty of barely noticing it. As I drove from my house the road pointed me straight at the volcano, at least for a moment, but soon I was preoccupied with the traffic of a busy highway.

Even as America’s traffic and westering dream detoured around the volcano’s far more ancient geological reality, America imposed its dreams upon the volcano, turning it into a mere stage prop of the Wild West. For about twenty years starting in the 1880s the volcano was near the center of a large ranch, the Arizona Cattle Company, which branded its cattle with the symbol “A-1”. The ranch became known as the A-1 Ranch, and the volcano became known as “A-1 Mountain.” A century later, long after the branded cows had been eaten and their leather had worn out and the cowboys had died and their branding irons had been melted down and ranchers had realized that the grasslands at more than seven thousand feet weren’t the best for grazing, the volcano was still branded with the name “A-1.” The volcano had glowed with vastly more heat than a branding iron, and it had branded the land with a symbol miles long, but the brash and fleeting Wild West had left upon the volcano the incomprehensible human concept of cattle rustling, of the theft of property. Brash indeed was the superintendent of the A-1 Ranch, Captain B. B. Bullwinkle, who had been a fireman during the great Chicago fire of 1871, who played poker with cows as poker chips, and who always raced his horse into Flagstaff until one day the horse tripped and Bullwinkle flew off and was killed. The volcano was also clouded by the local lore that the A-1 Ranch was the birthplace of A-1 Steak Sauce (it really came from Britain).

Fortunately there are cures, or at least temporary antidotes, for the superficialities of human culture and the human mind. The power of nature can break through the dull surface. The (w)hole reason all those tourists were driving past A-1 Mountain and going to the Grand Canyon was because they wanted to break the dull surface in the grandest way, break it into a ten-mile-wide canyon full of strange shapes and glorious colors. Even tourists who were inclined to see the Grand Canyon as a theater of Wild West adventure and conquest couldn’t help noticing that nature was much larger than humans. Humans could also be stirred by Niagara Falls, by Yosemite cliffs, by Old Faithful, by Kilauea. An erupting volcano might be the most reality breaking of geological forces, for it violates our sense of the ordinary, solid, hard earth and reveals the strange powers always beneath us. All over Earth humans saw volcanoes as the work of powerful gods and gave volcanoes elaborate offerings, including human sacrifices. Sometimes volcanoes were seen as the gateway to Hell. Even extinct volcanoes were inhabited by gods.

It seemed wrong, then, that I often barely even noticed the volcano right in front of me. I too would travel far to see a wonder of nature, yet I had failed to fully inhabit my own neighborhood, my own naturehood. I might live here, but here did not live in me. With mere eyes I might touch the volcano, but the volcano did not touch me.

I wanted to be a native to this earth. I decided I would go and welcome the volcano into my world of human experience. I would climb the volcano, then climb back down and hike to the far end of the mesa. I would re-create the journey of lava out of the ground, down the volcano, and across the land. I would take the measure of the volcano and the mesa, not in numbers or concepts but in my own footsteps, in human muscles, in impacted senses, with the red button of human consciousness pressed to Record. I would try to translate the vast powers of nature into the language of the human body and mind.

I stood at the base of the volcano and looked up. I imagined the volcano erupting, perhaps for years, shooting high a plume of magma, thousands of red-yellow hot blobs spreading out and raining down. The magma that fell onto the back rim of the cone piled up and began cooling off, while the magma that fell back into the caldera remained hot and fluid and turbulent, then overflowed out of the volcano and flowed across the land. Gravity did its best to stop the volcano from rising, but the upward forces of the earth were too powerful.

Gravity now tried to stop me from rising up the volcano. The slope was steep, and the volcanic cinders rolled beneath my boots. But my hard work allowed me to feel the strength of gravity and the strength of the magma that had overpowered gravity. The volcano was registering itself in my muscles and breath, speaking volcanic height and mass and power in the language of flesh. The volcano was growing larger. When I paused to catch my breath, I could imagine the volcano saying: I didn’t stop—you should have felt the roar of my breath—you would have been incinerated into ashes instantly. When I glanced up to see the route ahead, the volcano laughed: I never worried. Because I was scaling the volcano to be a scale to take its measure, the volcano tried to fit into me, but my body was far too small to hold it.

When I reached the rim and felt pleased with myself, the volcano snorted: Why is it that humans climb mountains because they want to feel big? With every step of the way, we mountains are telling you how small you are, how fragile your bodies, how brief your lives. Yet when humans reach the top their pride swells to absurd Everest size. Maybe it’s not really mountains you are feeling superior to; even on remote mountains humans remain obsessively social animals who derive their worth by feeling superior to one another.

From the rim I gazed onto a horizon filled with volcanoes and lava flows. This volcano was part of a volcanic range that stretched for more than 50 miles and included more than six hundred volcanoes. The first volcano had erupted about 6 million years ago, and the most recent volcano, Sunset Crater, appeared less than 1,000 years ago, when humans were living around it and had to flee and abandon their fields and houses to the lava. A-1 Mountain appeared about 330,000 years ago. The volcanic range was quiet for the moment, the long geological moment, but not finished.

This volcanic range was an oddity for being far away from the colliding edges of tectonic plates, which produced most of Earth’s volcanoes. But it was on the edge of the Colorado Plateau, a 130,000-square-mile region that was uplifted, leaving cracks along its edges, through which volcanoes had erupted. This volcanic range was generated by a “hot spot,” a vein of magma welling up from deep in Earth’s mantle; as the North American plate crawled 50 miles across this hot spot during 6 million years, the hot spot continued breaking through the crust and left a 50-mile track of volcanoes. About 400,000 years ago the hot spot had built one giant stratovolcano (the same type as Mount Fuji and Mount Kilimanjaro), maybe 15,000 feet high, which today would be the tallest peak in the non-Alaska United States, except that the volcano had collapsed and left a ring of peaks, today called the San Francisco Peaks, the tallest of which is 12,633 feet. The peaks loomed only a few miles from where I stood. Several other volcanoes in the range were taller than 9,000 feet, but since the base elevation here is about 7,000 feet, these volcanoes stand 2,000 or 3,000 feet above the surrounding land. Most of the six hundred volcanoes are cinder cones a few hundred feet high. Very few had produced a lava flow as long as that of A-1 Mountain. The A-1 volcano was probably fed by the same powerful magma chamber that had built the 15,000-foot San Francisco volcano.

It was my turn to flow down the volcano. I stepped off the backside rim and headed into the caldera, still a distinct bowl. The caldera held a mixture of volcanic cinders, formed when flying blobs of magma congealed before hitting the ground, and thick strands of lava, which flowed out of the ground like toothpaste and acquired lengthwise striations where the lava scraped harder lava. Today the caldera was also full of ponderosa pine trees. From the caldera I flowed downward, following the chute the lava had taken, following gravity. I wasn’t moving nearly as fast as the lava had flowed, and I wouldn’t be even if I were running, and if I were running I would be tripping and tumbling and breaking my crust and erupting with my own lava, of which I had a far more limited supply than did Earth. Measured by my biological caution, I felt Earth’s prodigal power and violence. I saw a river of lava rushing down this slope.

From the volcano’s base the lava had formed various lobes and ridges and bumps; I followed the longest lobe to where it dropped down to a smoother plain. It also dropped down to a dirt road, probably an old A-1 Ranch road, now a Forest Service road, which I would follow, through a mixture of meadows and ponderosa forests, to the far edge of the mesa. If I had brought a compass I could have taken a shorter route, straight through the forest, rather than wandering with the road. I could have trusted my course to Earth’s giant magma magnet, not to the needs of 1880s cattle ranching, which had bent this road to an artificial pond for watering cattle. The lava had trusted Earth’s magnetic field; its tiny mineral compass needles, frozen when the magma cooled, were still loyally pointed to the direction of Earth’s magnetic north 330,000 years ago.

Now I was probably walking at about the same pace that the lava had flowed. The pace of lava is determined by the combination of the land’s gradient, the push of lava from behind, and the lava’s own composition. On this plain the slope was so gradual that I usually didn’t notice it, but the lava had. Here and there the lava seemed to have lost momentum and mounded up into modest bulges. Compared with other types of lava—types are defined by their content of minerals, gases, and water—this lava had been moderately fluid. Basalt is the most fluid lava: it forms Hawaii’s readily flowing lava rivers and gently sloping shield volcanoes. Rhyolite is the least fluid lava: it gums up a volcano until the volcano explodes, like Mount St. Helens. In between basalt and rhyolite are several other types, including the rare benmoreite, which makes up A-1 volcano. Benmoreite was fluid enough to flow a long way, yet thick enough to pile up into a tall mesa with steep edges.

As I walked I imagined the ground moving, bubbling, swirling. Liquid rock. If I could look into the hundreds of feet of lava beneath me, I would see layer upon layer of lava, swirling this way and that, fossilized motions, the geological fingerprints the lava had left as it continually rebuilt its channels and gradients and built the mesa.

I tried to imagine the lava’s heat, which I guessed was around 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Any trees or grasses in the path of the lava would have burst into flame. The lava beneath me probably contained many lenses of burned carbon. If the lava was slow and cool enough, it may have been imprinted by a tree’s round trunk or bark texture. I imagined my own 98.6 degrees being subjected to 1,500 degrees: it would evaporate my water, drive crazy my cells, rupture my organs, cook my skin red and black, and then burst me into flame. Human metabolism is so delicate that it can’t operate at even 108 degrees. A century ago the forests on this mesa were logged, and the logs, made of volcanic soil, were thrown into fireplaces, where the ancient, imprisoned energy of the volcano flared forth once again to save humans from suffering in a 50°F room. Human bodies are thin, percolating lenses of carbon balanced between volcanoes and glaciers, stars and the coldness of space. Far below me the magma still brewed, searching for its next invasion route into the biological world. Once, volcanoes ruled the earth, and cells were the invaders.

For the moment, the earth seemed solid enough. With every footstep I was feeling the solidity and weight of the lava. It was hammering its strength into my flesh and bones and mind. The lava river had become rock that had strongly resisted the rains that for a third of a million years had tried to set it flowing again.

I tried to feel the age of the lava. I tried to think of 330,000 years in terms of human lifetimes, about five thousand human lifetimes. This didn’t seem so hard to grasp. But then, a third of a million years is a long time in the lifetime of a species. When this mesa was forming, humans were still sharing the world with Neanderthals, and indeed humans were still evolving into Sapiens. In the time this mesa has been sitting here, modern humans had emerged and migrated all over Earth and developed thousands of languages and learned to stack rocks into houses and cities. The mesa saw climates change and plant and animal species come and go; in the last 5 percent of its history, the mesa held Ice Age snows and its first human footprints. And this mesa was a recent event in the history of its volcanic range, itself a recent event in the history of this continent, only 2 percent as old as the youngest rocks in the Grand Canyon.

At least I was getting a good feel for the mesa’s size. I was feeling it with my leg muscles, with about ten thousand footsteps, with little eruptions of thirst and hunger. The mesa was growing larger. And more real. For a while I was following in the footsteps of an elk, craters imprinted in mud and now dried solid. For the elk this mesa was far more real and intricate and tasty than it ever would be for me. Yet the elk would never imagine this mesa as lava flowing from a volcano. The elk wouldn’t feel the awe that compelled humans to make sacrifices to volcanoes and that now propelled me on my own little ceremony. I was following the tracks of the volcano, and the six hundred footsteps of the magma hot spot. I was beginning to feel not just the power of this volcano but the greater powers of which this volcano was a small, momentary swirl. I felt the magma sun hidden deep inside Earth, and the upwelling currents that moved continents and raised mountain ranges and triggered earthquakes and generated Earth’s magnetic field. I felt a power that had been churning for more than 4 billion years and that was far from tired out. I saw this volcano revealing Earth’s deepest secrets.

Ahead of me I focused on one cluster of black volcanic rocks. I focused on it because my motion detectors signaled that one of the black rocks was moving. Yes, it really was moving. The black rock leaped into the air. The black rock spread its wings and flew. The black volcanic rocks, transmuted through leaves and seeds and bugs, had become the black body of a raven, the black wings of flight, the bright fire of life. Perhaps this was actually Earth’s deepest secret.

Ahead of me the woods seemed to be less shady, more filled with light, as if I were soon going to emerge into another meadow. But it was also about time for me to reach the edge of the mesa, the edge of the forest, the edge of the sky.

Through the vertical lines of the trees I began to see another shape, with vertical lines but a much wider body than a tree. I saw that it was made of lava. The mesa’s jagged lava rocks had arisen into a pile of rocks about twenty feet high, fitted together like jigsaw pieces. The pile was circular, as circular as a perfect volcanic crater, and like a crater, it held a lot of empty space inside. This empty space was a conduit, an air lock, through which the empty spaces of the universe were vacuumed out of the far sky and brought to Earth. This circle of lava rocks, roofed by a wooden dome, contained a telescope. Like the lava rocks, the metal of the telescope had been squeezed out of the earth by deep, powerful forces. With this telescope Earth became deep and powerful enough to see and meet the deep and powerful forces of the universe. The volcanoes of Earth could crater-eye see the volcanoes of Mars, the wheelings of the planets and moons, the eruptions of stars, the subductions of black holes, the swirls of our galaxy, the swarms of galaxies.

This telescope had become one of the more famous telescopes on Earth. Out of the parade of tens of thousands of lights across the sky, this telescope had sifted one light that behaved differently than the stars, behaved like a planet. This was the telescope that had discovered Pluto.

I walked past the observatory dome and onto a sidewalk and down a hill. Embedded in the cement were a few small metal discs, each representing a planet. Alongside each disc was a sign with a photo and facts about the planet. I had started at Pluto and was heading into the solar system. I passed Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, making a dozen or two dozen footsteps between them—the sidewalk was longer than a football field. I arrived at Mars, where the sign showed a photo of Mars’s giant volcano, Olympus Mons, and explained that it was six and a half times as high as the San Francisco Peaks and as large as the state of Arizona. The discs for the rest of the planets were clustered nearby.

The purpose of this “Pluto Walk” was to give people a better sense of the scale of the solar system, to translate the numbers and concepts of astronomy into human experience. The Pluto Walk was doing the same thing I had done on my plutonic walk from A-1 volcano. Now, at the end of my walk, I was being offered a larger map on which to locate the volcano and the mesa and myself.

I stopped at the metal disc of Earth. I bent down and looked at it more closely. In it I imagined I could see, only a speck, the entire mesa I had just walked, big enough to tire me yet only 1/5,000th the circumference of the planet. I looked again at the lava landscape around me, so long and firm and textured and full of tall trees, so real in human experience,...