I "the cemeteries of stony forests"
Entire trunks of fossilized trees — indeed, whole cemeteries of stony forests — emerge from the bluffs and fall in pieces to the beach below
PARTI
Recently, I had a reading experience I can only describe as meta-morphic. For years now I've been writing a book of my own... In an attempt to actually, finally complete it, I escaped New York City for several weeks and hid out in Cape Breton, at the far northern end of
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Nova
Scotia. The community there is a hardened one — the vassal and,
ultimately, victim of geology. For decades the main industry was
coal,
drawn from seams that underlie much of the region. But the mines
began to close in the 1960s, coughing bent, broken men back to the
surface. Folks get by today on the graces of tourism and government
assistance. Coal, as any mining museum in Cape Breton will tell you
(and there are several now), is the dark fruit of ancient garden
beds, the carbonized remains of swampy jungles that covered much of
the Earth 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period.
Generations
of trees, ferns, and gargantuan reeds grew and fell before being
submerged and then gradually buried under successive layers of
sediment,
like botanical specimens flattened between the pages of a book.
Chemical changes reduced some layers to true fossil beds, others
to coal.The cliffs of northern Nova Scotia are internationally
renowned
for their fossil contents. In Joggins, a forlorn town on the Bay of
Fundy, entire trunks of fossilizes trees — indeed, whole cemeteries
of
stony forests — emerge from the bluffs and fall in pieces to the
beach
below. At low tide, visitors prowl the mudflats in search of sunken
fossils and scavenge the shoreline jumble, rock hammers in hand.
I stopped at Joggins on my drive up to Cape Breton. After several hours wandering on the beach, I'd gathered several pounds of seemingly matchless fossils: signatures of ancient grasses, the talon imprint of some dinosaur, intriguing whorls of indeterminate origin. I lugged them to the interpretative center, a small brown house on the town's single street. The center had a collection, too, gathered over years by local experts. Tiny claw prints of lizards. Articulated silhouettes of insect wings. Whole root systems of trees. In comparison, in an instant, my collection seemed pathetic, even, I began to suspect, illegitimate. The center's guide, a high-school senior and the grand-daughter
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of the curator, offered to identify what I'd found. My fossils merely looked like fossils. "They're just rocks," she said gently.
Things improved a few days latter. The house I'd rented was set back from a low bluff overlooking the sea. In the face of the cliff I recognized the same sedimentary features I'd seen at Joggins: pancake layers of geological strata, dark traces of coal, a scree of fallen rocks on the shoreline below. At low tide I went down and poked around. The rocks were of sandstone, siltstone, and shale: thin layers of sediment, each layer representing varying degrees of solidity. With care, and the can opener on my jackknife, I found I could pry the layers apart. Inside were the fossils I'd sought: stems, leaves, roots, their textures finely etched on pages of stone.
Slowly, I picked through the fallen debris, pulling apart, marveling. Shreds of rock fell in my trail. The pressed flora of an ancient Earth was revealed to me. When I looked around at the rubble still left to examine, suddenly I saw not rocks but books: mounds of blackened, soggy tomes; heaps of hardcovers, their titles indecipherable; leaves of text that crumbled at my touch. At one point I came across a rock as big as me. It stood on edge with its thin layers of sandstone aligned vertically, facing me like a giant prehistoric thesaurus. I peeled away the leftmost page — it took two hands — and felt the rush of ages.