In the pool locker room I overheard a dad say to his preschool aged son, “No rush, buddy. We have plenty of time.” That struck me as a lovely thing to say to a child. How often do most kids hear and feel the reverse?

Cedar and I have been trodding the same ground daily. I often wonder if she (and I) get enough exercise in a day. I’m realizing that the slower I go, the more she gets to move, explore, chase, sniff, and revel in the dry November woods. (It’s cold this week!) Earlier in the week, I re-read Thoreau’s “Walking,” and love how he takes up the word “saunter” with (maybe imaginary) roots in a trip to the holy land, à la Sainte Terre.

Sapsicle, anyone?

We saunter. Well, I saunter and Cedar does all those other dog verbs. And it’s good.

But it hit me this week that maybe that generous dad wasn’t telling his young son the whole story. With no snow, I’ve started to notice some Flintstone coffee-table sized slabs of rock strewn around in the washes and creeks that slice through the big tree trail. The flood events rewind the tape and show what’s been going on around here for a while. The mess they expose is also a glimpse into geologic time. 

Cathy says the slabs happen because the metamorphism in the big uplift created a lot of chlorite and mica minerals.
An older photo (from April) above Wire St. in the “gooey Gastineau formation.”

It’s been a few since I’ve committed the geology periods to memory: Holocene, Pleistocene, etc. (So long in fact that my college mnemonic reveals more about who I was at 20 than any deep geo-knowledge… H was for “horny”…)… 

https://www.geologyin.com/2016/12/10-interesting-facts-about-geological.html

Anyway, I emailed my friend Cathy, author of Roadside Geology of Alaska, to ask her about these slabs. She’s one of those local geniuses who is so smart she can put things in terms I can almost understand. “On Wire St., above the gooey Gastineau formation which overlies the Triassic bedrock there ( up to about 700 feet in places) are metamorphosed ancient marine sea floor sediments and lava flows from dinosaur days—Taku Terrane Rocks.” 

So… the big trees on Cedar’s sniffing grounds are rooted in a thin, relatively recent (but still way before human life around here) organic layer, which covers the real action. When the plates collided in the fault that is today Gastineau Channel, the whole danged sea floor came up to be a mountain side. 

Put in that perspective, I realize that dad’s words to his son were a big, sweet lie. We do not have plenty of time. We are a blink.  But a good saunter, in a big tree Holy Land clinging to some thin dirt on a sideways sea floor, with the illusion that we have plenty of time, ain’t a bad way to spend our blink. I’m sure I speak for Cedar when I say, “We’ll take it.”