If Cedar and I could chat about title of this post, I think we’d agree for different reasons. The packed ice on the trail today kept Cedar waiting (sort of) for Dad to creep along with the help of ski poles. And because he was going a bit slower, Dad paid a little extra attention to the assignment he used to give his students in the woods: See time.

It’s not ALL waiting when Dad goes slowly. Cedar may actually log more steps and sniffs, running up and down hill, sniffing under fallen trees, climbing under exposed roots, and doing dog-knows-what before coming back to prove she can wait on me. But one way we can see time today, kids, is the foot-packed ice left on the trail, as January awaits turning back into January.

Today’s amble reminded me of learning about the concept of “hill creep” –the slow movement of the land’s surface downhill–in what feels like a geologic era ago. I remember seeing some dramatic photos (slides in a projector, no doubt) of trees with arced boughs testifying to gravity’s slow pull on land, while the trees corrected to head straight for the light. The savvy land purchaser, our professor told a bunch of students living off of cheap beer and food stolen from the cafeteria, would look at the trees before purchasing a home.

Although my photo is certainly not dramatic enough to make today’s Ecology 101 slide shows, I was struck by an occasional testament to hill creep today. In a way this photo is not fair to illustrate movement so slow we might call it a “creep”—I took it in a slide area that must have moved relatively rapidly in recent geologic terms. Still, it’s a cool testament to trees’ phototropism, that tendency to make a beeline for the light.

In fact, my big dumb thought in the bigger trees today was more about hill non-creep, the dramatic staying in place that’s been in vogue among the big spruces (especially) on this walk for the last three or four-hundred years. It’s amazing to me how much has NOT crept despite the considerable slope of the hillside, and, I’m sure, epic weather events over the centuries.

In this little speck on the planet, there’s more at stake than the title of a post in a dog blog. (I know you don’t believe that.) The big question, I think is about just how much time you have to see to see change. In other words, just how fast are things losing their grip? There’s a storm brewing in town already about a new study reclassifying slide zones. Houses previously outside of the worst paths of historical and predicted avalanches are now included within those zones in the newest study. Luckily or unluckily, the City didn’t have enough money to expand the re-classification to our neighborhood. Besides having confirmation that something more than creep this way comes, property owners in these zones take a big hit on insurance and property values. (The City refused to adopt the maps that the study produced—a classic exercise in denial that I think I support!)

These big trees give me some consolation. They have seen nearly half a millennium of wild weather, incessant gravity, and even a few years of really stupid politics. I know evolutionists (experts in seeing time) argue about gradualism, catastrophism, or, in one of my favorite phrases…”punctuated equilibrium.” Which all boils down to whether the important stuff creeps slowly over time, whether it happens in catastrophic events, or whether it’s some combination of stability-crisis-change-stability.

All I can say for sure right now is that the boreal giants in our back yard are marking time by not moving…much…yet. As for Cedar, I’m going to guess she’s happy Dad hobbled home so another trip to the big trees is pretty much ensured.