Was there a time when the Rock Fairy dropped boulders randomly across the countryside? The rocks lie in both field and forest. A good example is Doane Rock* near Eastham, Cape Cod. It stands 18 feet tall and has a buried depth estimated at 12 feet. That’s a big rock. Who put it there?
Called “erratics,” boulders like Doane Rock randomly lie in once glaciated lands. Carried on moving ice that once covered Canada and northern United States, the rocks made their slow descent to the surface as the glaciers melted and retreated. Once part of rocks in some other region, the erratics seem to have wandered far from their home. They are like knights errant, “wanderers.”
The continental glaciers were so massive that nothing, not even solid rock, could resist their erosive power. They broke rock and carried the fragments, regardless of size, till the ice thinned by melting. With no force strong enough to move them once the ice was gone, the rocks have lain in their new homes for thousands of years. The clue to their travel lies in the compositional difference between them and the rocks in their new neighborhoods. Granites from far away can be found “out of place” in sedimentary rock complexes. There is, in fact, no single composition of erratics. Whatever rock glaciers randomly scoured provided the emigrants.
Like glacial erratics, all of us can be carried along by forces too large to resist. Fragmentation and forced emigration is an almost periodic process that we can trace to those irresistible forces. In the physical movement of people, war, as we all know, is chief among those forces. Pandemics, famines, and economics are also such forces. The ambitions and policies of overwhelming numbers of invaders is still another. Look, for example, at the traces of Celtic people in Icelandic DNA, that chemical signature of heritage having been carried there by marauding Vikings.
For most of us, culture is the glacier in our lives, and it thins by time. It carries us with it and puts us down as we age. So many people are stuck “out of place” among unrelated “rocks.” Think of those whose lives have extended long after the general culture in which they spent most of their lives has melted away. Their friends and acquaintances having thinned, and their popular culture having faded into obscurity, they now stand as strange deposits on lands of foreign composition. They have little in common with their new surroundings. Ninety-year-olds are the Doane Rocks of every civilization.
But even if we don’t achieve great age by human standards, each of us is destined to become some kind of erratic eventually. Sounds a bit depressing, but don’t despair.
Doane Rock stands above the surrounding terrain, shaded by trees growing in soils that were, like the boulder, carried to Cape Cod long ago by a giant ice sheet that no longer exists. Young people climb on it. People take Selfies with it. The rock seems oddly out of place, but definitely fascinating enough to be the center of a small park dedicated to its existence. A big stone in the middle of some woods. It stands alone and immobile, but it hints at a life of travel, of experiences only it knows. And people go out of their way to preserve it and to see it. It is special by virtue of its size, isolation, and its relationship to both the distant rock from which it parted long ago and the process that forced its emigration.
Doane Rock was a passive traveler, one not responsible for leaving its point of origin and being carried along by an ice sheet that might have been thousands of feet thick and that covered all of New England and the shallow coastal zones. And like that erratic, early in our lives we were carried by irresistible cultural, philosophical, and social forces. But there is a major difference between glacial erratics and us. The only laws that apply to glacial erratics is the strength of the parent rocks and the force and spread of the eroding glacier. Inertia applies. Once dropped, the erratic is motionless.
We, by contrast, find ourselves still mobile, even when we have lain in one spot for a very long time. Wherever the forces of our past dropped us in the present, we are not stuck like Doane Rock. We can maintain our erratic, or wandering, nature. Moving physically might be difficult for a number of reasons, including economic ones, but breaking free from the containing ground of current culture and thought requires only the effort of the mind.
There’s no fault in having been carried along by overwhelming forces. It happens to all of us in some way, even if only by virtue of once being young and inexperienced. But staying in place till we become social and intellectual oddities, even revered ones, is a choice, albeit a difficult one. Intellectual inertia is an individual matter.
Move. It’s time to wander again, but do it by choice.
* http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=doane+rock&qpvt=Doane+Rock&qpvt=Doane+Rock&qpvt=Doane+Rock&FORM=IGRE
Called “erratics,” boulders like Doane Rock randomly lie in once glaciated lands. Carried on moving ice that once covered Canada and northern United States, the rocks made their slow descent to the surface as the glaciers melted and retreated. Once part of rocks in some other region, the erratics seem to have wandered far from their home. They are like knights errant, “wanderers.”
The continental glaciers were so massive that nothing, not even solid rock, could resist their erosive power. They broke rock and carried the fragments, regardless of size, till the ice thinned by melting. With no force strong enough to move them once the ice was gone, the rocks have lain in their new homes for thousands of years. The clue to their travel lies in the compositional difference between them and the rocks in their new neighborhoods. Granites from far away can be found “out of place” in sedimentary rock complexes. There is, in fact, no single composition of erratics. Whatever rock glaciers randomly scoured provided the emigrants.
Like glacial erratics, all of us can be carried along by forces too large to resist. Fragmentation and forced emigration is an almost periodic process that we can trace to those irresistible forces. In the physical movement of people, war, as we all know, is chief among those forces. Pandemics, famines, and economics are also such forces. The ambitions and policies of overwhelming numbers of invaders is still another. Look, for example, at the traces of Celtic people in Icelandic DNA, that chemical signature of heritage having been carried there by marauding Vikings.
For most of us, culture is the glacier in our lives, and it thins by time. It carries us with it and puts us down as we age. So many people are stuck “out of place” among unrelated “rocks.” Think of those whose lives have extended long after the general culture in which they spent most of their lives has melted away. Their friends and acquaintances having thinned, and their popular culture having faded into obscurity, they now stand as strange deposits on lands of foreign composition. They have little in common with their new surroundings. Ninety-year-olds are the Doane Rocks of every civilization.
But even if we don’t achieve great age by human standards, each of us is destined to become some kind of erratic eventually. Sounds a bit depressing, but don’t despair.
Doane Rock stands above the surrounding terrain, shaded by trees growing in soils that were, like the boulder, carried to Cape Cod long ago by a giant ice sheet that no longer exists. Young people climb on it. People take Selfies with it. The rock seems oddly out of place, but definitely fascinating enough to be the center of a small park dedicated to its existence. A big stone in the middle of some woods. It stands alone and immobile, but it hints at a life of travel, of experiences only it knows. And people go out of their way to preserve it and to see it. It is special by virtue of its size, isolation, and its relationship to both the distant rock from which it parted long ago and the process that forced its emigration.
Doane Rock was a passive traveler, one not responsible for leaving its point of origin and being carried along by an ice sheet that might have been thousands of feet thick and that covered all of New England and the shallow coastal zones. And like that erratic, early in our lives we were carried by irresistible cultural, philosophical, and social forces. But there is a major difference between glacial erratics and us. The only laws that apply to glacial erratics is the strength of the parent rocks and the force and spread of the eroding glacier. Inertia applies. Once dropped, the erratic is motionless.
We, by contrast, find ourselves still mobile, even when we have lain in one spot for a very long time. Wherever the forces of our past dropped us in the present, we are not stuck like Doane Rock. We can maintain our erratic, or wandering, nature. Moving physically might be difficult for a number of reasons, including economic ones, but breaking free from the containing ground of current culture and thought requires only the effort of the mind.
There’s no fault in having been carried along by overwhelming forces. It happens to all of us in some way, even if only by virtue of once being young and inexperienced. But staying in place till we become social and intellectual oddities, even revered ones, is a choice, albeit a difficult one. Intellectual inertia is an individual matter.
Move. It’s time to wander again, but do it by choice.
* http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=doane+rock&qpvt=Doane+Rock&qpvt=Doane+Rock&qpvt=Doane+Rock&FORM=IGRE
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