photo by James G. Gehling for the NY Times

Looks kinda like a gang sign, no? A tribal tattoo? Something from The Matrix?

Actually, it’s a fossil from a time we know very little about, in terms of biology.  The Precambrian era was a very long hunk of time — about 4 billion years, to be imprecise — that predated the explosion of life characterizing the Cambrian period, 542 to 490 million years ago.  An article in yesterday’s NY Times by Sean B. Carroll describes recent work by geologists and paleontologists to access fossils prior to that period of intense proliferation.  In places like the Namibian Desert and the evocatively named Mistaken Point on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, they’ve discovered fossils that provide interesting, if puzzling, clues to the evolution of life from simple single-celled creatures to the more complex animals with bilateral body symmetry that showed up during the Cambrian.

This is news? Rock lays on rock, right?  Shouldn’t they just be able to look lower to find fossils from an older period?  After all, we know life dates as far back as three and a half billion years.

The trouble is,  there’s a lengthy period of the earth’s history — roughly 1.2 billion years — that’s gone AWOL.  Lost and unaccounted-for.  And disappeared with it are the trace evidence of life — the fossils — that might clarify the transition from billions of years of unicellular simplicity to the startling development of structural and functional complexity.

Geologists call this (writers, you will love this) The Great Unconformity.  To me that conjures pictures of a turn-of-the-century magician, a man out of step with his time in a mysterious and possibly lucrative and alluringly shady way, who must perpetually dodge efforts by the more boring conformities to toss him in jail and throw away the key.

No, no.  The Great Unconformity for geologists is a gap in the rock record.  You can actually lay your hand on it.  Go to the outcrop on highway 337 near the Doc Long Picnic Area in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque.  Lay your hand so your thumb points down and you can touch granite 1.4 billion years old with your lower digit; your pinkie will rest on sandstone from the Mississippian Period, roughly a billion years younger.

The significant distinguishing factor?  Precambrian rock almost everywhere is devoid of fossils.  No evidence of life.  While the massive sediments that accrued while this neck of the wood lay under vast inland seas are teeming with fossils of creatures who roamed the murky depths and crawled up onto the shores.

The Great Unconformity.  No-life to rampant life.  Ever remind you of your writing?

Whoa, now.  I know.  Hell of a leap.  But, still:  though the analogy is far from watertight, I think there’s something interesting in thinking about how those sometimes dull and awkward first drafts can morph into writing that’s possessed of a life of its own; something bigger, somehow, than the me what made it.

It feels like that to me, sometimes.  A quickening.  The quicksilver leap from raw material to a thing of beauty and intelligence and for which I can take only some of the credit.

And maybe not so quick, really.  Because the only way I know to get from A to B is through tuned-in exploration, patient excavation, and a really good dose of luck.

Not unlike the paleontologists who have hunted down the mystery fossils in the land lost to time.

This is what spring looks like in my neck of the woods.  A snowstorm’s coming on, but in the meantime

1. ravens execute crazy aerial maneuvers in tandem.  mating, fighting, having fun?
2. robins crowd the juniper bushes
3. redwing blackbirds cause a ruckus by the creek
4. muddy road, muddy path, muddy dog paws, muddy house
5. wind blows hard enough to make your eyes water
6. hermits emerge, blinking, and get hit with social invitations
7. prairie dogs emerge, blinking, and get hit by truck traffic
8. wind-induced despondency.  warmth-induced hilarity.  repeat rapidly
9. ferocious need to change out of your studded snow tires.  now!
10. what’s that color?  GREEN?

Come back tomorrow for a guest post written by Maida Tilchen, author of the newly published novel LAND BEYOND MAPS.

This post is for the birds:  the 25+ species that frequent my little patch of heaven by the San Cristobal Creek in northern New Mexico.

I was inspired to tally up our local count when I read Per Petterson’s OUT STEALING HORSES, a terrific novel set in a rural part of Norway’s forested north.  It opens when the narrator returns to the small village of his youth.  He’s alert to the natural world, and mentions having seen eight different species of birds on his land.

Only eight, I thought?  How many have we got here on our two acres?

The two dozen or so I came up with are just a start.  I’m sure there are many more than that.  I’m a pretty unskilled birdwatcher, relying on my spotty vision and untutored ear to pick out the few birds I can identify.  (I’ve got a handy little Golden guide to backyard birds to help me out, too.)  And I recalled that many in five minutes, taking a walk and counting on my fingers the names of birds I could remember seeing (or hearing) in the past year or so.  Raven, magpie, robin, flicker, redwing blackbird, meadowlark … it was a pretty easy task:  informal, unscientific, but a good indication of the kind of avian diversity this place supports.

It’s a grand tradition, birdwatching.  Conjures the image of the little old person in a bucket hat and a pair of binoculars banging into her/his sternum.  I don’t have a bucket hat, though, and the only binoculars I own are in the bottom of a basket in our laundry room.  (I think.)

Still, I’m in good company.  While Native Americans have been paying attention to the movement and activities of birds for millennia, the U.S. Government got in on the act more recently, encouraging Americans to record bird sightings in order to track patterns of migration over the past century.  Now the USGS is looking for volunteers to transcribe these scribbled observations – six million index cards preserved in government files – into a database.  Scientists hope this will yield useful information regarding variations in range and other data related to climate change, land use, and similar phenomena that affect the natural world.  

It’s easy to sign up.  Just go to the USGS News story here for a link to the Bird Phenology Program.  You can concentrate on a particular species, a particular area, or just take what they throw at you.

Good at identifying birds by sight, but not so sure about their calls?  Check out Chronicle Books’ delightful BIRD SONGS, an oversized, beautifully illustrated text that includes a built-in audio player loaded with recorded songs of the featured birds.

It’s both a serious book and one heck of a great toy.  I love mine.  And if you’re entertaining two-year-olds, there’s nothing like the recorded call of a loon to keep them engaged.

How many bird species hang out where you live?

It’s not exactly a luxury destination.  Kind of cold for that.  But Lake Vostok, Antarctica, may turn out to be one of the most interesting places on earth this year.

Haven’t heard of it?  Neither had I, until I read Luke Dittrich’s piece in Esquire a few months ago.  (I can’t confess to being a regular Esquire reader; there was a copy laying around at the salon I go to, and I glanced through it while waiting to get my hair cut.)

Lake Vostok isn’t even visible, unless you’ve got ice-penetrating radar.  It’s a freshwater lake the size of Lake Ontario trapped four kilometers under glacial ice, and people are calling it the last virgin wilderness on Earth.  For a little while, anyway.  At least until the team of Russian scientists drilling toward water break through the last meter of ice protecting the free water.

That water’s been around for twenty-five million years, and hasn’t seen the light of day since the ice cap sealed it half a million years ago.  It’s absolutely pristine, and what it has to tell us about life on earth in the distant past is an exciting prospect. The water there is more oxygen-rich than any other terrestrial lake environment, and the microbes scientists expect to find living there will undoubtedly show some unique and startling adaptations to their unusual environment.  In fact, the lakes most resembling Vostok in scientific models are those found on Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.  If there’s life in Vostok, could there be life on Europa or Enceladus?

Here’s the rub: the equipment used to drill the nearly 12,000-foot-long ice core is contaminated with lubricants and other chemicals, and the hole itself has been filled with diesel fuel to prevent it from refreezing.  Presents a bit of a problem, as you might imagine.  Yes, breaking through to fresh water would doubtless yield exciting and important scientific discoveries… but introducing that gunk to the pure lake environment would corrupt and endanger the entire ecosystem.

I’m staying tuned to find out what happens next.  Meanwhile, I’ll stick to the topic of Antarctica in literature for the next few posts.  Come back Monday for a look at the white continent in Michael Chabon’s fiction.

Wherever you are, try to stay warm.  It’s -62 at Vostok Station, with forecasters predicting snow. 

When I walk the burn trail now it’s open country, grassy, with gorgeous views of the mountains both east and west and charred skeletons of the pines the blaze left behind.  It’s common to find elk track, and deer, and turkey, and the pinch-ended scat of coyote.  This fall I was pretty sure I found mountain lion scat.  Bigger than coyote, full of hair, shaped like in the pictures.  It was sitting in the middle of the trail with what looked like scratch marks around it.  Not that it would be a big deal, really.  We know they’re around, up in the mountains, down in the Gorge.  My neighbor got roughed up by a lion some years ago, not far from here.  Plenty of people have spotted them.  But I got excited.

And the truth is, I got scared.

Linda Hogan knows big animals.  In POWER, her novel about the endangered Florida panther, she gets at the mythic quality of this cat.  Her work here, as in SOLAR STORMS and in PEOPLE OF THE WHALE, her 2008 novel, turns her vivid attention to a rend in the center of modern life.  By abandoning old ways (particularly traditions that address how to behave toward animals), she contends, modern people have lost the connection that places them in proper relationship with the rest of the world.  In her books, the consequence of this amnesia is dire, both for the humans and for the animals.

Hogan, who is of Chickasaw and Germanic descent, is neither the first nor the only novelist to address this cultural fracture among indigenous people.  Nor are her observations restricted to Native Americans.  What sets Hogan apart from other novelists who trace similar themes in their work is her lyrical, incantatory ability to evoke a place so fully that the reader feels entirely, almost deliriously, immersed.  From SOLAR STORMS:

There was a place inside the human that spoke with land, that entered dreaming, in the way that people in the north found direction in their dreams.  They dreamed charts of land and currents of water.  They dreamed where food animals lived.  These dreams they called hunger maps and when they followed those maps, they found their prey.  It was the language animals and humans had in common.  People found their cures in the same way.

            ”No one understands this anymore.  Once they dreamed lynx and beaver,” Agnes said.  “It used to be that you could even strike a bargain with the weather.”

            For my own part in this dreaming, as soon as I left time, when Thursday and Friday slipped away, plants began to cross my restless sleep in abundance.  A tendril reached through darkness, a first sharp leaf came up from the rich ground of my sleeping, opened upward from the place in my body that knew absolute truth.  It wasn’t a seed that had been planted there, not a cultivated growing, but a wild one, one that had been there all along, waiting.  I saw vines creeping forward.  Inside the thin lid of an eye, petals opened, and there was pollen at the center of each flower.  Field, forest, swamp.  I knew how they breathed at night, and how they were linked to us in that breath.  It was the oldest bond of survival.  I was devoted to woods the wind walked through, to mosses and lichens.  Somewhere in my past, I had lost the knowing of this opening light of life, the taking up of minerals from the dark ground, the magnitude of thickets and brush.  Now I found it once again.(170)

 

Hogan relinquishes none of the other tools of vivid narrative – her plots are compelling, her characters richly modeled, the arc of the story complex and satisfying – but her capacity to anchor the human in the place is extraordinary, and her ability to evoke the physical and spiritual power of animals I find unparalleled.

Camille Colatosti interviewed Linda Hogan for  The Witness in 2002.  In speaking about a gathering of tribal elders to address endangered species concern, Hogan said, “One of the most traditional, a man in his 80s named Howard Luke, who is an Alaskan Athabaskan, said that we do not live in a human-centered world. Animals are watching us and know what we are doing.”

On the burn trail, I got the feeling that maybe there was a mountain lion watching me, knowing what I was doing.  I didn’t know how to behave, exactly.  So I said a little prayer for both of us and walked on.