"NOW AND AGO" An Essay Revering the Oldest Rocks in Kansas by RiverSoul

 Monument to the Ice Age, Blue Rapids, KS

              One recent day, as I periodically feel the need to do, I revisited the Age of Glaciers Monument in the small NE Kansas town of Blue Rapids.  Some 10-11,000 years before the present (YBP) the last glacial sheet melted its way north out of Kansas.  Fossil evidence shows that several large mammals, including both mastodon and mammoth, roamed the Midwest during that time.  Archeological evidence suggests that Paleo-Indians lived in Kansas by that time and hunted, among other animals, those giant elephantine forms.

         The basic reason for my revisits is a particular type of stone:  Sioux quartzite.  I needed to read again that the large pieces of this stone, scoured out and dragged by the last glacier from SW Minnesota and found scattered across the landscape as far south as the glaciated NE corner of Kansas, are at least 1.5 billion years old.  This quartzite, a type of metamorphic rock formed from sandstone under great heat and pressure at geologic depth, began with ancient riverbed sand deposits.

          I grew up encountering those large, roughly spherical chunks of quartzite scattered across my home county of Pottawatomie that lies just to the SE of Blue Rapids.  Some chunks of this reddish-brown, very dense and resistant stone are 5-6 feet in diameter.  Standing next to one of these large stones, I feel jelly fish fragile and utterly temporary.

Oldest Rocks in Kansas

          Why does whatever metaphysical plan that may exist even bother with the mortal, and tenuous, human stage of development?  Is it (to use poet Maxine Kumin’s term) that our “Ground Time” here is a period of testing to determine what sort of placement we will earn in the spirit world?

          Or is the appearance of humans on this planet just the result of contingencies, a position fervently argued by Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard paleontologist and student of evolutionary theory?  Did our line persist and develop to its present stage due to a string of unplanned mutations and happenstances in the struggles, the gives and takes, the triumphs and losses of organisms during the eons of life on Earth?  Did we become the dominant species by a series of unplanned rolls of the dice?

          Or, to look at Sioux quartzite in another way, was this stone shown to us as another potent lesson about time?  About how, looking at that ancient rock, we must be moved to admit that, in spite of our thus far short Ground Time here, we, recklessly, have done great harm to the Mother Earth that sustains us?

          About how we humans have a finite amount of time—a non-renewable resource—at our disposal to turn around our collective lifestyle; about how, given our penchant for habitat destruction, and if humans are to have that significant Ground Time here, we must learn to not wait, as we tend to do, until it is almost too late; about how we must learn to live in a state of mutualism with our Earth?

          About how we must desist from viewing our Earth as something evil, as something we must conquer and control?  (Being evil is not the same as being dangerous.)  About how we must accept that we are part of the biological and physical worlds that swirl both around and within each of us?  About how we must learn to both cherish and to become persistent allies of the fragile crust of Spaceship Earth?  About how our interactions with our planet must be done with the grace of the good neighbor:  the patient gardener with the long view, living a blessed lifestyle known as “reciprocity?”

     I study the small piece of quartzite on my shelf—and I wonder.

                                                                                                                   RiverSoul

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