Time and Change at Chaco Canyon

[Listen to this post read by its author.]

"A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down ... There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen among those who come after." (Ecclesiastes, 1:4-5, 11, RSV)

Chaco Culture National Historical Park, October 2019, photos by PB Laub

Trees and their shade are mostly absent here. In their place are stark cliffs of sandstone, slowly eroding in the ceaseless, arid wind. What draws people out here, nearly an hour of slow and bumpy road from the nearest sizable town, are the remains. Stone and masonry, as well as still abundant pot shards, stand in silent testament to what once was. Eight or nine hundred years ago, Chaco Canyon was a settlement or destination for the Ancestral Puebloan people, a site perhaps of trade or of worship. Then, abruptly, people disappeared; the site was abandoned.

What happened and why has been the subject of continuing speculation and debate. Some, like Jared Diamond, in his 2005 book Collapse, look for ecological or social causes of decline. Might the clear cutting the timber nearby been a factor, or over-reliance on food imported from great distances? Others, like Anna Sofaer, find, amidst the apparent disaster, evidence of advanced astronomical knowledge employed by the Puebloan people. So, might Chaco be a warning that feats of science and engineering offer little protection from societal collapse? The Roman Empire is long gone too, though their marvels of engineering, the aqueducts and the Coliseum, still stand.

I visited Chaco Culture National Historical Park last month, coming up from Albuquerque with others for a long day of hiking. I could write about a long climb up a narrow slot canyon beside Kin Kletso, about how glad I was not to know in advance about the steep ascent and, worse, the steep descent awaiting me. But no. More memorable was the enigmatic feel of the place, first experienced as an absence and, later, as a presence.

Fossils found in sandstone at Chaco Canyon, October 2019, photos by PB Laub

Fossils abound in the hard sandstone underfoot. You need not seek them out. Fossil impressions of shells and ripples suggest an ancient sea, one dated to the Cretaceous Period 85 to 75 million years ago. Then, a vast interior sea -- called the Western Interior Seaway  -- bisected the still-forming North American continent into distinct land masses. Once water washed this parched land. Walk further and notice what looks to be rusting rebar poking up through the rocks. "What the hell?", I wondered, baffled. What they are, a park ranger later told me, are three-dimensions casts of burrows made by crustaceans. Ophiomorpha Nodosa these casts are called. Iron in the cement filling the casts rusts, just as rebar rusts. And, being harder and more erosion-resistant than surrounding rock, these rebar-like casts are revealed as the softer surrounding rock disintegrates back into sand.
Even the hardest of rocks weather and erode. Sandstone crumbles back into the sand from which it was made, at some later time to be melted, compressed, or cemented into new rock. In geology, this is taught as the Rock Cycle. The cycle shows how rocks are forever being recycled and remade, the past they reveal erased and consumed.

Chaco is a somber place, a mute monument to the relentlessness of time. Seeing similar remains near Los Alamos several years ago, I wondered aloud, "and what happened to the people who lived here?" Someone overheard and surprised me, saying, "Oh, they're all around you. Their descendants are the people of New Mexico's pueblos." Evidently, continuity remains even as the connecting strands vanish.

Since that small epiphany, I've wondered how the world would feel if we let go and stopped resisting the passage of time. Ecclesiastes, the book of the Jewish canon quoted above, urges a return to God as answer to the ravages of time. Maybe, or maybe not. Rather than lamenting the brevity of life and the fragility of memory -- "there is no remembrance of former things", Ecclesiastes insists -- we might instead ride the wave of time as long as we live, celebrating the dynamic earth and its cycles, looking to the sky not for Heaven but for the heavens of stars and planets moving in a mathematical precision that we and our Native American brethren have figured out.

posted: 2019-11-23, last edited: 2019-11-24

My Radioactive Life, part I

[Listen to this post read by its author.]

When I was a kid, one thing I had to have was something radioactive. My friends had things I coveted but could never possess: parents with even a passing interest in science, for instance, or a Johnny Unitas football card. So it seemed just that I should have something they'd never have: radioactive atoms decaying and disintegrating in a glowing spew of alpha or beta particles.

Configure the right radioactivity in the right way, and you have a nuclear bomb. Screw it up -- simply spill the stuff all over yourself -- and you die a horrible death of radiation sickness, your corpse interred in a lead-lined coffin. Not that that scared me. After all, wasn't Peter Parker bitten by a radioactive spider? And look what happened to him: he became Spider Man! This was the late 1960s. I was nine. When the TV set was free, I'd watch The Man from Uncle and Mission: Impossible, Cold War dramas frequently featuring spies from Red China and Communist Russia. Like me, those bad guys were scheming to get the radioactive stuff; their adversaries in contrast were trying to poison them with it. Radioactivity radiated cachet. 

I knew precisely what I wanted, and it wasn't illegal, just unsafe. It was a few micrograms of radium suspended in a solution of zinc sulfide. I knew I'd find it painted on the hands of old wristwatches. Decaying radium's radioactive rain of alpha particles made those watch hands glow in the dark. Quite likely, it also caused the cancer deaths of the women employed in painting those watch hands [1].   

Radium alone was not enough. Other things safely glowed in the dark. Who would believe me when I claimed that radioactivity was the reason? Consequently, I needed a Geiger counter to prove my claim. I'd remove the glass cover of the watch, exposing the watch face. "Go ahead, slowly move the wand toward the watch", I'd tell my skeptical friend Todd, the one with the Unitas card, handing him the cylindrical probe of the Geiger counter. Slowly, steadily the rate of the counter's clicking would accelerate, from a few lackadaisical clicks per minute at a foot away to a frenetic clatter and chatter at less than an inch away. Or so I imagined. "This is the real stuff", I'd say, grinning. "Bombs are made of it. Spies want it. And I've got it!" 

I never got it. At age nine, getting radium meant asking the parents. To them nothing, I suspect, could be more preposterous than a request for something radioactive. Whatever they thought radioactivity was, it surely wasn't something for their child. My asking, I reasoned, would be interpreted in either of two possible ways. Either I was a wise guy, purposely asking for something I could never possess. Punishment was the due response. Or, worse, I was yet again a "scatterbrains" and a "retard", my brain warped by too much television, deserving not just punishment but also medication by some elementary school Nurse Ratched [2] as well as demotion to the Special Ed program. Knowing better, I kept my head down and my goddamned mouth shut. "Children are not to speak unless spoken to".  

I never needed to get it. I already had it, had it all along without knowing. Well, not radium, but something else radioactive: potassium-40. You might say it was under my nose the whole time, except that it was my nose, and all the rest of my body. Our bodies are radioactive with naturally-occurring potassium-40, some 4000 atoms decaying each second, showering the cells of my body with high-energy beta particles and gamma rays. And yet we have evolved an ability to live and thrive in the face of such abuse. How?

I remain the skeptical kid I was half a century ago. Then I needed a Geiger counter to convince myself and my friends of radium's radioactivity. Now I need mathematical proof that the value of 4000 is real. I'll believe the number when I can derive it myself. And so I have. It is here: Rate of Potassium-40 Decay in the Human Body 

Footnotes

1. As lurid as my childhood imagination was, reality, sadly, has not been far behind. For horrible deaths of radiation sickness, one need only review the cancer deaths of those employed painting the watches I so desired, as well as accidents suffered by Los Alamos weapons scientists Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. Worse was the 2006 murder of Russian dissident and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London. He was poisoned with a lethal dose of Polonium-210.

2. My eternal nemesis, embodiment of childhood's threats and evil, Nurse Ratched.

posted: 2019-11-22, last edited: 2019-11-30

Books behind this blog

This week's post is be found on a separate page of this blog. On that "Bookshelf" page, I discuss the books (mostly) most important to me over the years. They offer a taste of how this blog may evolve.

posted: 2019-11-15, last edited: 2019-11-27

About this blog (first post)

[Listen to this post read by its author.]

Opening my apartment's Venetian blinds reveals volcanoes, five small cinder cones lurking, like acne upon my adolescent face, 12 miles to the west. This is Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the American Southwest.

Picturesque Mount Fuji or Mount Etna they are not, but volcanic these five unimpressive mounds most definitely are. A first visitor to my new digs, Billy, pointed them out to me. Intrigued, I responded "... and extinct". After all, I had read about about local volcanoes in this area, ones last erupting 150 to 200 thousand years ago. "Dormant", he responded, politely correcting me. On a geological time scale, what is a few hundred thousand years? Just yesterday, perhaps. Or tomorrow. Here then was a first lesson for this Easterner who had recently moved to New Mexico: the earth beneath our feet is ceaselessly active, if only on time scales humanly imperceptible.

None of this I expected moving here from the Gulf Coast of Florida last July. Rather, I came for the cooler, arid climate of countless sunny days, the lower cost of living, and a fresh start. Standing at the corner of Wyoming and Lomas Boulevards last May, waiting for the traffic light to change, I looked east to looming scarp of the Sandia Mountains. "How sheer and how close by", I thought. "I ought to be able walk to its foothills in under 90 minutes." Indeed, I can, and I do. At that instant, I decided here would be my new home.

Having never owned,  or even driven,  a vehicle, I use my feet and public transit. Traveling at four miles per hour alters one's sense of time and distance. My trip last Monday to the five volcanoes consumed the entire day: walking some 19 or 20 miles, riding over an hour on the number 157 city bus, drinking three liters of water, and downing four ibuprofen tablets to soothe the aches and pains those miles put on my 58-year-old body.

Part of that walking took me up and through a road cut on Unser Boulevard. Cars zipped by, few I suspect, noticing the roadside rubble, from pebbles to boulders in size, of hard, black basalt. Call it lava or hardened magma, basalt is extrusive igneous silicate rock darkly colored from its abundant magnesium and iron. Albuquerque's West Mesa is built upon a blanket of the stuff, in places one hundred feet thick, the viscous ooze issuing forth from the last eruption of those dormant -- but not extinct -- volcanoes.

Geologists have a good explanation why our volcanoes run north-south parallel to the Sandia Mountains with the city of Albuquerque nested in between. We live in the Rio Grande Rift. For the last 20 million years, the crust of the earth has been pulling apart here and faulting. More about that will come in subsequent posts.

For me, basalt is more than a type of rock. It is also a metaphor for the desires and drives seething deep within each of us. Think, for example, not only of our various fears but also of our erotic drive to create art, or procreate children. Then too there is our anxiety over the finiteness of our lives, as well as our yearning to transcend all that is human. These too are "deep dark basalt".

This blog's header photograph (visible in the blog's desktop version) shows Vulcan Volcano, one of the five, now just two and a half miles to the south. I photographed it on Monday's long walk. The last miles of my approach followed an unmarked, rock-strewn dirt path. Overhead, high voltage power lines stretch, arching in catenary grace, testament to our human presence and imprint upon the land. "Rattlesnakes", I thought with dread. "Pay attention, watch and listen for them." Nonetheless, the volcanoes beckon. I must visit.

posted: 2019-11-09, last edited: 2019-11-30