Edward Nugent's Blog - Posts Tagged "geology"
New Essay
This piece was first published in the October, 2017 issue of Hippocampus Magazine. I hope you enjoy it.
A Paean to Change
I live in a dynamic topography. To my east the cerulean waters of the Gulf of California fill the rent in the Earth’s crust where, on its journey northward, the Pacific Plate is swinging away from the North American Plate. To my west is the Sierra Gigante. The name Sierra (sawblade), so apt, as the peaks thrust fifteen hundred meters upward straight from the sea. It is on this boundary between sea and sierra I live.
The Sierra itself speaks of its birth in earth, fire and water as sedimentary layers of sand, clay and conglomerates alternate or are covered by pyroclastic and lava flows a hundred or more meters thick each one on top of the other. The boundaries are clearly defined by horizontal lines that slant, dive, dip and bend in response to crustal forces hidden far below.
Raging torrents from the late summer tropical storms (tormentas tropicales), in their torment, claw sheer walled canyons that line the Sierra’s rocky faces. The furious waters propel car sized boulders that choke the narrows, and in sandstone ledges, leave gouge lines. Even in summer heat, where waterfalls once thundered, tiny cascades trickle into pools scooped deep into yielding stone, respite from the withering heat.
Gravity requires movement in only one direction—down. Not even the loftiest peak can resist. Whole mountainsides slump as their bases erode. Boulders are ground to stones which are, in turn, ground to sand. All impelled to the sea and the mighty chasm below from whence all originated.
I have always lived with mountains and canyons. I spent the bulk of my life in the Colorado Rockies. I have stood at six thousand meters and gazed at a peak nearly three thousand meters higher called, by those who live in its shadow, The Goddess Mother of the Earth. I matured on the Colorado Plateau, played in a place so riven that it is named Canyon Lands, traversed the canyon immense enough to be called Grand, yet nothing is like where I am right now in scope or impact.
Here, the forces of the Earth are laid bare. Epochs of change are frozen in time and motion, leaving only distance, and perhaps it is that distance that occupies me now—the distance from friends, family and all that was once familiar, the distance between each of us as human beings, the distance from my own birth. Distance can change by the variables of time and motion. I can return to the familiar by moving back to where I came from. Distance between people can be bridged with time and movement toward understanding. The distance that can’t be closed is the one controlled by direction—the expanding distance from my own creation.
My own cycle is mirrored by the landscape that surrounds me. I too am separated from what was once familiar. Deep chasms separate me from those I love. My face is furrowed by life’s inescapable torments. I am layered, bent and fractured. On a far faster scale, I too am being exposed and worn down by inescapable forces. All things that are must return to their source to be reformed, recast, remade, recreated, the process of the universe itself.
Edward Nugent
A Paean to Change
I live in a dynamic topography. To my east the cerulean waters of the Gulf of California fill the rent in the Earth’s crust where, on its journey northward, the Pacific Plate is swinging away from the North American Plate. To my west is the Sierra Gigante. The name Sierra (sawblade), so apt, as the peaks thrust fifteen hundred meters upward straight from the sea. It is on this boundary between sea and sierra I live.
The Sierra itself speaks of its birth in earth, fire and water as sedimentary layers of sand, clay and conglomerates alternate or are covered by pyroclastic and lava flows a hundred or more meters thick each one on top of the other. The boundaries are clearly defined by horizontal lines that slant, dive, dip and bend in response to crustal forces hidden far below.
Raging torrents from the late summer tropical storms (tormentas tropicales), in their torment, claw sheer walled canyons that line the Sierra’s rocky faces. The furious waters propel car sized boulders that choke the narrows, and in sandstone ledges, leave gouge lines. Even in summer heat, where waterfalls once thundered, tiny cascades trickle into pools scooped deep into yielding stone, respite from the withering heat.
Gravity requires movement in only one direction—down. Not even the loftiest peak can resist. Whole mountainsides slump as their bases erode. Boulders are ground to stones which are, in turn, ground to sand. All impelled to the sea and the mighty chasm below from whence all originated.
I have always lived with mountains and canyons. I spent the bulk of my life in the Colorado Rockies. I have stood at six thousand meters and gazed at a peak nearly three thousand meters higher called, by those who live in its shadow, The Goddess Mother of the Earth. I matured on the Colorado Plateau, played in a place so riven that it is named Canyon Lands, traversed the canyon immense enough to be called Grand, yet nothing is like where I am right now in scope or impact.
Here, the forces of the Earth are laid bare. Epochs of change are frozen in time and motion, leaving only distance, and perhaps it is that distance that occupies me now—the distance from friends, family and all that was once familiar, the distance between each of us as human beings, the distance from my own birth. Distance can change by the variables of time and motion. I can return to the familiar by moving back to where I came from. Distance between people can be bridged with time and movement toward understanding. The distance that can’t be closed is the one controlled by direction—the expanding distance from my own creation.
My own cycle is mirrored by the landscape that surrounds me. I too am separated from what was once familiar. Deep chasms separate me from those I love. My face is furrowed by life’s inescapable torments. I am layered, bent and fractured. On a far faster scale, I too am being exposed and worn down by inescapable forces. All things that are must return to their source to be reformed, recast, remade, recreated, the process of the universe itself.
Edward Nugent
Essay from Litterary Orphans
This essay was first published in Issue 26 of literary Orphans Magazine. Enjoy.
Mind Canyon
Though it is early, the sun is intense and promises a withering day ahead. I swing my hydration pack onto my shoulders, adjust the drinking tube, and take a swallow from the bite-valve. Picking a path through what appears to be widely spaced chaparral should be easy, but there is actually little open space between the spreading, spiny branches of the palo verde, mesquite, ocotillo, and uña de gato bushes. Chollas fill any clearing in the brushy forest, ready, with their bulbous branches covered in hair-like spines, to grab the incautious or unsuspecting passerby. Pitayas reach up and spread their arms like huge, green and black striped candelabras. Cardones dominate the canopy; their thick, green trunk and forked branches reach twenty feet or more into the clear, blue desert sky. The ground is hard and rocky. Finding a livestock trail that threads through this forest is welcome.
The trail is not straight but curves and bends; weaving up and over the rounded ridge, it descends into the wide, rock-strewn bed of an arroyo. I turn left and walk upstream. Though it is dry now, even here, where the arroyo has widened to at least sixty feet, the magnitude of the late summer floods is marked by the highline of debris a few inches higher than my head. Branches, uprooted bushes and trees, even stones, are driven, wedged, and wrapped around the paper white trunks of the palo blanco trees rooted on the silty islands of the braided watercourse.
As the arroyo narrows, the sandy, stony bottom turns to a boulder-strewn passage that, instead of walking, requires a ballet of hopping and balancing to the imagined crescendo of surging water and crashing stones. There are interludes where the floods have swept the floor clear and clean all the way to bare rock to reveal shallow sandstone ledges, like pages of an open book, each page a single layer, an episode, in the cycle of a once covering sea.
In the rocks, I can see the epic of their creation: The Earth is split as the Pacific Plate pulls from the North American Plate. The ocean pours into the widening gash. The Baja Peninsula rises from the newly created Sea of Cortez. Volcanos spew clouds of ash; layers of rose and gray lava flow and bury shales, sandstones and conglomerates, and in many places, metamorphose those marine layers into more durable schists and gneisses. Magma bulges and heaves from below, which fracture the layers above as it forces them upward. The pressure and heat shoot molten minerals into the fractures where they cool and harden. Sun, gravity and the seasonal rains sculpt the nascent range to reveal peaks and carve canyons. The Sierra Giganta is born.
I gain elevation quickly, though almost imperceptibly, as the canyon narrows. White, dark gray, green, yellow, and orange intrusions angle across walls of layered taupe, maroon, and pink. Where the stripes cross the canyon floor, they form dry dams several inches high to barriers that must be climbed or skirted. The walls widen and recede, as I reach the catchment basin. The canyon’s serpentine twists and bends are now behind and below me.
In the shade of a mesquite tree, I stop to rest, snack and reflect on the landscape. It is late spring. The low-growing plants are brown or tawny yellow. Most bushes and trees are leafless. Even the dusty green branches of the palo verde trees are bare but tipped with tiny flowers that resemble a crown of pale yellow-green mist. With their bristling, prickly beards, old man chollas gather in patches. The cardónes’ green skin covers their frame of vertical, wooden slats that expand to store water from the rains, only to contract during times of inevitable drought.
As I stretch out in the patchy shade of a mesquite tree, I see a flit. I look closely and can see a cardinal; its vivid red matches the flower blooming at the very tip of the otherwise lifeless-appearing palo adán. I hear its distinctive tiú, tiú, tiú, tiú. The longer I am still, the more bird songs I hear. I recognize the descending scale of the canyon wren and the whirring, lu, lu, lu, lu as a white wing dove takes flight. It is canyon music.
A whisper of breeze, like breath, sweeps up from below. Each canyon has its own, distinctive breath. Here, the breath is intermittent, cool, faintly scented with copal. It softly brushes my skin. My mind drifts with the breeze.
What suite would Copeland compose to capture this landscape? What instruments could conjure the rending of continental plates, the blasts of spewing volcanoes, the groans and shrieks of a mountain range being born? Could its movements rage like the flood, and rise and fall like the wind? Would birdsongs form its chorus?
Can this place, this moment, be expressed in word, canvas or song? Once roused, must imagination seek expression in form?
In the heat of the afternoon sun, I stir. The spell broken, I must return.
Edward Nugent
Mind Canyon
Though it is early, the sun is intense and promises a withering day ahead. I swing my hydration pack onto my shoulders, adjust the drinking tube, and take a swallow from the bite-valve. Picking a path through what appears to be widely spaced chaparral should be easy, but there is actually little open space between the spreading, spiny branches of the palo verde, mesquite, ocotillo, and uña de gato bushes. Chollas fill any clearing in the brushy forest, ready, with their bulbous branches covered in hair-like spines, to grab the incautious or unsuspecting passerby. Pitayas reach up and spread their arms like huge, green and black striped candelabras. Cardones dominate the canopy; their thick, green trunk and forked branches reach twenty feet or more into the clear, blue desert sky. The ground is hard and rocky. Finding a livestock trail that threads through this forest is welcome.
The trail is not straight but curves and bends; weaving up and over the rounded ridge, it descends into the wide, rock-strewn bed of an arroyo. I turn left and walk upstream. Though it is dry now, even here, where the arroyo has widened to at least sixty feet, the magnitude of the late summer floods is marked by the highline of debris a few inches higher than my head. Branches, uprooted bushes and trees, even stones, are driven, wedged, and wrapped around the paper white trunks of the palo blanco trees rooted on the silty islands of the braided watercourse.
As the arroyo narrows, the sandy, stony bottom turns to a boulder-strewn passage that, instead of walking, requires a ballet of hopping and balancing to the imagined crescendo of surging water and crashing stones. There are interludes where the floods have swept the floor clear and clean all the way to bare rock to reveal shallow sandstone ledges, like pages of an open book, each page a single layer, an episode, in the cycle of a once covering sea.
In the rocks, I can see the epic of their creation: The Earth is split as the Pacific Plate pulls from the North American Plate. The ocean pours into the widening gash. The Baja Peninsula rises from the newly created Sea of Cortez. Volcanos spew clouds of ash; layers of rose and gray lava flow and bury shales, sandstones and conglomerates, and in many places, metamorphose those marine layers into more durable schists and gneisses. Magma bulges and heaves from below, which fracture the layers above as it forces them upward. The pressure and heat shoot molten minerals into the fractures where they cool and harden. Sun, gravity and the seasonal rains sculpt the nascent range to reveal peaks and carve canyons. The Sierra Giganta is born.
I gain elevation quickly, though almost imperceptibly, as the canyon narrows. White, dark gray, green, yellow, and orange intrusions angle across walls of layered taupe, maroon, and pink. Where the stripes cross the canyon floor, they form dry dams several inches high to barriers that must be climbed or skirted. The walls widen and recede, as I reach the catchment basin. The canyon’s serpentine twists and bends are now behind and below me.
In the shade of a mesquite tree, I stop to rest, snack and reflect on the landscape. It is late spring. The low-growing plants are brown or tawny yellow. Most bushes and trees are leafless. Even the dusty green branches of the palo verde trees are bare but tipped with tiny flowers that resemble a crown of pale yellow-green mist. With their bristling, prickly beards, old man chollas gather in patches. The cardónes’ green skin covers their frame of vertical, wooden slats that expand to store water from the rains, only to contract during times of inevitable drought.
As I stretch out in the patchy shade of a mesquite tree, I see a flit. I look closely and can see a cardinal; its vivid red matches the flower blooming at the very tip of the otherwise lifeless-appearing palo adán. I hear its distinctive tiú, tiú, tiú, tiú. The longer I am still, the more bird songs I hear. I recognize the descending scale of the canyon wren and the whirring, lu, lu, lu, lu as a white wing dove takes flight. It is canyon music.
A whisper of breeze, like breath, sweeps up from below. Each canyon has its own, distinctive breath. Here, the breath is intermittent, cool, faintly scented with copal. It softly brushes my skin. My mind drifts with the breeze.
What suite would Copeland compose to capture this landscape? What instruments could conjure the rending of continental plates, the blasts of spewing volcanoes, the groans and shrieks of a mountain range being born? Could its movements rage like the flood, and rise and fall like the wind? Would birdsongs form its chorus?
Can this place, this moment, be expressed in word, canvas or song? Once roused, must imagination seek expression in form?
In the heat of the afternoon sun, I stir. The spell broken, I must return.
Edward Nugent
