Pele's Flapping The Sheets

I've said it before. People take things so dang personally. One little thing goes wrong and it's all about them. Everyone bitches about the crappy weather on the weekend, but crappy for whom? There could be legions of salamanders who couldn't be tickleder about it, but nobody thinks about them. They think only of themselves.

I guess it's just our nature. We've got a hell of a thing going on in Hawaii right now that anybody should be honored to witness but it's being described as leaving a "path of destruction." Yes, it's possible you and your car and your house and your slower offspring and everything you've ever loved and cherished could be melted on the spot, but let's get some perspective here. This is clearly an act of creation, not destruction. You've got brand new real estate welling right up out of the ground before your very eyes.

We had much the same sort of event right here in Oregon not that many million years ago. Same kind of basalt flow. It flowed mostly westward at a decent clip until it hit the ocean and got chilly. Generally speaking, the basalt was said to flow at a rate a human being could outrun, although he would have to outrun it for a solid week. That was usually the sticking point, or would have been, had people been invented yet, but they hadn't, which cut down on the whining.

There are various ways in which molten rock meets blue sky. For instance, you could put a wedge of sea floor underneath the shoreline and keep shoving it down until it got so deep the pressure remelted it, causing volcanoes such as our own Cascade Mountains to pimple up about a hundred miles inland. But in the case of our huge shield-volcano basalt flows and the Hawaiian ones, it's because there's a hotspot underneath. Some spot in the deeper earth layers is perennially hot and churns out lava. Could be in the mantle, could be one floor higher; they're not sure. It's the spot where the fire goddess Pele sits and fans herself and complains that everybody's mumbling and the music is shitty now, and many people have left gifts for her as a bid for leniency, bouquets and leis and virgin teddy bears, but it doesn't work. (She wants chocolate.)

Pele doesn't move around, but the lithosphere above her does, so it twirls out a nice apostrophe of islands over time. In the case of the Hawaiian chain, it's the southeasternmost island that is newest and they are progressively older to the northwest. There's a volcano newer than Hawaii but it hasn't broken the water surface yet, and nobody counts it until they can drop a parking lot on it. That's another narrow-perspective thing people do.

Our own basalt flows have quite sturdied up the landscape for us. Apparently we are sitting on enough basalt that it could have covered the continental U.S. evenly up to twelve meters ("meter" is French for "yard"). We and our parking lots stand now as the westernmost legacy outpost of the old hotspot that is currently under Yellowstone. Ain't nothin' but heat coming up around Yellowstone and no end of wonders to behold, but even here you'll find people all cranky about not being allowed to annoy bison with their snowmobiles. If there were any justice in the world, these are the people who would get their asses geysered.

I think there are a lot of things everyone should be required to learn. Here's one that rarely makes the list: whichever patch of the planet you live on, you should know its story. You should know what got rammed or rumpled to give you your view; you should know why there are seashells in the middle of your prairie. You should appreciate how very tiny and ephemeral you are, and be humble, and enjoy the show, and try not to trash the place on your way out.

A Ridge Too Far

So yes, I can drive a stick and I can parallel-park, which makes me better in some ways than many youngsters. Better at things that no longer need doing, but who's quibbling?

However I would be fibbing if I said I really enjoy shifting gears. I got my first automatic car ten years ago and the only stick shift I ever encounter anymore is on our truck. My particular economy of stature is not what the designers of our truck envisioned. My feet barely aspire to the floor. In order to drive the truck at all, I have to reach underneath the bench seat and try to motivate the whole thing forward, but I'm not as strong as I might be and if no one's there to help I usually only get it half whanged out, and not really as far forward as I need. That means I'm on the edge of the seat and at an angle, and when I put the clutch in, my leg is completely extended and also I'm driving with my tippy-toes. If my ass ever goes flat, I won't have any grip on the seat at all. The only reason I haven't hit anyone yet is probably because my driving is so erratic that everyone clears the hell out of the way.

But I haven't hit anyone yet, and I've been driving this or our previous, even-bigger truck for thirty years. Mostly without complaint. Except when I'm bringing home a load of something up 33rd Avenue. 33rd Avenue has this one steep spot with a most unfortunate traffic light right at the top of it. I get a couple yards of steaming cow shit in the bed and I'm screaming all the way up the hill. I'm screaming at the people in front of me if I think they're going to mosey me out of making the green light, and then I'm screaming at the people behind me if they're planning to come right up on my bumper. I don't want them right up on my bumper. I want them about a quarter mile from my bumper, assuming a prayerful position. I try to communicate that with enthusiastic gestures in the back window but it never works. "Oh look, George, there's a crazy butch lady in front of you. I think it's a lady. Get up closer so we can see."

Stairs up the Alameda Ridge

Apparently no one is used to manual transmissions anymore. They assume if the truck full of steaming cow shit is stationary on the hill ahead of them, the only way it can go is forward. That is not at all the only way it can go. Particularly if I'm at the wheel. Sometimes I even signal the problem to the people behind me by rolling to a stop and then toggling back and forth with the clutch and gas so it rolls back a bit--then forward, then back again--but this only seems to fascinate them.

So when the light changes I have a couple options, if what you mean by "options" are things I can control in theory. I can stomp on the gas and simultaneously rip out the clutch pedal and go forward very noisily. Or I can do that and stall out and coast backwards with no power and burst into tears. It's a crapshoot. I truly hate driving this street with a full load. I am a nervous wreck.

Alameda Ridge view: rain, but higher rain.

But we live on relatively high ground and elevation must be gained one way or the other. The problem, as I see it, is glacial Lake Missoula. We had a perfectly decent river basin here at one point, formed as a standard bit of scooped-out area in front of a group of volcanoes, and it should have been perfectly easy to haul a steaming bunch of cow shit home on it, but then came the Missoula Floods and their biblically massive cargo of sediment from eastern Washington, forty or so episodes of it, and our little neighborhood got progressively taller, and the portion at the top of 33rd Avenue in particular got taller. We  had a minor volcano in the way of the floods coming down the Columbia River, and while it got briefly turned into an island, the north portions of it got scrubbed off and deposited as a giant gravel bar. This was great news for the future denizens of the so-called Alameda Ridge who would have a nice view of the city and a bunch of money to enjoy it with, but it was terrible news for those of us further north with all the elevation and none of the view and only passable driving skills and possibly a steaming load of cow shit. And, arguably, for the people driving behind us.

The entire situation is so ghastly that I've taken to skirting the Alameda Ridge altogether. Further west there are ways to gain that elevation but not quite so fast, and as much as I'd like to take a direct route, there's something to be said for getting home at all. I don't have to go too far out of my way. Just 15,000 years or so.

Take This With A Grain Of Basalt

I think everyone should be required to learn the geological history of their particular patch of the planet. It helps drill home the notion that life did not begin on the day of one's own birth, and that, by corollary, we should not keep thinking we are so special. This is important. When we, as a group, begin thinking we are so special, we make decisions we might regret later.

I've been working on my own education. And what I've discovered is how many spectacular ways you could be dead right now if you'd started out 150 million years ago in Oregon, assuming the old age didn't get you first. Oh sure, you'd have to contend with earthquakes and volcanoes just about anywhere, eventually, and certainly here, but we've had catastrophes other places can only dream about.

For starters, you'd have been screwed almost everywhere in Oregon 150 million years ago unless you could tread water for a very long time. There really wasn't anything to plant a flag on. There were bunches of coral reefs and volcanic islands dotting the vast sea, happy and tropical, with no aspirations whatsoever to be welded to the landscape, whilst the Americas and Europe and Africa were jammed up and hunkering nearby. But once the Americas got the notion to make a break for it, it was Westward Ho at ramming speed. The islands, meanwhile, were moseying east, all unawares, and then, suddenly--like over the course of sixty million years--they were mashed into the continent. A bunch of them are currently mountains in the northeast corner of the state, and the rest are currently mountains in the southwest corner of the state. The ocean used to lap up against Idaho. Now, we get to have the shoreline, and Idaho has potatoes and white people.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the ocean floor had no choice but to dive under the continent, after scraping off its volcanoes--for which we are grateful, because it is ever so fun to find fossil seashells at 9000 feet--until it got deep enough to melt something fierce, and ralph up brand new volcanoes. A lot of the landscape just sort of accumulated between the other bits, as shallow seas grew ever shallower and eventually dried up. This is normal everyday stuff you might encounter in any state, and if it killed you, it would not kill you spectacularly. But then! Boy Howdy!

Lava! But so much lava that it flowed so thick and stayed so hot that it pushed all the way across the state, traveling at about three miles per hour. So sure, you could outwalk it, if we ignore for the moment that the 3mph is an average speed, and that it was probably a lot zippier at first, and that you probably can't walk 600 miles at a whack. But let's say you keep up a good pace: that crap is going all the way to the ocean, and there you are, not only drowned, but cooked in steamy hot water like a chicken nugget. And if that particular flow didn't get you, there were lots more. This went on for three million years, and you probably didn't.

Say you rode out those three million years on a stratovolcano and finally thought it was safe to head

down to the valleys. Feeling lucky? Surprise! Floods. And floods that Noah had no chance of riding out, no matter who he thought he had in his corner. 300-foot-tall walls of water coming through at 65 mph over and over for two thousand years. You're toast. Grab your little dinghy and kiss it goodbye.

But if you've made it this far, hang the hell on. Any day now we're going to shear off and head up to Alaska. It's going to be a bumpy flight.