Disguised as mountains

 I am going to do something different today. Philosophizing, you might call it. Rambling about, spiralling in on something I've learned.

As a small child, I overheard my doctor talking to Mom. The walls were thin; this was not for my ears. He said, good old white-haired Doctor Gilchrist, dead and gone now these 60 years and more, he told Mom not to expect me to reach adulthood. He was mistaken, no blame to him; this was before the age of antibiotics. I'm now 82 years old, and I think I'm an adult.

I took this to heart. Not with despair, but with determination. I was going to remember. Everything. Because I was a child and still took literally all I had been told, and "knew" I would soon be facing heaven. And I didn't like what they said heaven was; gates and paved streets and gold, all shiny and hard. I was a child of the rainforest. The substrates I knew were water and wood, mossy rock and forest duff. No straight lines anywhere, nothing polished,  no stony walls. No gold. So I was going to store up memories of the world around me to hark back to for comfort once I was stuck in heaven. (I was a child, remember.)

I had plenty of time to stock up memories. I spent many hours looking out my window, or my hospital windows, watching, watching. The way water moved, the swaying of evergreen branches, the shapes of the mountains, the courses of raindrops on glass; I can still see them, could still paint the picture of the view out of my bedroom window.

When I was able, and released into the wild, I kept up the program of remembering. The scent of pine branches, the taste of fresh huckleberries, the business of crabs on the stony beach, the smell of wood smoke and the touch of salt spray on my face. I swam down under the dock to look at the sea urchins clustered there. I climbed the hill and lay on the moss in the afternoon sunlight. All filed away.

So nothing has changed. I still go out and look and remember. And after years in other climes, I'm back close to home, where I spent my first years. I'm once again in the rainforest. Looking at lichen and mushrooms, logs on the shore, gulls and crows, hermit crabs and bees and diving ducks ... And mountains.

And here's where what I'm seeing has changed for me. The mountains. The rocks. Glacial erratics on the shore; tall, forbidding rock faces where they've cut roads through the hills; slabs of sandstone forming the bed of a summer-slow creek. Rocks.

I am not a scientist. Science-oriented, yes, but not extensively science-trained. And geology has never been my strong suit; I know the basics, that's about it. But I've loved the mountains, even more so after some years in Bella Coola, in that deep valley hemmed in by white peaks. Nusatsum, the Saloompt, Noosgulch, Thunder Mountain; I can see their shapes in my dreams yet. And then, here in Campbell River, as I drive down the shore highway at low tide, I pass glacier-wrought beach decor; long scratches in flat slabs of sandstone and discarded rocks scattered about, glacial erratics, their lower surfaces colonized by barnacles. This island has been a busy place ever since it sprung out of the sea, so many millennia ago.

But there has always been a divide, to my mind: nature, with its horde of living things, and star stuff, the rocks Ma Nature lives on. And this was another mistake.

I don't know where, exactly, I started to realize it. Maybe reading about the fossils of crinoids found near Buttle Lake. Maybe earlier, splitting a stone from the clay hillside below my cabin in the Fraser Valley and finding inside it a fossilized leaf. But still, those were examples of life trapped in stone. I was reading about limestone when it finally clicked; the stone is as much part of living Nature as the snowdrops that sprung up beside my door last week and the cat that sits on my windowsill, tail twitching as she watches the sparrows in the plum tree, so tantalizingly out of reach.

See, limestone is made up of the shells of tiny marine animals. My rock book lists, "Reef forming animals, such as corals and algae, and shelled animals such as bivalves, gastropods, brachiopods, ammionites and echinoids  are all common and sometimes form the entire rock." Like the moon snail shell I found on the beach, like the weathered clam and mussel shells that make up much of the sand. Just older. Very much older; the crinoids at Buttle Lake were there, waving about underwater, collecting their food just as barnacles do today, but this was 290 to 260 million years ago.

That's the limestone. What about the igneous rocks, the basalt and granite? No telling what they were before they got crushed and melted down there in the deep earth, but there is one hint; by weight, their most common element is oxygen. The element that turned this globe from a barren waste to a growing, living, breathing thing.

The Bella Coola river runs green, a pale blue-green that tints the ocean water for 15 kilometres beyond the estuary. Glacier runoff, rock flour; the mountain rocks ground to a fine powder and borne out to sea to slowly sink to the bottom, there to provide trace minerals to swimming and creeping critters, or even to be converted to those super-hard snail teeth (made of goethite crystals). Given a few hundred millennia, if the sun still shines, these same snail's teeth will be rock again, ready to be stewed, squeezed, re-ground, delivered for re-use by a new generation of critters. Ma Nature recycles.

And life goes on. Even when it's disguised as mountains. The rocks from which life arose, back there in the cooling star stuff.

It's all of a piece. This world is a living entity. Maybe the stars are dead. Lifeless, anyhow. But now I wouldn't be so sure.

One more thing to remember.

Today's photos are ones I took years ago, in 2010: the mountains of the Bella Coola valley.

View from near the top of the Hill, the road dropping down into the valley, a 1500 metre drop.

Nusatsum, as seen from my window.

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Lo siento: no he traducido este post; lo haré mañana o pasado mañana, y subiré la traducción aquí.

Por ahora, las fotos son de las montañas en el valle de Bella Coola, que menciona el texto, fotos que saqué en 2010. La primera es la vista desde cerca de la bajada al valle; el camino baja 1.500 metros desde el pasaje por el Chilcotin hasta llegar al rio.

La segunda foto es de la montaña Nusatsum, como la veía desde mi ventana en el valle.