Time Will Tell

This is out of season, content-wise, but I ran across it looking for something in July. The massive, fern-covered boulder balanced at the edge of Nameless Creek puts me into the context of time on a much larger scale that the four seasons.

Here in the Ancient Appalachians (as compared to the newer shallow-ocean parts of Southwest Virginia) the mountain crests some 700 million years ago were like the comparatively young Rocky Mountains of today, except by some geologists reckoning, much taller.

And so this piece of the earth's original rock tumbled down from a mountain ridge at maybe 25,000 feet somewhere over what is now Floyd County back in a time when The Buffalo was a deeply subterranean igneous extrusion. Who knows what kind of torrent a 10,000 year flood would be, and this boulder has seen hundreds of them.

And now, high places have been made low. Our little creek purrs along, not even coming high enough to reach the base of my favorite monument to time. It has become a part of earth itself, supporting life, even as it stands at the very brink, geologically speaking, of itself wearing down to nothing but sand, washing speck by grain down Nameless Creek.

So I apologize for a winter scene in the middle of summer. But then again, what better time having just turned the corner of our shorter measure of time, the days growing shorter by minutes a day, and earth's seasons too are moving, and man's.

Are we in our infancy as a living planet and a species, or are we well past our glory days? Only time will tell.