Earth Words
One thing I’ve learned from my recent discovery of geology is this. Rivers dry up. Rivers change course. Rivers are anything but permanent. I think of this every time I drive over the Guadalupe River just upstream of Canyon Lake. The river is empty. Bone dry. There’s nothing but rocks covered in dried minerals and dust. It may flow again, but studies show that the effective 100th meridian, first named by John Wesley Powell, is likely heading east to the 98th, and things behind it are turning arid. That includes the watershed of the Guadalupe River, and the Pedernales and others.
Of course, rainfall will fluctuate just enough for the deniers to say otherwise, but time will march on. The earth will continue to warm, and the continents will continue to move. The river will leave, and I will be dead and gone. At some point down the road, the strata where I have walked and lived and drove will become buried under sediments that may blow in by the wind or be carried along by a new inland sea. And who knows, maybe the ice will come again. It only started leaving what’s now the US about 18,000 years ago and that’s no time at all in the history of earth.
Science fiction would suggest that we will be able to control the weather, but I think that has always assumed a more or less static earth. And we now know that the planet is alive, and the continents are on the march, and there will be more volcanoes and mountains. Things will be uplifted, rent asunder, folded, and compressed. Lava will flow, ash will fall. Seas will rise, move, cover, retreat, rise again. And who knows, one day earth might well say once more, here’s another life form I can do without.