Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  There were some thin green beds among the Bloomsburg reds. Anita said they were the Kupferschiefer greens that had given false hope to the Dutch. Whatever else there might be in the Bloomsburg Delta, there was not a great deal of copper. In the eighteen-forties, the mines of the Minisink were started up anew. They bankrupted out in a season. The Reverend F. F. Ellinwood delivered the “Dedication Sermon” in the Church of the Mountain, village of Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, August 29, 1854, a year that Ellinwood placed in the sixth millennium after Creation. “The rude blasts of six thousand winters have howled in undaunted wildness over the consecrated spot, while yet its predicted destiny was not fulfilled,” he told the congregation. “But here, at length, stands, in very deed the church firmly built upon the rock, and it is our hope and prayer that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it … . For many centuries past, has Jehovah dwelt in the rocky fastnesses of this mountain. Ere there was a human ear to listen, His voice was uttered here in the sighing of the breeze and the thunder of the storms, which even then were wont to writhe in the close grapple of this narrow gorge. Ere one human footstep had invaded the wildness of the place, or the hand of art had applied the drill and blast to the silent rock, God’s hand was working here alone—delving out its deep, rugged pathway for yonder river, and clothing those gigantic bluffs and terraces with undying verdure, and the far gleaming brightness of their laurel bloom.” The hand of art, that very summer, was blasting the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad into the silent rock. Stagecoaches would soon leave the scene. A pathway by the river was replaced with rails. The sycamores that shaded it were felled. A telegraph wire was strung through the gap. Given a choice between utility and grandeur, people apparently wanted to have it both ways. Trains would travel in one direction carrying aristocrats and in the other carrying coal.

  Anita put her fingers on fossil mud cracks, evidence not only of hours and seasons in the sun but of tranquillity in the environment in which the rock had formed. She also moved her fingers down the smooth friction streaks of slickensides (tectonic scars made by block sliding upon block, in the deforming turbulence of later times).

  In the Ecological epoch, the Backpackerhaus School of photography will not so much as glance at anything within twenty-five miles of a railhead, let alone commit it to film, but in the eighteen-fifties George Inness came to the Water Gap and set up his easel in sight of the trains. The canvases would eventually hang in the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery (London). Meanwhile, in 1860, Currier & Ives made a lithograph from one of them and published it far and wide. By 1866, there were two hundred and fifty beds in Kittatinny House alone, notwithstanding that the manager had killed a huge and ferocious catamount not far from the lobby. That scarcely mattered, for this was the New World, and out in the laurel there were also wolves and bears. The gap was on its way to becoming a first-class, busy summer resort.

  “Note the fining-upward cycles,” Anita said. “Those are cross-bedded sandstones with mud clasts at the base, rippled to unevenly bedded shaly siltstones and sandstones in the middle, and indistinctly mud-cracked bioturbated shaly siltstones with dolomite concretions at the top.”

  It was a lady visiting the Water Gap in the eighteen-sixties who made the once famous remark “What a most wonderful place would be the Delaware Water Gap if Niagara Falls were here.”

  The Aldine, in 1875, presented three wood engravings of the Water Gap featuring in the foreground gentlemen with walking sticks and ladies with parasols, their long full dresses sweeping the quartzite. The accompanying text awarded the Delaware Water Gap an aesthetic edge over most of the alpine passes of Europe. The Aldine subtitled itself “The Art Journal of America” but was not shy to make dashes into other fields. “The mountains of Pennsylvania are far less known and visited than many of the American ranges at much greater distance, and even less than many of the European ranges, while they may be said to vie in beauty with any others upon earth, and to have, in many sections, features of grandeur entitling them to eminent rank,” the magazine told its readers. “Not only the nature lover, by the way, has his scope for observation and thought in the Water Gap. The scientist has something to do, and is almost certain to do it, if he lingers there for any considerable period. He may not have quite decided how Niagara comes to be where it is—whether it was originally in the same place, or down at the mouth of the St. Lawrence; but he will find himself joining in the scientific speculations of the past half-century, as to whether the Water Gap changed to be what it is at the Flood; or whether some immense freshet broke through the barriers once standing across the way and let out what had been the waters of an immense inland lake.”

  By 1877, Kittatinny House was five stories high. Harper’s Weekly, at the end of the season, ran a wood engraving of the Water Gap in color by Granville Perkins, who had taken enough vertical license to outstretch El Greco. Under the enlofted mountain, a woman reclined on the riverbank with a pink parasol in her hand. A man in a straw boater, dark suit, was stretched beside her like a snake in the grass.

  In the crossbedding and planar bedding of the Bloomsburg rocks, as we slowly traced them forward through time, there had been evidence of what geologists call the “lower upper flow regime.” That was now becoming an “upper lower flow regime.”

  When people were bored with the river, there were orchestras, magicians, lecturers, masquerade balls. They could read one another’s blank verse:

  Huge pile of Nature’s majesty! how oft

  The mind, in contemplation wrapt, has scann’d

  Thy form serene and naked; if to tell,

  That when creation from old chaos rose,

  Thou wert as now thou art; or if some cause,

  Some secret cause, has rent thy rocky mantle,

  And hurl’d thy fragments o’er the plain below.

  The pride of man may form conceptions vast,

  Of all the fearful might of giant power

  That rent the rampart to its very base,

  Giving an exit to Lenape’s stream,

  And wildly mixing with woods and waters.

  A mighty scene to set enchantment free,

  Burst the firm barrier of eternal rock,

  If by the howling of volcanic rage,

  Or foaming terror of Noachian floods.

  Let fancy take her strongest flight … .

  But, as for us, let speculations go,

  And be the food of geologic sons;

  Who from the pebble judge the mountain’s form …

  Anita said the rock had been weakened here in this part of the mountain. The river, cutting through the formations, had found the weakness and exploited it. “Wherever a water gap or a wind gap exists, there is generally tectonic weakness in the bedrock,” she went on. “The rock was very much fractured and shattered. There is particularly tight folding here.”

  The hotels were in Pennsylvania, and were so numerous in the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties that they all but jostled one another, and suffered from the competition. Up the slope from Kittatinny House, as in a game of king-of-the-mountain, stood Water Gap House, elongate and white, with several decks of circumambient veranda under cupolas that appeared to be mansard smokestacks. All it lacked was a stern wheel. There was a fine view. On the narrow floodplain and river terraces of New Jersey, where I-80 would be, there were cultivated fields and split-rail fences, corn shocks in autumn, fresh furrows in spring.

  Anita and I came to the end of the Bloomsburg, or as far as it went in the outcrops of the gap. “These are coarse basal sands,” she said of one final layer. “They were deposited in channels and point bars through lateral accretion as the stream meandered.” In all, there were fifteen hundred feet of the formation, reporting the disintegration of high Silurian worlds.

  Ten or twelve years after the turn of the century, a Bergdoll touring car pulled into the porte cochere of Water Gap House and the chauffeur stepped out, leaving Theodore Roosevelt alone in the op
en back while a photograph arrested his inscrutable face, his light linen suit, his ten-gallon paunch and matching hat. This must have been a high moment for the resort community, but just as Teddy (1858-1919) was in his emeritus years, so, in a sense, was the Water Gap. A fickling clientele preferred Niagaras with falls. An intercity trolley had been added to the scene. Two miles downstream—in what had been George Inness’s favorite foreground—was a new railroad bridge that looked like a Roman aqueduct. Rails penetrated the gap on both sides of the river. There was a golf course—dramatic in its glacial variations on precipitous tills pushed by the ice up the side of the broken mountain—where Walter Hagen, in 1926, won the Eastern Open Championship. Soon thereafter, the tournament was played for the last time. Walter Hagen was not coming back, and neither was the nineteenth century. The perennial Philadelphians were now in Maine. In 1931, Kittatinny House burned up like a signal fire. Freight trains wailed as they rumbled past the embers. In 1960 came the interstate—a hundred and sixty years after the first wagon road. As a unit of earth history, a hundred and sixty years could not be said to be exactly nothing—although, in the gradually accumulated red rock beside the river, ninety-four thousand such units were represented. To put it another way, in the fifteen-hundred-foot thickness of the Bloomsburg formation, there were five millimetres for each hundred and sixty years. The interstate, with its keloid configuration, was blasted into the Shawangunk quartzites, blasted into the redbeds of the Bloomsburg, along the New Jersey side. As if that was not enough for one water gap, it turned and crossed the river.

  In all the rock we had walked by, the rivers and streams that carried the material had been flowing west and northwest. I looked over the bank at the inventive Delaware, going the other way. “When did the Delaware River come into existence?” I asked Anita.

  She shrugged, and said, “Long ago.”

  I said, “Really.”

  She turned and looked back toward the great slot in the mountain, and said, “In the late Jurassic, maybe. Possibly the early Cretaceous. I can look it up. I didn’t pay much attention to that part of geology.”

  In round numbers, then, the age of the river was a hundred and fifty million years. The age of the Water Gap rock was four hundred million years. Another fifty million years before that, the Taconic mountains appeared. The river 150, the rock 400, the first ancestral mountains 450 million years before the present—these dates are so unwieldy that they might as well be off a Manchu calendar unless you sense the pace of geologic change and draw an analogy between, say, a hundred million years of geology and one human century, with its upward-fining sequences, its laminations of events, its slow deteriorations and instant catastrophes. You see the rivers running east. Then you see mountains rise. Rivers run off them to the west. Mountains come up like waves. They crest, break, and spread themselves westward. When they are spent, there is an interval of time, and then again you see the rivers running eastward. You look over the shoulder of the painter and you see all that in the landscape. You see it if first you have seen it in the rock. The composition is almost infinitely less than the sum of its parts, the flickers and glimpses of a thousand million years.

  Over the bridge and out of the gap, we paid twenty-five cents at the booths of the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission. The collector was a citizen so senior he appeared to have been alive for a sixty-millionth of the history of the world. “Have a nice day,” he said. We were moving west and would soon be rising into what geologists refer to as “the so-called Pocono Mountains”—actually a layered flatland that has been cut up by confused streams into forested mesas with names like Mt. Pohopoco. The long continuous welt of the deformed Appalachians—the Ridge-and-Valley belt of folded mountains—is extremely narrow at this latitude. As much as eighty miles wide in the course of its run from Alabama into Canada, it is a fifteen-mile isthmus where it is crossed by Interstate 80 at the eastern end of Pennsylvania. The foldbelt is narrow there because the Poconos refused to deform. When tectonism came and rock was being corrugated left and right, the strata that would become the Poconos were somewhat compressed but did not bend. “The rocks took the shock of the tectonics and didn’t buckle,” Anita said. “They shattered some, but they didn’t move much. They didn’t have the glide planes.”

  Now, scarcely a mile from the toll booths and still very much in the foldbelt, we came to what road builders call a throughcut, where the road had been blasted through the tip of a ridge. We stopped, crossed the interstate, and climbed the higher side. The rock was calcareous shale, and had been seafloor mud about three hundred and ninety million years ago, possibly ten fathoms down then, and gritty with fragments of shells and corals. There were brachiopods in the rock (something like clams and scallops) and cornucopian corals. Certain categories of these lone-growing, conical corals were the index fossils that led nineteenth-century geologists working in Devonshire to recognize the relative age of the rock the corals were found in, and to call the time Devonian. “If it weren’t for this roadcut, I’d never have been able to measure these rocks,” Anita said. “The next exposure is halfway between Kingston and Albany. When they first made this road, we came in and mapped in a hurry, before they laid on that god-damned grass seed, all that straw and organic tar. In the East, no one knows from geology.”

  The sea had been in retreat here in the early Devonian, and as we made our way uphill, and pursued the dip of the strata, we hiked two or three million years through progressively shallower marine deposits and came to a conglomerate full of pearly white quartz that had been tossed and rounded by surf. Beyond the conglomerate was light, coarse-grained sandstone—a fossil Devonian beach. The sea would have been out there to the west, the equator running more or less along the boundary between Canada and Alaska. We turned and went the other way, up through woods and around the nose of the ridge. We were far above the interstate now and looking down on the tops of big rolling boxes—North American Van Lines, moving families from coast to coast. We went on through more woods, in an easterly direction, against the dip, until at length, high on the far side of the ridge, we reached another beach, ten or fifteen million years older than the first one. In the comings and goings—transgressions, regressions—of the epicontinental sea, the strandline had paused here in late Silurian time. Anita said, “This was the barrier beach when the red beds of the Delaware Water Gap were paperlaminated lagoon muds behind barrier islands. Geology is predictable. If you find lagoon mud, you should find beach sand not far away.” On through the woods, she walked offshore to an exposure of dark, shallow-water limestone. “This is what I’ve come up here for,” she said. “This is as pure a limestone as you can get.” She remembered the outcrop from her mapping days, and now she wanted the conodonts. With her sledgehammer, she went at the rock. It was grudging, competent. She set off sparks. Working hard, she slowly filled two canvas bags, each having a capacity approaching one cubic foot. As she had done on hundreds of similar journeys, she would carry the bags into the post office of a small town somewhere and set them on the counter with a lithic clunk while the postmaster’s eyeballs moved forward over the tops of his reading glasses. There was a frank number, a printed label. “ANITA G. HARRIS, U.S.G.S. BRANCH OF PALEONTOLOGY AND STRATIGRAPHY, WASHINGTON, D.C. 20560, OFFICIAL BUSINESS.” Seeing that, 18412 would develop a security clearance in the lower strata of his frown, and with solemnity accept the rocks.

  It was a shelly, coastal limestone. There were cup corals in it, and a profusion of brachiopods that looked like filberts. “Farmers call these hazelnut rocks,” Anita said. A little farther along the outcrop, the limestone was full of small round segments of the stems of sea lilies—tall, graceful animals with petalled heads that grew like plants on stems. “The sea lilies grew in clear, shallow water a little offshore,” Anita said. “It was a coast like Fiji’s, or the Philippines’, or Guatemala’s. The coral and the thick shells tell you the water was warm. The rock is dark because it is full of dead oil, which came in later—much later
. Oil migrated into these rocks and was cooked at high temperature. The conodonts will tell me the temperature.”

  In the deformed, sedimentary Appalachians, the rock not only had been compressed like a carpet shoved across a floor but in places had been squeezed and shoved until the folds tumbled forward into recumbent positions. Some folds had broken. Some entire regions had been picked up and thrust many miles northwest. Dozens of other complexing events had locally affected the structures of the Ridge and Valley Province. One therefore could not know what to expect next. Whole sequences might suddenly be upside down, or repeat themselves, or stand on end reading backwards. Among such rocks, time moves in and out and up and down as well as by.

  “It’s a real schlemazel,” Anita said. “Not by accident is geology called geology. It’s named for Gaea, the daughter of Chaos.”

  Among the west-dipping Silurian formations of the Delaware Water Gap, one might project but could not reasonably expect Devonian rock to westward. It would be there if the stratigraphic package was intact and had not been overturned. The rock of that first big Pennsylvania roadcut was early Devonian in age. Leaving it, we moved seven miles west along the interstate and twenty million years up the time scale, where we stopped at a roadcut of middle Devonian marine siltstones and shales, so rich in organic residues that it was black as carbon, with corals that had been sliced by dynamite and resembled sections of citrus. Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian—for this crunched and shuffled country we were experiencing remarkable consistency in an upward voyage through time. And now in the silken muds of these Devonian seafloors we were seeing the final stages in the long tranquil interval between the Taconic and Acadian revolutions. The rock coarsened abruptly as we drove on westward. There were cobbly conglomerates. They were the first explosive belch from the new Acadian mountains, which came up in the east at a rate ten times as fast as erosion could destroy them and, with a new system of rivers, rapidly shed this downpour of rock. A few miles farther on, another ten or fifteen million years, and we were among roadcuts containing upper Devonian stream channels of a quiet country, a low alluvial plain—point bars, cutbanks, ripple marks in red river sands. We were forty million years past the Water Gap, and the geology was repeating itself on an epic scale. A new set of coalescing fans had come off the Acadian mountains, and, as the great sierra disintegrated, its detritus spread westward thick upon the country and into the sea—at least ten thousand feet thick in the east and gradually thinning to the west, this immense new clastic wedge, to be known in geology as the Catskill Delta.