“What is petrified wood? Petrified wood is a fossil of woody vegetation. Most fossils are imprints of plants or animals. Petrified wood is a three-dimensional fossil that is created when trees, or tree parts, are covered by silica-rich sediment. Water seeping through the sediment dissolves the minerals in the soil and penetrates the cells of the tree. As it flows through the plant tissue, it leaves the minerals behind to replace the vegetable matter with stone."
- National Park Service, US Department of the Interior
50 million years ago in what today is known as Yellowstone National Park, a Sequoia forest used to stand not far from the Absaroka Mountain range nearby. When volcanoes in the range erupted, the Sequoias were covered in ash. The wood cells of the Sequoias were soaked through with silica-rich groundwater, replacing vegetation and biotic matter with stone. At the same time, the lack of oxygen meant no bacteria could decompose organic matter, halting decomposition. Essentially, over millions of years, the structure of smothered wood was replaced with minerals, becoming a replica of the wood that was once alive.
What remains today are remnants of a mighty forest from millions of years ago, petrified wood like the bones of the Sequoia’s skeletal remains. Along the hike up Specimen Ridge, I spotted many chunks of petrified wood, along with animal bones and interesting stones.
It is difficult to imagine a Sequoia forest standing in the great expanse of the Lamar Valley. The Valley is now home to bison and wolves and mule deer alike, who roam the sagebrush-covered plains and cross shallow streams crossing the valley. It is difficult to imagine the crack of the Earth’s crust as the Tetons rise from tectonic plates, inch by inch, year after year for what seems like eons.
I’ve been alive for seventeen years, and I have no concept of time, at least on this grand scale. Being in Wyoming has somewhat warped my sense of time: I’ve learned about the birth of mountains and the slow trek of glaciers over hundreds of thousands of years, about super volcanoes that literally change the climate of the earth, about the preservation of Sequoia trees -- cell by cell, mineral by mineral -- over millions of years.
In Yellowstone, I hiked to the top of Specimen Ridge, overlooking Lamar Valley, and I learned about the Absaroka’s volcanic eruption, the consequential formation of petrified wood from Sequoia trees millions of years ago, and I sat there, with a piece of rock, a rock made from mineral to replicate the exact shape of a piece of Sequoia, in my hand. I sat there and I looked out, over the valley, to where the Absaroka’s waited by the horizon, and I found myself struggling with this concept of time: what is a million years? Much less millions and millions of years? How can I even begin to imagine time? The spacetime continuum uses time as this tangible thing, a measurable unit -- I can’t even begin to imagine the stretch of the spacetime continuum. There is a song, and a particular line of lyrics I think of: “These moments are here only yours and mine, tiny dots on an endless timeline,” from La Dispute’s “Woman in Mirror.”
Now there are plains and valleys, wolves and deer and bison, where there once Sequoia forests; this is a dynamic planet and the only thing certain is change. As I learned, even individuals interacting in a group -- that interaction is dynamic. There will never be a day where I interact, where I intersect, with the same group of people the same way.
How insignificant are we? If mountains can rise and fall in this time, if forests can live and die over the course of thousands and thousands and thousands of years?
How significant are we? If we are moving mountains and tearing down cliffs in such a short time? If we are developing cities of metal and kingdoms of steel and concrete and machine, when it takes eons to tear down forests and rivers?
How humbling to imagine -- I can’t even begin to understand: supervolcanoes big enough to change Earth’s climate, ancient, primordial forests, and even seeing what I have is only a fraction of the history here. How can I even begin to understand? There’s so much detail in flowers and DNA and plants; how can I understand something so huge when there are so many things so small? The more I learn the more there is to learn.
Holding this piece of petrified wood is like holding evidence of what was once here. But even physical evidence is hard to understand, hard to accept.
There is one particular instance I think of when I think of my time in Wyoming: during our backcountry trip, one night after a grueling hike, uphill with heavy backpacks, we decided to stargaze. Wyoming’s sky was so unbelievably clear: there were more stars than I’d ever seen in the city, and in that moment I felt so small, so insignificant. I could see the stars and the constellations, just like in the movies, and I felt humility.
As summer comes to a close, I begin to move towards the world of college applications and college essays. This will be related back to Lamar Valley, in a moment. I remember in one college essay seminar, a speaker mentioned the sublime.
In literature, the sublime describes greatness, vastness. I’ve looked at many articles online regarding the term, but I think it’s best described as this sudden rush of shock, of awe, of awareness and of realization.
In regards to college application essays, this speaker said that, as a prospective college student, the goal for writing all college essays should be capturing the sublime in 650 words or less. I’m not sure if that is a feasible goal, but the idea is there.
Originally, philosophers often used the sublime to describe nature, like the Swiss Alps. Seeing mountains ranges, and being inside of them, and knowing their history and grandeur -- it’s easy recognizing why the sublime was so often used to describe nature: mountains, valleys, space, the stars. I find sublimity in other, small things as well, but I’ll muse on that in another post.
“The sublime, in aesthetics (from the Latin sublimis, [looking up from] under the lintel, high, lofty, elevated, exalted), is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.”
- New World Encyclopedia
"But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again."
- Hermann Hesse
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