Pocket of Time

The Tennessee Valley flowed down to the Pacific Ocean, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge and the restless city at its southern anchorage. The landscape was very old, he could sense that without even looking it up. He did anyway.

“Sedimentary rocks from the Mesozoic”, the US Geological Survey site said. That meant that these hills were from the time leading up to the extinction of the dinosaurs, more than 65 million years ago.

As usual, he’d gone hiking with an eye towards geology, he couldn’t help it. Landscapes tell stories, sometimes cryptic. This landscape was no exception, and he loved deciphering the clues. He looked around as he walked, breathing in deeply as if he could smell the history.

He stopped, arrested in thought and stride by an outcrop of rock. It was banded and tilted at an improbable angle towards the sky. The bands were rusty red and black, with thinner, light gray bands in between. He climbed up to the rock face and studied it. It spoke to him.

The listing bands in the rock were layers of silt and rotting plants and animals, deposited on an old ocean floor and turned into stone over the aeons. He felt as if it were a graveyard that had been desecrated, upturned and thrust into the daylight by immense geological forces in the deep, left in an undignified and naked state, exposed.

He made a promise to the ancient seabed, as he sensed it yearning for an ocean long gone, teeming with prehistoric life. He’d bring it, or at least a small piece of it, to the nearby Pacific, where it could rest at the bottom of the sea once more.

He’d neglected to bring a hammer, but the rock was so loose and fragile, his hands would do. He rapped his knuckles on one of the black bands and marveled at how hollow and crisp it sounded, as if it were still made of coal. He wriggled and clawed and finally tore a small, flat piece of black rock from the face of the cliff with his bare fingers.

He sniffed it, it looked so organic. It smelled of dust. It was fossilized carbon, life itself turned into stone, between layers of crumbling gray clay. It lay in his pocket now, solid and primeval, sacred. As he walked on towards the beach, something had shifted inside him, he felt different. He had a duty to perform.

There was a large sign by the trail where the valley ended and the beach began. It warned of rip currents and hazardous cliffs, of treacherous surf. He removed his shoes and dug his toes into the sand. Time flowed, like water, as he felt the power of the ocean, where life once began, wash over his feet.

As pelicans floated above the horizon, he observed the green steel of the waves hammering away at the black volcanic rocks of the cliffs, two enemies from time immemorial battling it out over scraps of existence itself: Here endeth America!

Remembering his promise, he reached into his pocket and found the rock he had plucked from the bottom of a forgotten sea an hour earlier. The thought humbled him, that he’d literally reached out and touched the time of the dinosaurs.

He flung his arm back and threw the rock as far out as he could, into the buzzing waves, paying his respects to the merciless ocean, then and now. The age-old sediment returned to its home, 65 million years after it left.

He smiled as he felt time melt.

(Image credit: Gunnar Helliesen)

This post is for India Drummond’s Writing Adventure Group, #19: “Pick a pocket”. The WAG is open and all are welcome to join! There’s also a WAG Facebook Group you can join.

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