Sixty million years ago, a huge granite slab exploded out of the earth, creating the whole of the Black Hills. The stone is so hard that nothing but dynamite sufficed to carve the Rushmore memorial.
Yet scientists estimate that Rushmore erodes at a rate of one inch every 500 years. At that rate, Washington’s face will be gone in (okay, 60 feet times twelve inches per foot equals 720 inches times 500 years equals) 360,000 years. That’s a long time in human terms, far longer than the most generous estimates of the existence of our civilization. But it is only a blink in geologic time.
I had seen what wind and water could do in the Badlands, and what water alone could do in Rushmore Cave. In fifty or a hundred million years, the Black Hills themselves may be gone, eroded by wind and water and tourists who spill Coke on the rocks. A hundred million years is a long time even geologically, but just a wink of the Universal Eye.
I turned away from the memorial and peered out from the mountain to where the curve of the world met the dome of the sky. Within that horizon, the circle of the sky in the circle of the eye, the cycle of transformation underlay everything.
Lichen and moss, flowers and trees, artists and tourists, all break down the rock. Over millions of years, soil is created. From the soil, vegetation emerges. From the vegetation, animal life proliferates. Then the waters come in and cover everything and the plants and animals die and get packed down into the bottom of the sea and over years and years harden into rocky layers. The layers are then lifted up into the air to make mountains and caves and everything starts again.
But in all that endless vital cycle, something would never change. I was there. I walked that path. I saw those faces. That was forever.
And I realized then. Time is a wave. The water is never the same from arc to trough. But everything the wave sweeps over changes it forever.
Everything that is will be lost.
Everything that’s done is forever.
Maybe that’s our soul, not what we are, but what we do.
Order the Book:
Your favorite local bookstore
Bookshop.Org
Amazon
Bookstores/Libraries: Available through Ingram Content Group.
