Rock Bottom (Em Hansen Mysteries)

by Sarah Andrews

  “Something big?”

  “Yes, something big. How much do you want me to tell you, all in one bite?”

  Brendan said, “Just tell me what you think happened.”

  What I think happened; ouch! Like a great trout, I rose to the bait of the debate, opened my mouth, bit hard. “Well, like I said, that’s an unconformity, which is the geological term for a place where the strata don’t continue without a break. Unconformities tell a story.”

  “So tell me the story,” he said, impatience seeping into his tone.

  “Okay, that angle tells me that all those layers didn’t just drop out of the waters of some cataclysmic flood, because sediments that drop out of flood waters lie flat. It also tells me that deposition stopped and tilting and erosion occurred before deposition started again. The crust of the earth got all busted up here and sections of it tipped as great big blocks, which made hills or mountains, which were then eroded flat across the top. After that the younger layers were deposited. All of that takes time, a lot of time. And there’s a gap in time represented by what’s been eroded away. Now this whole region has been lifted up and the river has cut down through the whole shebang and left us a nice cliff face where we can see the whole story in cross-section.”

  “Shebang. Story.”

  “You don’t have to use fancy names for it. Geology is pretty straight-forward, pretty intuitive as sciences go. Seeing it as a story helps us put the events in sequence.”

  “What do you mean ‘intuitive’?”

  “Most sciences are very quantitative, which means by the numbers. For instance, in chemistry you take sodium and chlorine and combine them and you’ll get sodium chloride—table salt—every time. This plus that at such-and-such temperature and pressure equals X. What happens in the lab is exactly what happens in nature. There are a lot of numbers in geology, too, but we have to deal with rocks that are missing because they eroded away, or because they’re covered, or because they’ve been cooked and have transformed into something else. Geology is ultimately a physics experiment with a lot of chemistry thrown in, but the variables are extremely complex and some of them are, like I said, hidden or missing. So we have to approach geology more qualitatively, looking at patterns. We look at the overall story and make an interpretation, or a prediction if we’re looking into the future.”

  “Aren’t the stories written down?”

  “Not on paper. Most of geology happened before there were any people to observe it, but in another way of speaking, it’s all written right here. We have to read the rock. But like I say, some of the pages of the book have been torn out and recycled.”

  He pondered this for a while, then said, “You said there was time missing between the tipped rock and the horizontal ones. How much time?”

  “About three hundred million years.”

  Brendan suddenly laughed, whether in scorn or frustration I could not tell. He said, “I can’t imagine a hundred years, much less three hundred million.”

  “Most people can’t,” I said. “But geologists can. People vary in what they’re good at. One person might be best at keeping the trains running on time, while another cooks a whole lot better than I do, another understands how to heal people that are sick, and a few of us are good at understanding this kind of thing. We call it ‘deep time.’”

  Brendan said, “You’re kind of weird, Em.”

  “Yes I am, and you know what else? Being good at thinking in billions of years makes me suck at politics, because what happens all in the short span of human history seems kind of unimportant.”

  Brendan considered this a moment, then said, “I kind of like that idea. So exactly how do you know there’s three hundred million years missing there?”

  “Erosion happens kind of slowly; we observe that directly and can measure it, though again there are a lot of variables to it. Moving water is a powerful tool of erosion, but it’s not just the Colorado River that’s eroding this landscape. The river is only about a hundred and fifty feet wide here, while the canyon is probably a dozen miles wide from rim to rim, so what’s grinding away at the rest of it? Well, I look at all the side canyons, each with a little creek that’s carrying its own bits of grit and mud downhill toward the river. On the slopes where there’s no obvious creek, still the rain falls there and you get what’s called sheet wash. In the winter, the snow and rain trickle into little cracks in the cliffs and freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw, and each time that water goes from liquid to ice it expands, and that’s both physics and chemistry. These expansions act like little jackhammers, helping to split the rocks apart into smaller bits that will fall down the slope. Everything wants to follow gravity downhill, both the water and the rocks, and that’s physics, too. You can see tumbled blocks all over the place, and the action of rainfall and freezing and thawing and the wind—more physics. Animals digging burrows under the rocks and so forth, now we’re into biology, all contributing to a process we call mass wasting. In aggregate, it’s mass wasting that’s kicked all the hundreds of cubic miles of rock that used to be here down into the river and carried it away. Each of these bits of the process we can observe directly and measure and back-calculate to interpret the story of what’s happened here, and how long it might have taken.”

  “So how long did it take to carve the canyon?”

  “Several million years. We don’t know exactly, because again, some of the pages in the book are missing. But we can say confidently that overall, erosion happens rather slowly here. We’ve got photographs that go back a hundred years or more and we can take a picture at the same spot now and compare them and see how much has actually moved, and that’s all part of how we learn the story of geology.”

  As I stood there waving my arms and trying to explain geology to Brendan, the rafting group that had camped near us the second night at Nankoweap pulled up onto the beach. As the passengers climbed out of the rafts, Wink trotted down the beach to join them. He had put on that ill-fitting plaid shirt again, and he lent a hand to the bottle blonde with the skinny sandals. The girl who had played the guitar that night took her other arm, and Wink guided them toward a trail that led up to a group of ruins.

  Brendan was watching them, too. He asked, “What about the stories in the Bible?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to argue about that, Brendan.”

  The boy looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Do you have a religion?” he inquired.

  I laughed. “Sure. When I stand in places like this and contemplate such vastness of time and space, and witness how deposition and erosion and all the other parts and processes of geology work together, I see an astonishingly beautiful system that is … well, the word is ‘divine.’” I took a deep breath then and shared my heart with him. “In its simplicity and complexity nature makes sense to me, Brendan. I observe it from the center of my being, and that experience is profound.”

  “Mom says scientists are trying to disprove the existence of God.”

  I don’t work as a geologist so I can disprove anyone’s religious convictions. I wanted to scream, or weep. I sat down on a rock and put my face in my hands. “Honey, some scientists are Mormons, and others will tell you they’re atheists, or agnostics, or whatever variety of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or … I don’t know, maybe pagan.”

  Brendan patted me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry to get so wound up about all that Bible stuff, Em. Really, I’ll try to take a vacation from it today, okay? Just working on my independent study report here.”

  I leaned my cheek onto his hand. “Thanks, Brendan.”

  “So you were going to tell me how those rocks got tipped.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Those rocks have got a name, the Grand Canyon Supergroup, and they got tilted when an old continent tore apart.”

  Brendan began to laugh. “Yeah, sure, like … rip!” He pulled his arms apart as if he were opening an accordion.

  I nodded. “Just like that, only much, much slower and
on an immense scale. Didn’t you learn about Plate Tectonics in fifth grade?”

  “Fifth grade I was home-schooled, remember? Mom and Dad were getting their divorce and Mom thought I was such a tender flower she had to keep me where I wouldn’t get rained on.”

  I winced. “You don’t watch PBS or Discovery Channel?”

  “Mom doesn’t go for that stuff.”

  I put an arm around him. “Well, continents move around, at about the speed your fingernails grow, and they rip apart or smash together, or sometimes just grind along past each other.”

  Brendan smiled. “Maybe you’ve been out in the sun too long, Em.”

  “That’s what they told Galileo when he said the earth moved around the sun rather than the other way around. So yeah, the continents move; we’ve measured it using satellites, and the earth’s crust—”

  “Now you’re telling me that the earth is like a loaf of bread?”

  I gave him a squeeze. “No, it’s more like it has a hard candy shell over hot jelly filling with a really hot nut at the center.”

  “How can you know that, Em? You’ve never been inside the earth!” Brendan tipped back his head and giggled.

  At that exact moment at the ruin, Wink threw back his head in a similar gesture, but on him it was not playful or attractive. It struck me that some people who still behaved like children as they approached their forties were stuck on an emotional snag; instead of remaining pleasantly young, they withered into emotional pygmies. In Brendan, adolescence was right on schedule, but underneath his clowning lay a terrible tension; would he get caught on it and wither, or work through it and grow into a man?

  I loved Brendan intensely in that moment and wanted desperately to give him something that would sustain him through his coming trials. I said, “Brendan, I love science, because it gives me a way to sort out what’s knowable from what’s not, but we each get to decide where to draw the line between what we see with our eyes and what we know with our hearts.”

  Fritz waved to us from the place where he waited on the trail. “It’s getting late,” he called. “We’d best get the group together and make some miles on that river.”

  Brendan said, “Tell me more about the candy shell on the hot jelly earth, Em.”

  I took his arm in mine and we began to walk toward the river’s edge. “Maybe on another day,” I said. “I’m getting sort of tired.”

  We passed close to where Wink still stood with his group from the other raft trip. Fritz told him, “We’re launching in ten minutes.”

  Wink ignored him, shifting his footing so that he showed Fritz his back.

  As we reached the rafts, Brendan asked, “What are you going to do about him, Dad?”

  Fritz didn’t answer, but I could see that his jaws had bunched up tight with rage.

  Diary of Holly Ann St. Denis

  April 8

  Dear God,

  Yesterday we went past places where there is salt hanging out of the cliffs, sort of flowing down out of nowhere, it looks like. I’m not sure where it came from, but You work miracles every day! Anyway boatman Dan was telling me that these were sacred salt mines that the Hopi Indians still visit today but “Uncle” Terry said the Hopi were not men of God so I should turn my face from this sacrilege lest I be turned to salt myself. Our geology consultant Dr. Oberley was rowing along beside us then, and he heard that. When we made camp this evening at Nevills, Dr. Oberley walked over from where he’s camping with this other group and when no one was listening whispered that I shouldn’t worry about being turned to salt. He said that T was just trying to scare me and that it was easy to get scared when you see a pillar of salt and think it’s a person who’s been frozen but that things don’t happen exactly like that. I liked that he called “Uncle” Terry “T.” I asked if I could call him “Dr. O” and he smiled and said he’d like that.

  God, is Dr. O right about this? I’ve been reading in my Bible where it says that Lot’s wife was turned to salt because she disobeyed and looked back while Sodom and Gomorrah were being destroyed by the angels, and I apologize for always asking questions, but it says that the bad men came to Lot’s house and said he had to bring the angels out so that “we may know them” but Dr. O says that in his version it says “so we can have sex with them.” Is he right that “knowing” is a code word for “sex”???? Or does Dr. O have a fake Bible with errors in it? I like Dr. O. He’s nice to me and speaks to me like I have a brain, and he seems to understand “how things are” for me. He says I play the guitar beautifully. And Mom likes him, too. And when we stopped for lunch at the Unkar delta today he showed us places where the Indians who used to live there left behind their artifacts. There are little bits of clay pots they made that are just sitting there on the ground! Surely the Flood would have washed them away.

  Here I go questioning things again! There’s sure a lot of places in the Book of Genesis where You got mad at people and destroyed them! And that says that “Uncle” Terry is right, not Dr. O.

  Dr. O told me in our private talk here at Nevills that bad things can happen to you when you’re a kid and you don’t have much control over what the grownups around you are doing, but that when you get older, you have a little more control over things.

  While we were talking a woman named Ms. Hansen from the other camp walked by with her stepson Brendan and Dr. O introduced me to them. He told me that Ms. Hansen is a geologist, like to say, See? Girls can be geologists, too, and that really amazed me. I asked her if she knew that the rocks came from Noah’s Flood and she looked at me a long time like she was really thinking about what I’d said, and then she told me that all nature was very beautiful to her. In that moment I saw Your Love in her eyes. She looked at me from Your great calm and said, “This is where I look to see God.” Then she said she hoped I was having a good visit to this very special place and she and Brendan continued on their way down the trail. I’m meeting such interesting people here, people who know a whole lot!

  Well, God, it’s time for me to say my bedtime prayers and put out this light, so I’m going to say good night and then say my prayers to You. Mom’s here and she looks tired and worried, but she won’t tell me why. I know that her feet hurt her where she’s gotten blisters. Well, like I said, good night!

  APRIL 8: NEVILLS

  According to our river guide, our camp at Nevills stood at about 2,760 feet elevation. That meant that we had ridden the river down about 450 feet closer to sea level over the seventy-six miles we had traveled from the put-in at Lees Ferry. The nearest point on the rim of the canyon was at 7,000 feet, over three-quarters of a mile higher. The canyon was not called Grand for nothing.

  Brendan asked me to go for another walk with him, so I said okay and we grabbed some dried fruit from the kitchen box and headed down through the brush toward the river’s edge, chatting about the rapids his dad had let him row that day. As we stepped out from the thicket of tamarisk, our conversation was abruptly interrupted: There stood Wink Oberley and the girl from the church group who played the guitar so beautifully.

  At the sight of us, Wink stopped talking.

  The girl looked our way and smiled. She was very pretty and blond and wore what I’d have to call a cute print blouse and a pair of jeans that looked like they’d just come out of a laundry room. “Hi!” she said, addressing herself to Brendan. “It’s nice to see another kid down here.”

  Brendan returned her smile uncertainly.

  Wink cleared his throat and introduced us. “Hey, what do you think of this? Ms. Hansen is a geologist! She works for the Utah Geological Survey, and you know what she does? She solves crimes sometimes, using geologic evidence.”

  The girl’s eyes widened. “You mean like on TV?”

  “Sure, just like that.”

  I smiled. “Except my hair and makeup aren’t as good as the women on TV, and I never wear high heels if I can help it.”

  Holly Ann tipped her head like a chickadee that was examining a seed. She didn’t say
anything for a moment, and I was afraid that I had offended her, but then she stared deep into my eyes and said, “Well, if you’re a geologist, then you must know that these rocks came from Noah’s Flood.”

  Well, that stopped my clock. I looked from her to Wink and back again, waiting to see if he’d correct her, but he did not. I wondered how the whole Young Earth thing jibed with getting his doctorate from Princeton. Geologists disagreed, but there was a difference between disagreeing and stepping off the curb into I-read-it-in-a-book-so-it’s-true.

  I turned back toward Holly Ann and returned her gaze, reaching as far inside her soul as she was reaching into mine. There was something very special about this girl: strength mixed with vulnerability. I can’t remember how I answered her question, so stunning was her gaze.

  Brendan had gone from silent and nervous to just plain silent, so we continued on down the trail. Thirty yards or so along the way, he whispered, “Nice.”

  I gave his hand a squeeze and said, “Thanks. Let’s just enjoy the sound of the river.”

  Fritz came down the trail and met us then. As we strolled back to our campsite we came across the tall man with the prominent Adam’s apple who had led the prayers at the fundamentalist campsite at Nankoweap. He strode up to Fritz and said, “You’re with Oberley’s group, right?”

  Fritz said, “He’s with us, yes.”

  “Well, maybe you can tell him that we don’t need his help anymore.”

  Fritz let his words slow almost to a drawl. “I’m sure you can tell him that yourself.”

  The man narrowed his eyes. “Who do you think you are, Chuck Yeager?”

  A corner of Fritz’s mouth curled in a smile. “A fellow pilot, are you?”

  The man jerked his head back in surprise and blurted, “SuperCobra.”

  Fritz said, “A-6,” brushed past the man, and continued along the trail.

  “What was all that?” I asked, as I caught up with him. “Was that code for something?”