Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  The work of Coney and his partners was critical to the then two-decade-or-so-old theory of plate tectonics. It showed that not only did movement of big plates generate geologic features, but also that smaller slivers of land helped form a landscape. The terrane theory has been called “one of the most significant tectonic concepts” of recent years, particularly as it applies to the western United States.31

  “When terranes first became popular, they were applied everywhere, probably too much,” said Barbeau. Whenever someone couldn’t figure out the exact story for an out-of-place rock it became a terrane. And the more exotic or suspect the better, which made the fifteen-hundred-to thirty-five-hundred-mile voyage of Salinia from southern Mexico seem possible. The “orphan” now had a parent. But over the years geologists have honed the terrane concept and learned not to apply it everywhere. As Barbeau observed, Salinia is a terrane but it has not traveled far and is neither exotic nor accreted.

  “The only reason you have these granite rocks on the coast that Jeffers used for his house is because of this weird tectonic history,” concluded Barbeau. “Jeffers’s house is that much more unusual because it’s only that small slice of land between Carmel and Half Moon Bay where you would find these granitic rocks anywhere along the coast of the western United States.”

  To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, of all the rocky knolls on all the West Coast Jeffers chose the one underlain by granite. And what a difference it made.

  Before he started work on Tor House, Jeffers’s poems lacked vitality. They are imitative, particularly of his early heroes Wordsworth and Shelley, often focus on love, and have simple, rhyming forms. But then he moved to Carmel and started his work with stone. The metaphors began to take shape. His education and local influences, his understanding of cosmological and atomic developments, his daily work with stone, each contributed to his poetry. “Jeffers always had this timeless, enduring imagery in his head and just hadn’t found the voice nor the metaphor to make it sing. So in a sense Jeffers found granite and granite found Jeffers,” said Aaron Yoshinobu. Jeffers’s ideas crystallized in Carmel and gave him his distinctive voice.

  Robinson Jeffers, 1930s.

  Once his themes took shape, Jeffers kept working them throughout his life. Tragedy and suffering, the Big Sur coast, the beauty of Nature and its redemptive qualities. The poems are not always easy to read. His great epic verses, such as Cawdor,Tamar, Roan Stallion, and Thurso’s Landing, are filled with incest, brutality, death, and pessimism and stretch for pages and pages, almost more novel than poetry. As one critic wrote, “Sometimes hard to stomach, they are always difficult to put down.”32 But many of his poems also contain short and beautiful passages describing his beloved landscape around Carmel.

  His devotion to what he calls “my loved subject: Mountain and ocean, rock, water and beasts and trees”33 is what makes his poetry resonate, particularly his shorter poems. He writes precisely and knowledgeably about landscape, both solid and oceanic, and its inhabitants. Seasonal change plays out in the mountains as they “vibrate from bronze to green/Bronze to green, year after year.”34 Gulls are the “slim yachts of the element.”35 Pelicans flying over Tor House “sculled their worn oars over the courtyard.”36 Cormorants “slip their long black bodies under the water and hunt like wolves.”37 Solomon’s seal makes “intense islands of fragrance”38 and eucalyptuses bend double “all in a row, praying north.”39 One can learn so much about the natural world from Jeffers’s poetry that it is almost as if he has written a field guide to the Carmel coast.

  But Jeffers’s use of geology and geologic metaphors shines above all else. Weathering is “the endless ocean throwing his skirmish-lines against granite . . . / that fierce music has gone on for a thousand/Millions of years.”40 In an homage to evolution and geologic time, he wrote that “the wings torn with old storms remember / The cone that the oldest redwood dropped from, the tilting of continents, / The dinosaur’s day.”41 During erosion “Cataracts of rock / Rain down the mountain from cliff to cliff and torment the stream-bed.”42 In contrast a resilient stone is “Earthquake-proved, and signatured / By ages of storms.”43

  Jeffers clearly paid attention to the natural world around him. Ever since his childhood he had had a connection to nature, but not until he settled in Carmel and worked on the land did he develop the knowledge and strength that gave him that passion to describe place. And this relationship centered on the house and tower he built from granite boulders on a low, barren knoll overlooking the sea.

  “The place was maiden, no previous / Building, no neighbors, nothing but the elements, Rock, wind and sea,” wrote Jeffers in a poem titled “The Last Conservative.”44 Tor House and Hawk Tower are the only structures he could have built for the site. How could I not love those buildings? In his ode to Tor House, Jeffers concluded, “My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably / Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite.”45

  4

  DEEP TIME IN MINNESOTA—

  MINNESOTA GNEISS

  These masses bear very evident signs of a crystalline origin,

  but the process must have been a confused one.

  —William Keating, Narrative of an expedition to the source of

  St. Peter’s River, Lake Winnepeek, Lake of the

  Woods, &c. performed in the Year 1823

  NO MATTER WHERE you look at rocks, you are missing most of the story. Either erosion has removed layers, no layers were deposited in the first place, or the layers lay underground and cannot be seen. If you live in a city, the geologic story may barely equal a paragraph of time. For example, in Seattle, where I live, the oldest rocks you can see are the 55-million-year-old basalts of the Olympic Mountains. The skyline-defining volcanoes, such as Mt. Rainier to the south and Mt. Baker to the north, are each under a million years in age, and the last glaciers, which carved the modern topography, retreated only thirteen thousand years ago.

  Going to a wilder locale may add only a few chapters to the story. In Moab, Utah, my home for nine years, you can pick up salt that had crystallized out of a sea 300 million years ago, climb a mountain that solidified as a hot hump of magma between sheets of sandstone 24 million years ago, or canoe between canyon walls carved by a river 2 million years ago. The story has expanded to a third of a billion years long, but many small gaps exist and no evidence occurs for the first 4 billion years of Earth’s history.

  Even the Grand Canyon, where you can see a mile of rock, fails to convey a complete story. The oldest layer, the Vishnu Schist, dates only to 2 billion years, and the youngest, Kaibab Formation, settled in a sea 245 million years ago. There is a known gap in the geologic record between 1.4 billion and 600 million years ago, as well as several slimmer pieces of missing time. I am not bothered by this. It is a fact of life.

  Geologists have terms for such gaps of time. “Unconformity.” “Disconformity.” “Nonconformity.” Each refers to a specific missing element. An unconformity is the most generic and refers to any break in the rock record. Again, either something was not deposited or something was removed. If that gap occurs between two layers of rock that are parallel, it is called a disconformity. A nonconformity refers to contact between two very different rock types, sort of like the relationship between a NASCAR mom and an NPR dad. An angular unconformity describes two rock units where there is an angle between the two layers.

  One of the most famous of these unconformities is at Siccar Point, about thirty miles east of Edinburgh, Scotland.1 There on a sunny June day in 1788, James Hutton sailed along the Berwickshire coast with his friends John Playfair, who later became Hutton’s biographer, and Sir James Hall, who owned the boat. Three years earlier, at a presentation to the renowned Royal Society of Edinburgh,Hutton, an eccentric farmer and naturalist, had proposed that Earth was so old that no one could make a good estimate as to its age. Few had accepted Hutton’s radical idea and the three men, or at least Hutton, were seeking evidence to prove his theory of an ancient Earth.


  They began their trip on Hall’s property at Dunglass Burn and proceeded east and south along the jagged coast, rounding several headlands before arriving at Siccar Point, where they found two rock layers. The lower strata consisted of gray beds of silt and sand, which stood on end like upright fingers of a hand. Resting directly atop the fingers were horizontal beds of red sandstone, which those in the eastern United States would call a brownstone.

  From what we know about this adventure, Hutton gleefully explained to his friends that the gray stone, which he called schistus and which modern geologists call graywacke, had formed in the sea over vast epochs of time. Subsequent to its conversion to rock, the gray beds had been tilted vertically, and finally uplifted above the sea. More time passed, the sea rose, and sediments washed out of the nearby mountains and covered the schistus. Finally, Hutton told his fellow seekers of time that the gray and the red must have risen again, together as one. Clearly great ages of time had passed in order to generate such an unlikely wedding of rock. Our three Scotsmen had no way of knowing how much time had passed between the schistus and the sandstone, but the beds at Siccar dramatically illustrated that Earth was far, far older than previously thought.

  Geologists are still finding these gaps. In contrast to when Hutton found Siccar Point and could only recognize a relative gap, modern geologists can determine the absolute gap. They can take almost any rock, crush it to a powder, probe its chemical constituents on a microscopic level, and determine its age, whether in the thousands, millions, or billions of years.

  Using these techniques, known as radiometric dating, geologists have discovered that a stone in the building trade has one of the longest story lines of any rock on the planet. The geologic tale of the Morton Gneiss (pronounced “nice”), quarried in Morton, Minnesota, stretches from its origin 3.5 billion years ago to 12,900 years ago. In that time the swirly pink, gray, and black, heavily metamorphosed Morton rocks were buried, baked, squeezed,warped, uplifted, injected with magma, and stripped bare by massive rivers. This 3.5-billion-year-long adventure created what one geologist calls “the most beautiful building stone in the country.”2

  My favorite Morton-covered building stands at the southeast corner of the main intersection in Morton, where State Route 19 crosses Main Street. It is architecture at its most utilitarian—rectangular, two stories tall, and brick. The builder did, however, incorporate some semblance of an aesthetic with the cornice and frieze, which have a pattern of outlined squares atop two horizontal rows of raised bricks resting on another row of inverted, stepped pyramids.

  A faded red awning adds another touch of character, boldly proclaiming in large white letters, MORTON LIQUOR. Neon signs in the window hawk several brands of lite beers. Perhaps the store’s owner thinks that Mortonians, or at least those who drink, should be concerned about their weight.

  Below the cornice, polished slabs of Morton Gneiss cover the front of the building. Pink and black layers corkscrew around each other as if they are still fluid. Other layers look stretched and torn like taffy. Four-inch-wide eyes of black minerals, complete with white eyebrows, dot the variegated layers. This complex texture of light and dark bands typifies gneiss, a type of metamorphic rock formed from great heat and pressure.

  Located two hours west of Minneapolis along the Minnesota River, Morton showcases a full complement of uses for its eponymous gneiss. The old high school features Morton blocks for accents, window lintels, and entryways. A few blocks away, the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church, Wisconsin Synod, is made entirely of rounded, rough cut Morton stones, and the curbs on Main Street must be the most colorful as well as the oldest ones in the world at 3.5 billion years. In the cemetery above town, numerous headstones are made from Morton Gneiss. (Cemeteries are one of the best places to find the psychedelic rock; I have seen Morton headstones around the country.)

  Morton Liquor in Morton, Minnesota.

  The first person to note the building potential of the Morton stone was Giacomo Constantino Beltrami. A former Italian soldier, he was a political exile who hoped to make a name for himself in America by finding the source of the Mississippi River. In June 1823 Beltrami had joined Major Stephen Long’s expedition up the Minnesota River, then called the St. Peter’s River and thought to be a possible source of the Mississippi. Beltrami wrote in his 1828 travel narrative that tears filled his eyes when he first saw the rock along the Minnesota River. “I should have given myself up to its sweet influence had I not been with people who had no idea of stopping for anything but a broken saddle.”3

  When he emerged out his reverie he noted that the “immense blocks of granite scattered here and there with such a picturesque negligence, might with small aid from the chisel be raised to rival the pyramids of Memphis or Palmyra.”4 In lieu of grandiose structures, added Beltrami, the magnificent stone could easily be worked and fitted for barns, temples, or, for any local royalty, palaces.

  Sixty-one years would pass before quarrying would begin in Morton, when Thomas Saulpaugh opened a quarry on a high dome of rock just west of town. By 1886 three hundred men worked the property. Other quarries opened on the southeast edge of town, along the railroad tracks, and by 1935 five companies operated holes, the biggest of which was owned by Cold Spring Granite Company. To move the stone, which quarrymen cut into Volkswagen bus–sized blocks weighing between fifty and eighty tons, Cold Spring built what was reportedly the largest swing boom in the world.5 The steel mast rose 120 feet and supported a boom that could reach out 100 feet. Thirteen cables as thick as a man’s wrist held the derrick in place, enabling quarrymen to move with ease blocks weighing up to a hundred tons.

  Quarries sold the colorful stone under trade names such as Oriental, Tapestry,Variegated, and Rainbow granite. In what seems a rather ignoble fate, Cold Spring also sold crushed Morton as grit to go into turkey feed. At least the turkeys returned the Morton to the earth.

  Records do not exist as to how much of it got shipped around the country or where it went, but some beautiful Morton buildings went up in the 1920s and 1930s. None were pyramids or palaces. The buildings include the tallest structure in Brooklyn, New York, the 512-foot-high Williamsburgh Savings Bank; the first modern planetarium in the western hemisphere, the twelve-sided Adler Planetarium in Chicago; and numerous structures now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including Tulsa’s Oklahoma Natural Gas building, Richmond,Virginia’s, Old State Library, and Cincinnati’s Cincinnati and Suburban Bell Telephone Company building.

  Most of these buildings share two features. The first is that builders used the gneiss only at the ground level, because the Minnesota rock cost more but better resists urban agents of erosion, such as road salt, soot, and noxious vehicle emissions, than limestone and sandstone does. Second, the buildings were designed in the art deco, or moderne, style. The best Minnesota example is the Northwestern Bell Telephone Building in Minneapolis. Now owned by Qwest and formerly by AT&T, the twenty-six-story tower was built between 1930 and 1932.

  The main entry of Morton Gneiss consists of three square recessed arches topped by a keystone shaped like a stylized bird reminiscent of Egyptian art. Running along the top of the polished gneiss panels are classic moderne-style chevrons and zigzags against a background of vertical bands. Adjacent to the monumental entry rise geometric designs that resemble a tree with outstretched limbs dangling inverted triangles. A caduceuslike motif with lightning bolts replacing the traditional snakes surmounts each of the trees. Two adjacent doorways, each topped with another Egyptian-style bird, lead into a side entrance. Kasota limestone from southern Minnesota covers the remaining twenty-five stories.

  Morton Gneiss was an ideal stone for art deco projects. It fit the style’s aesthetic for unusual colors, particularly as a counterpoint to the light-colored, monochromatic stone often used above the base. (By highlighting the dark/light contrast, builders created their own unconformity. In the case of the Morton-Kasota contact, the missing time gap covering 3 billion years was what
geologists call a “great unconformity.”) Dark gneiss helped distinguish a building and set off the base from the surrounding structures. The Morton’s swirled surface also provided a natural counterpoint to the era’s prevailing fascination with machines and geometric patterns, as well as a complement to the fashion for abstract organic forms.

  Qwest Building, originally Northwestern Bell Telephone building,

  built 1930–1932, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  Although Beltrami recognized the potential of the Morton rocks, he was not a geologist. William Keating, also on Major Long’s 1823 exploration, was the first geologist to see the Morton rock along the Minnesota River. “The character of these rocks was examined with care, and found very curious,” he wrote in the official trip narrative. “It seemed as if four simple minerals, quartz, feldspar, mica, and amphibole, had united here to produce almost all the varieties of the combination which can arise from the association of two or more of these minerals.”6

  Keating encountered the Morton rocks at an interesting turning point, particularly on the subject of geologic time. For over a thousand years, biblical begats, begets, and begots had provided the means by which people had derived the age of Earth. By Keating’s time, the best-known and most widely accepted day one of Earth was Sunday, October 23, 4004 BCE, according to Irish Archbishop James Ussher.7 The biblical trap, however, was beginning to loosen in the early 1800s, because of the historic boat ride of James Hutton, John Playfair, and Sir James Hall.