Soul of the World

by Christopher Dewdney

  I became completely fascinated with the Devonian period and borrowed book after book from our little local library, often reborrowing the same book so that I could linger over the illustrations of the unlikely-looking creatures that teemed in those ancient tropical oceans. Gardens of crinoids that looked like tulips made out of beads waved in the currents between the coral reefs, their feathery calcium petals filtering plankton out of the water. Swimming around the coral and crinoids were trilobites. I loved their compact, sculptural bodies and the fact that they were divided into three segments, like insects. I imagined that they were as colourful as reef fish are today. The first true fishes were also alive in the Devonian, although most of them were protected by plated armour. For good reason.

  Some of the things that have emerged from prehistory are not as attractive as others. Velociraptors are fearsome, as are the tryannosaurs. But not all dangerous fauna were land-based. When I was a child leafing through illustrated books on prehistoric water creatures, I used to avoid the pages with illustrations of eurypterids, otherwise known as sea scorpions. It was an instinctive reaction of mine. Eurypterids were nasty customers indeed. They looked like a cross between a scorpion and a lobster, with two large paddle arms at the front end and a long, poisonous stinger at the rear. Some specimens were nine feet long, which makes them the biggest arthropods ever. Not only were they the top predator of their era, they were also real survivors. Their original colour, deep amber brown, is as bright today (when chipped out of rock by fossil hunters) as it was in the Devonian period. In certain cases, their tough, leathery shells resisted the mineralizing effects of fossilization, so that some specimens, though locked in limestone for four hundred million years, are still flexible today. Talk about a time capsule.

  As the Devonian period waned into the Carboniferous period, several species of eurypterids evolved to inhabit fresh water while others probably became land-dwelling. It could be that scorpions are their diminutive descendants. And if giant eurypterids had not died out, they might be as ubiquitous now as their Carboniferous brethren, the cockroaches. Land-dwelling eurypterids would make living in the tropics impossible. To me, even our two-hundred-million-year distance seems uncomfortably close.

  Because fossils were the most direct way of experiencing the Devonian period, I spent a lot of time at the the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where my father was an associate archeologist. While he met with fellow archeologists he would turn me loose, and I’d head straight for my devotional temple—the invertebrate paleontology gallery. I passed many afternoons there, poring over glass display cases that contained row after row of impossibly perfect fossils: slate slabs scattered with dozens of glistening black trilobites that looked as if they might swim away at any moment; groves of crinoids that seemed to have turned to stone as they undulated in the warm sea. Many of the fossils appeared to have been carved out of stone by meticulous sculptors. There were also cases full of ornate shells, sometimes completely freed from the rock, as marvellous as any that adorn the remote beaches of today’s Pacific Ocean.

  My supreme thrill came when my family went on picnic excursions to Rock Glen, a small limestone gorge in the countryside near my hometown in southwestern Ontario. This was pure time travel. We would eat our sandwiches at the top of the glen overlooking the waterfall, then explore the forested gorge. The shale and limestone there brimmed with fossils, and because the rock was so soft, the fossils tumbled out whole and rolled down the sides of the gorge, where they collected in drifts by the side of the river. It was fossil heaven, where the border between the present and prehistory blurred. On the upper slopes I could coax soft layers of slate apart with my hands, like leaves in the book of time. And in the shallow water of the stream at the bottom of the gorge, the submerged fossils of trilobites looked as though they might be grazing on the algae there.

  It sometimes seemed to me that I was trapped in a relatively uninteresting epoch that was not natural to my inclinations, that I was not of my time. I was a citizen, and still am, of deep time. Periods spanning millions of years strike me as natural, though I must admit, when billions are mentioned, things get a little abstract, even for me. I think that the origin of my familiarity with deep time came from a revelation I had one rainy, cold Sunday afternoon in late November, when I was eleven.

  I was leafing through a copy of The World We Live In, a big, wonderfully illustrated hardcover book about the history of life on earth. The page that caught my eye that afternoon, even though I’d looked at it many times before, was an illustration of the glacial age. It showed a four-thousand-foot wall of ice at the advancing edge of a continental glacier. You could see the lines and crevices along the top of the glacier, which stretched back in the distance to a grey polar darkness. There was an apocalyptic, icy grandeur to the scene.

  As I stared dreamily at the illustration of the lake at the base of the glacier—at the small icebergs floating in the water and the evergreen forest growing bravely beside the glacier itself—a shock of pure, deep time went through me. I knew that the location of that picture could easily have been right where our house now stood, these hundreds of millennia later. It was as if something within me had done the math. I could actually feel what existing for ten thousand years would be like, and I was filled with both dread and awe. It wasn’t just a sense of mortality, of how short life is in comparison to these millennial spans; it was the direct sensation within my body of every echoing century. I stood on that chilly shore.

  That experience changed me, and though I have never really, physically grasped such a period of time since, the vision gave me a kind of fluency with time, one that allows me to directly sense the hoary patina of history that gilds all ancient artifacts. I still marvel at fossils, and I feel every bit as much excitement going into a museum today as I did as a child. Also, limestone continues to hold dreams and nostalgia for me, vistas of lost epochs and spectacular new fossils. Limestone is sheer potential. Who knows what wonders are hidden within it, what secrets it might yield of time past?

  LIMESTONE AND CLAY

  Limestone isn’t simply a chronological record of prehistory, it is compressed time. The horizontal layers you see in road cuts through limestone beside highways were laid down millions of years ago as sediment at the bottom of oceans. I once calculated how much time was contained in a vertical inch of limestone, at least as it is represented by the dolomite cliff that Niagara Falls pours over. I divided the height of the cliff, 167 feet, by the number of years it represented, about thirty million, and came up with 15,000 years an inch. If you consider that the first citystates arose in Mesopotamia only 10,500 years ago, then the staggering age of this rock starts to become apparent. The layers of sedimentary stone that form the walls of the Grand Canyon in Colorado are even more impressive; they contain a continuous vertical record of 330 million years of life on earth. When you stand on the lip of the Grand Canyon, you are looking into an abyss of time as well as space.

  On top of holding the often perfectly cast remains of extinct creatures, of shells and dinosaurs, limestone also preserves single days—indeed, single moments. The trackway of a small, birdlike dinosaur discovered recently in Alberta is a record of a few seconds in time millions of years ago, when the dinosaur foraged at the muddy edge of a river.

  There are other fossil records of this same kind of ephemeral, transitory moment. A few decades ago, in an area of northern Tanzania called Laetoli, the trackways of two, possibly three, hominids were discovered preserved in stone. The tracks were so clear that they looked as if they had just been made the day before; in fact, they have since been calculated to be over 3.5 million years old. The actions of this small group of pre-humans, walking through the freshly fallen ash near an active volcano after a light rainfall, have been reconstructed, and so we know that at one point the footprints stop, indicating that the group paused to look around them. Did the nearby volcano erupt briefly? Did a carnivore roar? And where were they going? If there were two of them, it
appears it was a male and a female. But if there were three—and most anthropologists believe there were—why did the second, smaller male not only walk behind the first two, but also deliberately step in the tracks of the first male?

  Trackways are not the only record of transitory events. One of my favourite kinds of preserved moments in time are fossil ripple marks. More than representing a particular few minutes in time or revealing the behaviour of a creature, they represent a day, perhaps a single afternoon, in a shallow coral reef lagoon. Ripple patterns in underwater sand change gradually, from one day to the next, as the waves above transform them. In the Caribbean I’ve snorkelled over acres of flat white lagoon sand, scanning the smoothly corrugated contours for brittle stars and sand divers. I’ve always found this expanse of sinuous texture, like a giant’s fingerprint, to be meditative and idyllic. White underwater sand, lit turquoise by sea and sunlight, seems to me to be one of the essences of a tropical afternoon. But to come upon an identically contoured series of ripple marks, preserved in sandstone more than three hundred million years old, is to be sent back in time to an eerily similar lagoon lit by a similar sun. The earth was spinning more quickly then, so the primeval afternoon would end sooner than our afternoon does now, but the sand flats would be identical—until you reached the reef, that is. Then there would be some surprises in store: schools of squids housed in coiled shells, foraging trilobites and fish whose heads were covered with bony plates.

  TIME PORTAL: THE SANGAMONIAN BRICK WORKS

  It’s already September. The summer flew by, though early September is, for me, the pinnacle of August. The weather is hot and clear, the cicadas are singing, and my yard is at its lushest. The banana tree has six big leaves, and my palm has a new leaf beginning to fan open. This evening, when the sun was just beginning to throw the south side of my house into shade, there was a moment when every little bump and crevice on the bricks was cast into relief. In a brick just above and to the right of the back door, I noticed something that looked like a pawprint, and I stood up and took a closer look. It was a cat’s footprint—judging from its size, a kitten’s. “How’s that possible?” I thought. Then it struck me. Many years ago that brick, along with other wet bricks, must have lain on an outdoor rack before being fired in a kiln. That’s when a kitten walked across them. I began to search for more pawprints and I found some, probably from the same kitten, on several bricks in my house. I found one on a brick in the alleyway between my neighbour’s house and my own, and two others on the front of my house. I fantasized about removing the bricks and reconstructing the kitten’s path, like a dinosaur trackway in a museum display. But they’re fine where they are.

  Long before I saw the kitten prints, I’d noticed other impressions in the brick: four indentations in a row that look like they were made by the tips of someone’s fingers, and something that resembles the imprint of the side of a hand. Also, many of the bricks have ridges, possibly from spaces between the boards in the drying racks. All these indelible imprints, like footprints in wet concrete, are a permanent record of transient events—a kitten walking over damp clay on a warm spring evening, a worker testing the firmness of the bricks before he slides them into the red-hot kiln.

  I did some research on the history of my house and discovered that it was built in 1913 and that the bricks used to construct its walls were supplied by the Don Valley Brick Works, located in a ravine in the city’s southeast. At that time the bricks came in two colours, red and yellow. The yellow bricks were made of the clay quarried at the site, while the red bricks were made from limestone found beneath the clay. Because my house was built in 1913, I presume that my bricks were fired the year before, at least. They are a lovely hue of red, a warm, Pompeian terracotta. But my relationship with the brick works goes even deeper.

  As I went through the history of the brick works, which began producing bricks in the late nineteenth century, I discovered the site included a unique prehistoric deposit from an interglacial era called the Sangamonian. I was hooked. The Don Valley Brick Works turned out to be the only place in Ontario with 120,000-year-old fossils from the Illinoian glacial period. Even more importantly, a very remarkable layer, the Don Formation, consisting of clay from the Sangamonian interglacial period, overlaid the Illinoian deposits. The name was exotic, lovely. It rolled seductively in my mouth. But it was the Sangamonian climate that I really liked. At the height of the Sangamonian, 115,000 years ago, Toronto was much warmer than it is today. Osage orange trees, pawpaws and wild rhododendrons adorned the slopes beside rivers where beavers the size of black bears swam. Semitropical insects got stuck in the clay, and sabre-toothed tigers prowled the thickets.

  I decided to visit the fabled brickyards and see if I could find any Sangamonian fossils. The brick factory has closed down, but the city recently turned the buildings into a historical site and created a large park with ponds and walkways where the quarries were located. The works themselves are set in a large bowl formed by tall clay cliffs on two sides. Towards the west side are a few ponds where the old limestone quarry was located, and behind it is the famous north slope of the clay quarry. I clambered up the slope and spent the next half-hour splitting dry pieces of clay apart, looking for fossils. I didn’t find a thing. I went to the western edge of the property, where Mud Creek cascades in a small waterfall, and walked along an embankment strewn with discarded limestone pieces. Here I was happily surprised.

  The rocks were full of fossils: shells, feather stars, trilobites and coral. Some pieces even had ripple marks. During the Ordovician period—the time the limestone was formed—Toronto was on the equator (due to continental drift) and land plants hadn’t evolved. It was late evening when I stumbled upon this treasure, and the sun was almost setting. It was a perfect summer evening and it had that Balthusian light, almost pink, as the sun neared the horizon, warming the foliage and setting the red-brick buildings of the old factory ablaze against the blue sky and grassy hills. It seemed then that time leaked like a mist out of the limestone around me. It seeped out of the prehistoric clay and lingered over the ponds. A night heron flew overhead, croaking noisily, and above the ponds swallows performed their acrobatics. There was something moody, desolate and marvellous about the abandoned buildings with their empty windows. The architecture of the old factory seemed emblematic of another time, another place, an evening almost a century ago when a kitten walked over wet bricks and looked up to watch the swallows.

  WHY HISTORY GETS CLOSER AS YOU AGE

  A few days ago over lunch, a friend and I were talking about aging, and I submitted that the past gets more recent as you get older. “It’s the flipside of the converging age paradox,” I said. He asked me what that was, and I pointed out how, the older we get, the more that people who are younger than us “catch up” to our age. For example, if you are twenty and your younger sister is ten, then she is half your age. But when you’re thirty and she’s twenty, she gains on you: she’s now two-thirds your age. When you are fifty and she is forty, she is four-fifths of your age. And so on. “Eventually,” I said, “everybody ends up, more or less, the same age.”

  “But I’ll always be older than my sister,” he argued. “She’ll never catch up completely.‘ I agreed, but said that it hardly matters when your relative ages are so close. It’s the same as historical perspective, I went on. I told him how, when I was a child watching old black-and-white World War II footage on the television, the 1940s seemed remote and primitive compared to the smooth, sophisticated world of the late 1950s. So here was another effect of the age paradox. The Allies had declared victory barely more than a decade before, yet for me, watching from my living-room rug, it might as well have been hundreds of years ago, because a decade was over twice my lifespan up to that point.

  “The older you get, the closer you are to history,” my friend observed. Exactly, I said. An event that took place ten years before you were born was equal to the entire length of your life when you were ten, but only half of your life
when you turn twenty, and less than a third of your life when you turn thirty. Recent history, and all of history, gets closer to you the older you get.

  It’s a little like the distance paradox, my friend said—the one where, if you go half the distance towards a wall, and then half that distance, then half that distance, you approach the wall quickly, but in the end, you never quite get there. Like Zeno’s Arrow, I said. He nodded. He then went on to offer his own theory, one that had to do with degrees of separation in time.

  “We know history directly and intimately through people. Most of us have contact, through friends and relatives, with almost a century of history. If you take the future into consideration, the same thing applies. Some of the infants you know will still be alive almost a century from now. Its like degrees of separation, only in time. When I was young I met my grandmother, who had been born in 1850. Now I know a grandnephew who will most likely live at least eighty years, given today’s life expectancy. When you add it up, in terms of generations, then, by proxy, I am one degree of separation from almost two hundred and fifty years of past and future.”

  ANCIENT BEINGS AND LIVING FOSSILS

  I liked my friend’s idea, and when we parted I began to think of it in terms of a personal connection with time. What would the giant sequoias on California’s west coast tell us if they could communicate all the history they’d witnessed? What would animals that live longer than humans tell us? Parrots, large tortoises and crocodiles are among the longest-living animals, sometimes surviving longer than a hundred years in the wild. Humans would also have to be numbered among the longest-living animals, though only in special centenarian cases. The lengthiest documented human lifespan was recorded in southern France, where Jeanne Calment lived to be 122 years old. That would have given her direct, living contact with approximately three hundred years of human life, past, present and future. But in terms of longevity, the prize goes to tortoises. The oldest documented tortoise was named Harriet. She was rumoured to have been brought to England from the Galapagos by Charles Darwin in 1835, when she was only five years old. Later in life she was returned to the South Pacific, though to Australia instead of the Galapagos. She was a giant tortoise, and like all giant tortoises she grew for her entire life. When she died in 2006, at age 175, she weighed over 150 kilograms and was the size of a dinner table.