@vaspider, those roads are paved with the dissected crystalline core of the Allegheny Orogeny. More than 300 million years old, the time when the great coal forests were growing, insects the size of eagles and modern mammals roamed those forests, and amphibians were learning to operate on land. When these mountains were eroded to a broad flat hilly low-land, amphibians had developed water impermeable scales and hard shell eggs, the coal forests were gone because scavengers finally evolved the ability to digest the lignin in wood.
Geology and poetry go hand in hand. The understanding and appreciation of deep time. I could explain about the Grenville basement, the Cambrian carbonate shelves, the subduction and basin dynamics leading into the Taconic orogeny followed by the Acadian and Alleghenian, the contemporary Ouachita, Caledonian, and Hercynian orogenies, and name the various microplates, island arcs, and microcontinents that preceeded the collision with Africa. All with detailed timelines carefully constructed from the logic puzzle that is geostratigraphyâŚ
Or I could talk about a shoreline not unlike the modern Atlantic coast, calm for more time than there is between that moment and today was shattered as that coast became a blender. While life was going from slimy gelatinous disks to the great reptiles, a dozen landscapes like Japan, Madagascar, and the Philippines were crushed and folded like clay in a childâs hands. When two supercontinents slammed into each other in a slow motion crash, birthing a mountain range that dwarfed the modern Himalayans. And then erased into a flat plain.
When the dinosaurs took their first steps on Eastern North America, there were no mountains, no hills, nothing to mark what was likely the largest mountain range ever created by this planet. They would never see them, never know of the colossal roots left behind deep beneath them. It would not be until chimpanzees and our ancestors parted way that they would rise once moreâŚ
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