A Stroll Along the bottom of old Lake Bonneville

Hilda and I are in a cozy little motel room in Winnemucca, Nevada, tonight, tummies happily filled with lamb after a Basque meal at the Martin Hotel. We'll be home tomorrow, and happy to be there. But we are also enjoying our one more night on the road, free from all the to-dos that tug at our sleeves there. Planting those society garlic plants sitting around in their one-gallon containers, putting up the Christmas lights, finally planting those "fall" daffodil bulbs - all of that. Soon's I get off of jabbering at you here, I'll tuck myself in with all three pillows, and pour over the photo and computer mags I allowed myself at the Edmonton, Wyoming Wal-Mart this morning. Hilda will look for a Kings game on the tube. Cozy and happy.

But first, a geological and philosophical digression. It's about time travel. When you set the cruise control at 70 and fly over these fine strips of asphalt and concrete, you can't avoid relating to this impressive western terrain of ours. Even with no background in geology you can't escape the fact that as you speed across the Great Salt Lake Desert you are several hundred feet below the former surface of Lake Bonneville. The old shorelines are right up there on the sides of the mountains. As you leave the old lake and head up through the canyons, the highway climbs along alluvial terraces - sand and gravel river deposits that have been lifted along with the mountains and partly eroded away as the streams continue to cut the canyon. They are still eroding, of course, and the mountains still rising. But the highways and gas stations are built on them as if the world was built for us to do this and will remain forever as we see it now. Tertiary and Quaternary time is just a blink in relation to the age of the earth, and our lifetimes just a blink in comparison to the 10 million years or so of Quaternary time. So at first glance the surface we drive on seems static. But when thinking about those raising and eroding terraces, the rising and falling lakes, in my mind the terrain is in motion and evolving, and I see this ribbon of concrete as very fragile, indeed, and appreciate my luck to be alive in this brief time while this technology exists, and Hilda and I can just jump in the car and head off on a 2,500 mile drive for a little visiting.