I have been to the Southwest a number of times now, but the landscape of Utah caught me by surprise. The natural sculptures were unearthly. Canyons, buttes and bluffs in a variety of colors ranging from gray to tan to red and all shades in between.
We decided not to stop at the national parks in the area and instead stopped at several rest areas. At each one I poked around for rocks. Wherever I go I bring back interesting rocks. One formation caught my eye. It was a mud flat. Not a fresh one, probably a rarity in a desert. Instead, it was a mud flat that was probably hundreds of millions of years old. It was delaminating so I felt not regrets in picking up a piece to take home. I found out later that it is called “mudstone.”I love my piece of mudstone. It captures something very ephemeral—a rainstorm and the aftermath.
A rainstorm that happened hundreds of millions of years ago, before anything even remotely resembling a human being walked on the earth. What a thought.
My piece of mudstone is a light tan in color, almost gray. It records not only a few raindrops but also the sunny days that came after the storm. The surface is cracked, as a stretch of mud will do when it lies in the sun drying. Any one of us has seen this countless times and not given it a second thought.
I remember my mother commenting on a leaf that had been trapped on a patch of mud in our yard. She said that that’s how fossils were made, and wasn’t it interesting that a fossil that wold be found hundreds of millions of years later began with a patch of mud and a fallen leaf. What are the chances that that could happen?
Hundreds of millions of years ago Utah was at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The western half of the state was under water, and the eastern half was a huge mud flat. That is probably the period that my stone was made. Just another rainy day when the mud dried a bit, and more silt was washed on top of the dried mud, preserving what was below. The same process repeated again and again as the layers of sediment stacked up to form many hundreds of feet of mudstone.
My piece of mudstone is a record of a moment in time that is gone forever.
Our lives are like that too— we are here for awhile and we blow away like dust. Shakespeare reflected on it well:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Prospero, The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158
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