To look up to the Rocky Mountains is to feel the permanence of this earth. And maybe to feel uplifted as you imagine ascending 14,000 feet up into the sky.
But some pesky scientist will pipe up,
Well, actually, the material you see in the streams has descended from higher elevations over eons of time where a slow process of erosion will eventually reduce the mountains….
In the tobacco-stained mouth of an old-time prospector, it goes more like this:
Them there hills is coming down on us slowly but surely! Hee hee! (cough, wheeze, toothless smirk).
No matter the source, the idea seems preposterous until you stumble up a degrading granite hill as I did at Silver Cliff Ranch where I was speaking a few weeks ago.
Unlike the three-toed sloth erosion of the hard granite found in the Rockies’ Front Range, this cliff is more like a prancing Big Horn Sheep. It’s off-limits to climbers. There’s simply no place strong enough to anchor lines.
As you walk through the camp, it’s obvious that the loose rocks underfoot are making their way downward to Chalk Creek (aptly named) faster than the staff can keep up with them. Across the road they’re conducting a construction project that’s mostly a matter of digging up and removing the white and grey stuff.
When I mentioned to the camp director that there might be money in trucking the excess rock out as a lucrative export, he looked at me with a granite glare.
I’m retiring in a year. Did you say something, city slicker?
Recently, a new acquaintance was trying to articulate the pull to transcendence we all experience and how we call it “religion” or whatever. I began thinking of the slow creep of degrading granite, as one might in such moments of existential exchange. I mentioned the “vanity of vanities” from the book of Ecclesiastes and how our hearts are yet prone to seek out transcendence.1 I shared it as an honest confession of my hope in our ever-changing, material existence. His face mirrored the camp director’s. Probably my Old Testament wisdom reference was unfamiliar to him. Or maybe it stirred his heart. I hope so.
Earlier that week, I plunged my bike-heated body into my favorite dipping pool in Mill Creek in Lancaster County Central Park.2 I felt pebbles hitting my back under the water, and when I stood up in the rapids, some of those buggers dove into my sneakers. Even in Pennsylvania, the rocks become silt and flow on down to the Chesapeake Bay, hurried up by generations of mill dams now long defunct. Entropy, The Second Law of Thermodynamics, is our common experience: the breaking down of complex material into more basic stuff. The flow of the floe.
Where the spring melts flow down from Silver Cliff and cross Route 162, the road has been dug out to receive it. A sign says,
Danger! Flash Flooding. Do Not Enter When Dip Is Flowing.
Now if that’s not the dopest name for a playlist, I don’t know what is.
As providence would have it, the leaders of the camp asked if I could throw a dance party after their banquet on the last evening. I replied with the coolness of a granite countertop:
Yea. I think I can do that.
I’m always down to get that dip flowing.
Behind us on that dark Colorado night, the mountains were literally crumbling. Some students who had rarely danced (or been encouraged to) lost their inhibitions and their minds just a little. Other kids, accustomed to raving, got to sport their cool.
I thought of Ecclesiastes again. The “vanities of vanities” is wrongly assumed to be its chorus. It’s not. A more upbeat song pulsates through its twelve chapters. It’s a call
…to be joyful and to do good as long as (we) live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to (us).
That sounds a lot like its cynical, troublesome cousin, “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Wisdom, activated by faith in a good Creator, says,
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we live.
The slow pull of entropy is not the end of the story for creation or humankind. It’s merely the part that forces us to look to the hills.
We ended the night with a hearty sing/dance-along of “Don’t Stop Believin’” and, finally, “The Circle of Life.” The dip most definitely flowed. I figure one remedy for the futility of life is to look to those hills. Then stomp that entropy dead in its tracks.
Ecclesiastes 3:9-13 is a fine summary of this ancient, existential wisdom book. Three human realities are figured: the experience of our degrading material existence, the parallel quest for grappling with immortality in each of our hearts, and the reconciliation found in the simple enjoyment of our daily presence before God.
What we call “county park” sits on the edge of our city, easily reachable on foot and made up of hundreds of acres of streams (including the Conestoga River), trails, garden plots, ball fields, meadows, and large tracts of native trees.