Cronos

 

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.
                                       -- Nathanial Hawthorne

The Anastomosing of Time

The cold I caught while traveling is finally loosening its grip. The fog in my head is lifting, clearing away like morning mist off a river, and the daily walk is no longer a slough through heavy water but a return to the joy of air and light. Strength returns. The world sharpens.

And so I sit here, bathed in the glow of the screen, wrestling with a mass of digital ghosts—images captured weeks ago in the silence of Canyonlands. It is a good exercise, this looking. Analyzing the composition, checking the technique, remembering the tripod standing there like a three-legged watcher.

My mind, as it does, begins to wander. It steps into the screen.

I see the layers defined in the Permian Organ Rock formation, down in the deep throat of the canyon. I see the red bleeding out below the blinding white of the White Rim Sandstone. Those layers are not just rock; they are time frozen in a stack. This was a fluvial world once, a place of water. It is a record of rivers meandering across a flat plane, twisting and braiding in a pattern the geologists call anastomosing.

Anastomosing. It sounds like a spell, but it is just the memory of water. The sediments accumulated, grain by grain, building a clock made of stone.

I have taken you back to the Mesozoic before, walked you through the heat and the ferns. But that was a watercolor sketch—a light wash of pigment, transparent and quick. The truth? The truth requires oil. It needs deep, thick, textured paint, layer upon layer, to capture the heavy reality of what science has given us.

It is hard to hold. We understand a day. We understand the rhythm of a month. If Cronos, the old Greek god of time, smiles upon us, we might even understand a century. We can feel the shape of a hundred years.

But sixty-six million? The time since the fire fell from the sky into the Gulf of Mexico and silenced the dinosaurs? That is a ghost too big to hold.

So let us shrink it down. Let us give Cronos a tool we can understand.

Hand him a pen. A writing pen with a point as fine as a whisper—0.01 millimeters wide. A single scratch of this pen, thin as a spider’s silk, will represent one day.

Cronos puts the pen to paper. Scratch. Tuesday. Scratch. Wednesday.
He draws and draws. To mark a single year, he creates a band of ink 3.6 millimeters wide. A decade is the width of a matchbook.

Now, unroll the paper. Let it spill out of the room, past the Canyonlands, out into the world. To hold the sixty-six million years since the asteroid struck, the scroll must act like those anastomosing streams—wandering on and on and on.

The scroll would stretch for one hundred and fifty miles.

One hundred and fifty miles of ink.

Walk it. Feel the dust of the road. For the first mile, there is nothing but ash and the cold wind of the impact winter. Then, the ferns unfurl. The birds cry out with new voices. You walk ten miles, twenty, fifty. The paper stretches on, a white road under the moon.

You walk for days. You walk past the shifting of continents, the groaning of mountains rising like sleeping giants from the earth. You walk past the red layers and the white layers, past the rivers braiding in the dark.

And all this time, mile after dusty mile, there is no one to say hello. No lights in the windows. Just the wind in the grass and the hunger in the dark.

You are tired now. Your strength is fading. You are at the end of the road. One hundred and fifty miles of silence behind you.

And then, in the very last fifty yards—a mere stone’s throw from the end—a shadow stands up. A hand strikes a flint. A fire blooms.

We are here.

And all our cities, our rockets, our symphonies, our wars? The photos we take of the canyons, the colds we catch, the tripods we set up to capture the light?

Look down at the paper. Look at the very end.

It is the last seven inches.

We are nothing more than the final tremble of the pen, the last wet smudge of ink before the paper runs out and the wind blows it all away.


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