Strata (excerpt)
Table of Contents
Introduction: The San Rafael Swell
The Gray World; or, a Childhood Among the Cretaceous: Mancos Shale
The Scorched Earth; or, Extractive Entanglements: Ferron Sandstone
Colors from the Earth: Morrison Formation
Philomorphism: Entrada Sandstone
Pages of Time: Navajo Sandstone
Superfluous Beauty: Wingate Sandstone
Necrogeomorphology: Chinle & Moenkopi Formations
Communing with the Inorganic: TR-1 Unconformity / Permian Period
Introduction: The San Rafael Swell
Unconsolidated Surficial Deposits
Rocks, shale, mud, sand, and dust; badlands, buttes, mesas, cliffs, canyons, and washes; vast landscapes of gray, yellow, or red stone; patterned crusts of soil and sediment crumbling under my feet; the weight of coal loaded onto the bed of a pick-up truck or placed into a fireplace and the black coal dust remaining under the fingernails: many of the memories from my childhood in central Utah foreground an intimate experience of the materiality of the earth. Looking back at those years growing up in proximity to the state’s famous national parks and monuments, I can see a personal affinity with the inorganic beginning decades ago. Unknown to myself at that time, this apparent rural idle during youth was also an education and immersion in geologic deep time.
Deep time: the name metaphorically aligns going back into the far geologic past with going vertically down through the layers of strata. Framed thus, geologic time is cast into the impenetrable depths of the earth, only to be viewed at tourist visits to the Grand Canyon or on roadcuts glimpsed while speeding by on the freeway.
The San Rafael Swell near where I grew up in central Utah, however, subverts, or rather rotates, this figure. Formed 50 million years ago during the Laramide compression, the Swell is a massive anticline, basically a vast kidney-shaped dome 75 miles long and 35 miles wide, that has pushed its oldest strata up to the surface. As one enters the Swell from either the west or east, the further one goes toward the middle the older the strata that are revealed. When one reaches the relative center of the Swell, the deep past is displayed on the surface of the present.
In our “geologically illiterate” culture, geology is lamentably not a major element in the American primary school system, so to my young self the San Rafael Swell was just the “desert,” a series of variations on emptiness. Fortunately, the Swell benefits from a geological legibility that makes it easy to read its rocks and appreciate its exceptional stratigraphic arrangement, if one desires to. Moving latitudinally across the Swell, one encounters the same progression of strata, which also vary enough in color, texture, and form to be distinct from each other and recognizable to even a non-geologist’s eyes: entering the Swell from the west, there is Blue Gate Shale, Ferron Sandstone, Tununk Shale, Cedar Mountain Formation, Morrison Formation, Summerville Formation, Curtis Formation, Entrada Sandstone, Carmel Formation, Navajo Sandstone, Kayenta Formation, Wingate Sandstone, Chinle Formation, and Moenkopi Formation. The order is then reversed as one passes the center and crosses back down on the east side of the Swell. Even without the geological names, the flow of colors from gray to purple to red to green to yellow and so on quickly becomes a familiar pattern. Whether one is speeding down I-70 through the heart of the Swell at 80 miles an hour, kicking up dust on the Green River Cutoff Road through the northern Swell, wandering down shorter segments such as on the Moore Cutoff Road, or exploring one of the many rough dirt back roads that cover the southern half, the rocks predictably follow this sequence as one moves back and forth across geologic time. From some of the higher points in the Swell, deep time is even horizontally stretched out in front of one’s gaze as the horizon is a series of bands that shift in color as the strata succeed each other.
Despite its rich geologic offerings, practically no one lives in the Swell today. Archaeological discoveries testify to indigenous peoples being present in the area for up to 13,000 years, and the ample amount of rock art from different pre-historic cultures scattered across the Swell provides visitors today a reminder of this long human presence in the area. At the time of the first Spanish explorations of the region in the late 18th century, Ute Indians were the primary tribe in this part of Utah. Although “the San Rafael [Swell] had no permanent settlements” at that time, the Ute Indians likely knew it well from passing through in seasonal migrations or other travels. This nomadic culture might not have conformed to colonial ideas that equate possession of land with permanent inhabitation, but the Utes surely had strong connection to and knowledge of places such as the Swell that they may only have occasionally visited. Unfortunately, the eventual coercion of the Ute tribe onto a reservation in northeastern Utah in the late 1800s did much to repress or erase this indigenous intimacy with and relation to the land of the Swell.
This colonial removal and erasure of indigenous culture also certainly enabled later visitors to view the Swell as an empty place freely available for their own personal use and exploitation. Cattle ranchers, miners, bootleggers, and even outlaws all have appropriated the Swell for their own purposes over the past two centuries. Books and guides on the Swell take great pleasure in recounting entertaining stories about the adventures of the eccentric western characters who came to occupy or pass through the Swell during this period. These wild and often not verified tales range from cattleman Sid Swasey’s death-defying jump by horse over a 14-foot wide but over 70-feet deep section of Black Box Canyon to Butch Cassidy and his gang using the canyons of the Swell and nearby Robbers Roost to escape from pursuing lawmen after their daring robberies. The boom/bust cycles of the different mining industries, from coal to uranium, also created fantastic stories of individuals who were lured in by dreams of striking it rich from the Swell’s geologic resources but often just as quickly expelled by the harsh land and/or economic realities. Picturesque tales aside, collapsing wood cabins, the wrecks of broken-down cars, and the ruins of mining sites are today the most conspicuous physical reminders of the unorthodox desires that dragged this curious collection of people out into the Swell.
The Wedge Overlook near the center of the northern San Rafael Swell.
Beyond all the practical reasons for the lack of continuous human habitation in the Swell, such as its lack of water sources and infertile soils, there is something about the inhumanity of the rock-filled landscape that would seem to ward off even dreaming of permanently settling there. The earliest geologist visitors to the Swell certainly did not hold back in sensationalized descriptions of this world of barren stone. John Wesley Powell passed closely by and briefly visited the Swell on his famous trip down the Green River. Powell described the Colorado Plateau as “a whole land of naked rock.” He also would state it is “a land of desolation, dedicated forever to the geologist and the artist, where civilization can find no resting place.” Shortly after, Powell’s geologist colleague Clarence Dutton offered this even harsher description directly of the San Rafael Swell: “It is a picture of desolation and decay; of a land dead and rotten, with dissolution apparent all over its face.” So for much of history since the colonization and settling of the West, the Swell has been viewed as an obstacle to pass through as quickly as possible.
I grew up in Orangeville, Utah, part of Castle Valley, a narrow north-south strip of very small towns on or near the Highway 10 that runs along the west end of the San Rafael Swell. With the Wasatch Plateau towering thousands of feet higher on the west, the inhospitable flats and canyons of the San Rafael Swell on the east, urban Salt Lake City over two hours to the north, and half a state of rocky emptiness to the south, Castle Valley is arguably one of the more geographically isolated places in the country. Growing up surrounded by a land that was empty of humans and mostly impassable, especially in the winter months, I certainly felt like I was living in the proverbial middle of nowhere.
The town itself did little to combat this feeling of isolation and vacantness. Orangeville has a population that has historically hovered around 1,000 people. Living there in the 1980s, I was all too sensitive to the fact it lacked a single restaurant, coffee shop, or movie theater. Beyond the activities held at Orangeville’s Cottonwood Elementary School, which I attended, the town’s entire public life centered around events at the local Mormon chapel. Even when these gatherings were secular, such as Boy Scout club meetings, the location as well as the inevitable prayers and role of religion made them less than welcoming for someone raised as a part of the very small non-Mormon community in the region. Isolation from the religious center of the community ultimately compounded this feeling of geographical isolation from the rest of humanity. Nonetheless, there was, however, a library in town and plenty of open space around, so I spent much of those years wandering and absorbing this landscape or reading books and dreaming about other places.
The view west from Orangeville towards the Wasatch Plateau.
On the Utah Geological Survey map that covers Orangeville, much of the area of the town and its immediate vicinity is labeled as alluvial and surficial deposits, unconsolidated and uncemented material that is generally too recent and potentially fleeting to have a strong geological periodization. Like these Quaternary deposits on which they dwell, the current humans in the region feel like geologic latecomers who have been transported here from elsewhere and whose continued presence is tenuous. Hard work, reliance on seasonal flows of the Cottonwood Creek that passes through town, and many irrigation and reservoir projects have allowed for some agriculture to succeed, producing a thin expanse of farming (though mostly just of hay) around the town that provides a green contrast to the neighboring geology for a few months each year. But the soil quickly becomes alkaline and unusable after much farming, so the future of this industry and the government subsidies propping it up are in doubt across Emery County, which includes both Castle Valley and the San Rafael Swell. Coal mining and power generation, the other major local economic industry, has a future equally in doubt as the world moves towards greener energy sources.
No matter how tenuous or temporary their presence has been, humans since colonization and settlement have had a very significant, and generally not positive, imprint on the landscape from these small towns like Orangeville out to the deepest reaches of the Swell. This impact has been nowhere as highlighted as during the difficult fight over obtaining wilderness status for the San Rafael Swell. Perversely, one of the most common arguments made against designating the Swell a national park or monument was the conspicuous evidence of this already existing human intrusion across the land. There are the traces of mining and cattle raising mentioned already, with the network of roads that were built to accompany them. Yet it is the explosion of the off-highway vehicle (OHV) in the past few decades that has left human traces in places that even recently would have been too remote and untouched by significant activity to be deeply changed. Despite new laws and efforts to limit OHVs to designated trails, much of the Swell is covered by tracks of vehicles that wander wherever their drivers wish, ignoring harm to animals and soils as well as to the appearance of the land. Backcountry signs about speed limits and sticking to official trails are often so full of bullet holes as to be illegible, violently illustrating locals’ resentment towards any attempt at conservation that might limit their feelings of motorized freedom. Throw in mounds of broken beer bottles and empty bullet cartridges that often are left behind by this crowd, and one often finds a viciously scarred landscape rather than pristine wilderness.
Of course, “wilderness” has always been a dubious or incoherent concept, more a myth of colonial consciousness that makes indigenous peoples invisible than anything based in reality. I have no wish to repeat those valid critiques here. But though it may not be easy or even possible to completely escape the realm of human influence, especially in our modern world of weekend crowds of RVs towing ATVs far into the backcountry, moving east from Castle Valley towards the center of the Swell is to take leave from this current human-dominated world and increasingly immerse oneself in an inhuman world of stone formed long ago. One passes through the Cretaceous, into the Jurassic, and finally encounters the towering buttes of the Triassic. A bit of wandering can even take one to the Permian. If one wishes to continue on to the eastern side of the Swell, the pattern is repeated in inverse until, after a dramatic drop through the jagged reef on its eastern edge, one again returns to the present Age of Man (and a paved road).
The view east from Orangeville towards the San Rafael Swell.
In what follows, I shall take such a journey, not literally, but mentally by intellectually dwelling on some of the strata such a trip would pass through. There are already a number of guidebooks and websites for hiking, canyoneering, and backroad driving in the Swell, and I make no pretense to be as adventurous, knowledgeable, or risk-taking as the authors of those works. Those looking for literary narratives of trips through the backcountry of the Utah should turn to the carefully crafted works of local authors like Craig Childs or Ann Zwinger. I admire and enjoy such nature writing, but the genre often ends up limited by repetitive descriptions of the same natural features and hiking experiences, though this is less the fault of the authors than of the immense sameness of much of the landscape itself.
Instead, here I wish to use each strata as a schema for organizing increasingly deeper thinking and reflecting about the relation between the human and inhuman, mankind and geology, history and deep time. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes, “We think and reckon with stone, primordial invitation to extended cognition.” In each section, I will therefore gather observations of a specific strata from wherever it is exposed near the San Rafael Swell and survey the scientific work on the formation and physical characteristics of that strata. Rather than begin with potentially abstract topics and work through the endless volumes of often very academic writing about them, I aim to start from these personal and scientific encounters with the varying lithic materialities of the Swell and to stick close to the ideas and issues brought forth from this engagement with this specific section of the earth. However, the Swell’s strata also have a layer of human history now embedded in their geology, so my personal reflections will also often take detours through the quite unusual or unexpected ways humans have been drawn into an interest in the Swell’s rocks. Although it is tempting to draw examples from the spectacular geology elsewhere in Utah, this project also strictly limits itself to what can be thought starting from this selective local material. A similar project undertaken elsewhere would of course cover different geologic formations with different features and geologic and human histories and thereby prompt a different series of reflections.
To accompany this philosophical survey of the strata, I have included ample photos for a few reasons. First, geology terms may not mean much to a general reader, so they are best supplemented with visual illustrations of what is being described. Moreover, the strangeness and uniqueness of the Colorado Plateau that draws in so many visitors also make a written description often inadequate to successfully illustrate such geologic wonders. Finally, my investigation into rocks has a specifically phenomenological core that prioritizes the embodied perception and interaction with them. I might term myself a geo-aesthete, someone particularly affected by a sensuous appreciation of the lithic. Photographically representing at least the specific visual appearance of the strata therefore seems necessary.
As others have noted, the vertical schema of deep time maps easily onto the psychoanalytic model of the psyche, with the geologist’s digging for ever lower strata paralleling the analyst’s attempts to bring the most unknown layers of the unconscious into the light of the conscious day. One might therefore say memoir is always a form of geology of the self. This project no doubt participates in these cliches of the genre by excavating scenes from my past in hopes of finding keys to my present self. In particular, I will argue in the next section that my “geophilia,” my love of and interest in the lithic, partially stems from my childhood amongst the rocks of central Utah. I hope to explore how such a material affinity can lead to an illuminating intimacy between the human and rock, organic and inorganic.
While there is always much to be discovered and learned about the formation and structure of one’s subjectivity, it also would be dubious to assert there is some essential foundation or bedrock to the self to be grasped and preserved. Fortunately, the horizontal stratigraphy of the Swell invites also a de-centering of the self, a wandering astray from personhood. Here I must admit that my family spent most of my childhood on the outer reaches of the Swell, both out of my parents’ personal preference for the lusher fishing lakes of the Wasatch Plateau and the lack of promotion and access to the Swell 40 years ago. Visiting the Swell today therefore provides me an opportunity to broaden my understanding of the landscape and myself. As I work my way across the Swell’s layers, essential depths can be replaced with expanding vistas on the horizon and new potentials for entanglement with the other-than-human. Rather than a narcissistic propping up of selfhood, this is an opportunity for progressively deeper immersions into the non-living world of stone.
Cars driving down I-70 where it cuts through the strata of the San Rafael Reef.
So while starting with some of my most personal, concrete experiences of growing up on the edge of the Swell that establish the depths of my material obsessions, the following sections follow these material affinities as they flow into broader and more complex investigations about the relationship of humanity and geology. From the economics of coal extraction, to the aesthetics of stone, to the philosophical consequences of deep time and extinction, the later sections try to think through and with geology and rocks. Although starting with material about memories of my childhood hometown that might be almost banal in its familiarity from the autobiographical genre, this piece aims to ultimately arrive at the extremes of inhumanity, imagining a communion with the inorganic at the limits of sense and human inhabitability.
Environmentalists never stop demonstrating the dysfunctional and damaging relationship to the world that is produced when humans view their environment as passive material for exploitation. Over the past century, philosophers and scientists have also intellectually confronted complex physical processes and forms of self-organization that seem to undermine any absolute opposition of the living and the nonliving. Today, there is therefore an increasing awareness that the organic/inorganic dichotomy urgently needs to be deconstructed, reimagined, or even just abandoned entirely.
This argument has been made most forcefully and influentially by Jane Bennett through her concept of “vibrant matter.” Bennett argues:
The aim here is to rattle the adamantine chain that has bound materiality to inert substance and that has placed the organic across a chasm from the inorganic. The aim is to articulate the elusive idea of a materiality that is itself heterogeneous, itself a differential of intensities, itself a life.
Yet as this passage shows, this attempt to think the organic and the inorganic on a continuum risks reducing the latter to the former by thinking everything in terms of life or the human. Bennett is aware of this danger, seeing it as a useful but temporary first step with important ethical and political possibilities. Nonetheless, there remains the risk that rather than allowing one to escape from the solipsistic bubble of humanity the concept of vibrant matter merely expands that bubble my making all of reality a bit all-too-human. While sympathetic to her project and the many who take lead from it, I would instead like to try to reverse this line of thinking. By engaging with and reflecting on the rocks of the Swell that are so dramatically inhuman and unalive, I aim for connection with the geologic that, if anything, risks sublating the organic into the inorganic, or to think life in terms of the non-living. Neither reaffirming nor sweeping away the opposition between the organic and the inorganic, I will explore how each comes to express or mimic the characteristics of the other while always maintaining a minimum difference that prevents the complete identification of the two.
The urgency of this topic that Bennet rightfully singles out is largely due to the mushrooming debate about the “Anthropocene,” a term meant to indicate that human beings are now a geological force on the planet. The term has spread from its geologist origins rapidly across almost all academic disciplines and widely into public discourse in the last few years, evolving so quickly and being debated so intensely as to almost have burned up its usefulness. From nuclear waste that will not disappear for millions of years to accumulation of plastic in the ocean to alteration of carbon levels in the atmosphere, human beings are impacting the planet in ways that will be apparent in the geological record far into the future, even past the potential extinction of the species. No matter how one feels about the name or its accuracy, one reason the Anthropocene label feels so necessary is how it makes evident that humans need to be more aware of and rethink their relation to the geologic. If the geologic period may be named after humans, then perhaps humans need to start thinking on the scale of geologic periods. In particular, the environmental crises of the Anthropocene, most notably global warming, challenge people to innovatively broaden the horizon of their concerns past the human and to reconfigure their everyday practices and even academic disciplines into more sustainable, earth-grounded ones. Doing so requires reconstructing a sense of humanity’s place on the planet that is no longer one of domination and exploitation of nature and the earth but, as Donna Haraway argues, one of entanglement with, making kin with, or becoming-with the non-human.
Terry Tempest Williams, who lives on the other side of the Swell, writes, “We are eroding and evolving, at once. Let this be my mantra to be repeated daily. What if beauty dwells in the margins of our undoing and remaking?” What follows is such an attempt to remake my self-image and the image of humanity through a reckoning with the geologic and geomorphic processes that have made and are unmaking the San Rafael Swell and its surroundings.