Petrified!

After an arduous afternoon toting heavy objects out of my childhood home, I was relaxing alone on the back patio, legs outstretched, listening to Pacific chorus frogs singing from the farm pond just outside the backyard fence. Nightfall gentled in like an old memory. A platinum moon rose full above the garage on my left, casting long shadows into the grass. The back pasture stretched toward the empty ghost of a barn, then gave way to a hillside steep and dark with Douglas-fir. We are selling this place that Mom and Dad bought in 1960 and where they spent most of their adult lives. My son and his family have been living here and are moving into a home of their own. My body rested while my mind tried to absorb the imminent loss of the land that had formed me.

Sometimes letting go requires that we dig deeper. Sitting alone on a full moon night, I found that things no longer seen became visible. Between the garage and my chair on the patio was an empty muddy space that until recently had been occupied by a fossil stump roughly the size of a steamer trunk. The next-door neighbor kid and I used to rockhound along an eroded skid road that switchbacked up the hill. The track was poorly constructed and was in a constant state of erosion during the rainy season, a process that sometimes revealed small geological treasures. Occasionally we’d happen onto a piece of petrified wood. Our laconic diagnosis was simply petrified rather than petrified wood. This truncation saved an unnecessary syllable.

The ditchless road occasionally spawned mudslides. When my buddy and I were maybe ten-years-old, we found ourselves at the foot of one such slide just beyond the back edge of the pasture. A rock about the size of a loaf of bread was visible above the surface. My friend brushed his hand across the exposed stone and in near-disbelief exclaimed petrified! We started by digging around it with our hands, but the wood-gone-to-rock kept going down. We brought picks and shovels up from the house and ended up spending most of that summer digging the fossil out of the ground. When it was finally free from the surrounding soil, Dad brought his 1952 Ford pickup through the pasture and backed it up to the stump. With his help we managed to drag and roll the behemoth onto a pair of 2 x 12s chained to the back bumper and skidded it to the house. For nearly six decades the gargantuan stone rested in state next to the back patio, adorned by Mom’s various landscaping plants and a creeping scourge of English ivy.

The preserved topography of this rock that had once been a tree is complex. At the top the color is dominated by a storm of darkening grays, presumably because this section was exposed to weathering. The preserved wood grain then weaves gracefully down toward the base in a range of browns: khaki, cocoa, chestnut, burnt umber. At one point the descent is interrupted by a cinnamon gash running at a 45-degree angle that looks like a region of decay. Toward the bottom, the stone flares into the uppermost beginnings of roots, or perhaps buttresses. Taken together, the colors and grain feel like a microcosm of the Grand Canyon. My favorite part of this ancient stump is in the center of the top surface. It is an oblong hole about two inches by three inches bulging with several knots of crystal, their grains the size of course table salt. I’ve always wondered how deep into the rock those crystalline structures go.

Lately, I’ve been wondering how deep into time the roots once reached. Petrification is more nuanced than a pair of rockhounding kids could have imagined. For starters, turning wood to stone requires immediate burial to exclude the oxygen necessary for organisms that cause decay. Once buried, mineral-rich water invades the spaces within the plant cells. A process called permineralization begins. The dissolved minerals, often silica, precipitate inside the cells. Thus, the knots of crystal bulging at the top of the stump are probably silica, which makes them quartz.

This rock that was once a stump that was once a tree was once a part of an ancient forest. High on the dark ridge rising toward the full moon, the geology is volcanic and originated from ash and basalt flows during the Oligocene uplift and eruptions of the early western Cascades. Toward the foot of the hill where the fossil was found, the rocks are contemporaneous with the Wallace Creek Formation on the north side of this same ridge. These are upper Oligocene (about 25 million years ago) and are also of volcanic origin. The Wallace Creek Formation includes evidence of lahars (volcanic mudflows) and deposits from hillside outwashes.

In addition to local volcanism, the Oligocene was a time of global climate transition from tropical to cooler and drier conditions. The Willamette Valley was a stormy coastline transitioning into a brackish embayment. The giant fossil that my friend and I extracted from the foot of the mudslide had been a large tree, and candidate species were numerous; maples, oaks, hickories, Metasequoia, cedars, and redwoods were all there. Someday I’ll find a person who can identify the tree species that became this rock.

That forest of eons ago worked its way into my mind. I wondered how Oligocene sunlight scattered through the canopy leaves or how onshore winds bent the limbs into song. Salamanders similar to our coastal giant salamander might have lumbered over the forest floor. Would my nose have found the same strong odor of decaying needles and leaves as it does in our current forests? I’m left to imagine how that forest died. Because the stump is large and petrification requires quick burial, death was likely sudden, perhaps the result of a volcanic mudflow. Whatever the cause, the stump stands in testimony to cataclysmic forces punctuating the vast reaches of geological time. We were powerless then by our absence. We are powerless now in our smallness.

In my smallness I sat staring up at that hillside now placid in the moonlight. Mom and Dad are gone, and no one in the family wants to keep the place. Although I’m trying to shed feelings of ownership, I was having trouble letting go of that petrified testament to recent and ancient history. One of my three brothers rousted me out of indecision, insisting that I transport the fossil stump to my house in Eugene. Fortunately, he is also the one who lives closest and likes challenges. We dug the rock loose from 6 inches of late winter mud and rolled it onto a pallet. A cable winch was anchored to the hitch of Dad’s big pickup, and we slid the monstrosity out to the edge of the driveway. There it lay, tipped on its side, truncated roots facing out as if sulking and daring us to take it further from home.

My good fortune in life includes a large and loving family, some of whom have access to appropriate equipment. Fond memories cement our extended family—and make it easier to ask for favors. I called my cousin who owns a heavy-duty pickup with a hydraulic lift gate. When we were kids, he and his sisters often stayed for extended visits at our place. My cuz and I easily rolled the rock onto the lift gate (I swear I heard it grumble when we slid it into the pickup bed) for the 30-minute drive to southeast Eugene. Unloading wasn’t so straightforward. We leveled the lift gate with the front garden bed where the rock would be placed, winched it awkwardly out of the truck, and were able to place it with roots down and the photogenic side facing the sidewalk. It wasn’t quite right. He offered to call in a favor from a friend with a small backhoe. About then my neighbor across the street joined in the “fun.” We grunted, sweated, and cussed that half-ton of wood-gone-to-stone more or less into place. When my middle finger was crushed between the fossil and the cement garden wall, I swore hard while my purpling fingernail became an extended obscenity. The hulking stump still isn’t perfectly positioned, but as my students have been quick to remind me over the years, 90% is an A. There might be a backhoe in my future.

From the farm pond, my ears embraced a lone chorus frog letting out an exploratory creeeaak, as if to ask is anyone still here? I left my chair to turn off the patio lights, hoping to encourage more frog song. Instead, a plaintive meow tendriled out from the moon shadow near the woodshed. Mom’s little female cat became a mobile ink-spot slipping across moonlit grass. One of my brothers rescued she and her brother from their birthplace under his house in southeastern Oregon and brought them to live here with Mom. Chaos, the female, and Destruction, the male, otherwise known as Kay and Dez, entertained Mom in her last years. Dez left when my son’s family moved in, but Kay adopted them. She has been renamed Varda, for the Queen of the Valar in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, who is responsible for situating the stars in the heavens. The cat’s new name seemed especially appropriate on this star-shot night. I meowed back to her, our standard greeting, and she came to the patio for a perfunctory pet. For most of her five years Varda has known only this place. Now her family has moved, and she must move also. Now the petrified stump has moved. Now finally I must move on and release the immediacy of this place that has formed me, just as it has formed Varda and preserved that stump 25 million years ago. The time has come for the land to mold others into its likeness.

Melancholy mixed with gratitude drifted in on cooling moonlit air. I need to make my peace with this place that will become something else to someone else. I’m aspiring to fossilization. I’m already permineralized; the minerals here have seeped into my cells from decades spent eating from Mom’s garden and drinking the well-water. I have become an animate monument to this erosional terrace above the McKenzie River and a hillside that occasionally breaks loose to reveal stone relics of an Oligocene woodland. Maybe someday someone can scatter part of me here with Mom and Dad. Maybe a handful of my minerals will be hanging around in 25 million years. Maybe they’ll find their way into a fossil.