Earlier this year, on my usual walk through the UMass campus, I passed by a rock that was on display next to the Science Center. I had probably passed it dozens of times before but never noticed it. (Why do things that we miss all the time suddenly catch our attention one fine day?) The rock – dark grey, about four feet wide, two feet tall, sliced to reveal contours in the cross section – was like others in northeastern US: so common and ordinary, it blended into the landscape. But that day I stopped to look at the plaque that was attached to the rock. This is what it said:
“Hawley Formation Pillow Basalt. This basalt was erupted from an arc volcano during subduction and closure of the Iapetus Ocean, approximately 475 million years old. Quarried from Hawley, Massachusetts.”
475 million years! I was intrigued: Was this the oldest inanimate solid body that I had ever seen? Had it always more or less retained its shape over millions of years? And what about the exposed rocky cliffs along interstates and the glacier-strewn boulders along hiking trails which I saw so regularly – how old were they?
I had paid little attention to rocks and boulders, but now they have moved to the foreground of my awareness. They have turned into sources of wonder, quiet messengers from an ancient time. And geology itself, which for a long time seemed like a forbidding science – with esoteric terms such as subductions, mantles and moraines – now seems indispensable to understanding the earth’s deep history.
A few weeks later, outside the entrance to the Museum of Science in Boston, I came across rocks displayed in a row. At least two of them were estimated to be 3 billion years old — easily out-competing the UMass rock. Since the earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, I thought: surely now, these museum rocks are the oldest I’ve come across. Again, they were gray — a lighter gray — and not striking to look at. I might not given them a second glance but for the information boards that brought them to life.
This seems to be the great power of scientific narratives: by providing the necessary context they can transform the ordinary into the remarkable.
It’s happened many times, in other contexts. In May 2018, I was walking along a meadow trail in Amherst when birds hovering over the knee-length high grass caught my attention. Their scattered, disorganized calls resembled that of swallows but once I heard them a few times, I got attuned to their unique rhythm. Looking through my binoculars, I spotted a yellow-headed bird with a black and white body. I later identified it as a male bobolink.
Now, a bobolink is most certainly colorful, but so are other birds. My engagement with this species would have ended with the pleasure that comes with first sightings. But I went online and found that among migrants, bobolinks are particularly impressive, traveling 12,500 miles between North America and western South America each year. A bobolink might live up to 9 years, and in that time, “it may travel the equivalent of 4 or 5 times around the circumference of the earth.”
As with the rocks, the bobolink without the backstory would be yet another meadow bird. But now it’s different. Because now, when I first hear its burbling, metallic calls across the the high grass each spring, there’s a special joy in knowing that travelers from a faraway land have arrived.