A little hand held a weathered shard of rock up to me as we were leaving. My four-year old had found a fossil impression of a bivalve today around my mom’s house. I was impressed at its fidelity, and said as much.
My mother witnessed this while standing on her porch and said, “That’s something I don’t understand. How did that get here.”
“This shell fossil?” I asked, not sure if maybe her attention had wandered.
“Yeah. How did all those shell fossils get all the way up here?” She gestured around at the forest, and the hillside where she lives.
Recalling my geologic knowledge from a childhood spent collecting hundreds of similar fossils from the surrounding forest, I explained to my mother that millions of years ago, all the land around her was underwater in a sea created when, hundreds of millions of years before that, the continents of Africa and North America moved apart.
“Underwater? Like Noah and the flood?” She seemed incredulous.
“No, mom. Hundreds of millions of years before that story takes place, in a slow process of continental drift that takes millions of years.”
I even mentioned how the Appalachian Mountains, this hill, and the hills around it, used to be as big or bigger than the Rockies. They were formed when Africa and North America collided in the first place, but eroded down to what they are now over entire epochs of time.
The look on her face – it was like she thought I was just making shit up to have a laugh at her expense.
It’s hard, but I have to remember that there are people in the world who don’t know or believe in the theory of plate tectonics. One of those people is my mother.
There’s a poem in there somewhere.
Be good to each other.
~MS
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