New Year

'My chair' in Paradox is at the table that serves us for dining and is my office. It is the location for my virtual tours of the world both on the internet and in my day dreams. As I sit there, I look out due North across Paradox Creek valley toward the ridge line of Owl Pate, Bald Pate, and Moose Mountain. The valley, itself, in the view from my chair is mostly open fields and marsh. The soils are a complex mosaic of sands, gravels, and clays with a mineralized hard pan varying in depth but averaging about 20 inches down. The soils were mixed at the bottom of a lake probably about 20,000 years ago at the end of the last great Ice Age. Given the addition of plenty of organic material and some manure, I have created a nice productive family garden at the foot of the side hill that has held our home for the last four decades. Before we arrived, the place was a small dairy farm supported by the farmer's cutting of the forest and selling the logs and pulp. They lived simply with no running water.

The mountains surrounding the valley are mostly incredibly old granite ledges with. Numerous large open smooth places and precipitous drop offs provide great views of the Eastern Adirondacks and even some views of the High Peaks to the North and East. They have been scoured and sculpted by the great glaciations of the last few hundred thousand years. The soils on these ridges are primarily thin and rocky and support blueberries, red pines, and red oaks on the south sides and some some hemlock and cedar on the north slopes. Where soils are deeper, further down the ridge lines, there are some nice pines and even in some of the gentler places some maples, yellow birch, and beech. Between the ridges there are lots of marshes, bogs, swamps, beaver meadows, streams, small ponds, fish, bears, deer, and even some moose. Sometimes it feels like half of our land is under water.

These mountains are composed of incredibly old rock that was heated, compressed, fractured, folded, and buried under 30 kilometers of earth's crust. This process went on for several hundred million years during a geological event called the Grenville Orogeny when parts of North West Africa and Western Europe collided with North America creating a mountain range rivaling the current great Himalayans of Asia. As the continents separated, the mountains over what was to become our Adirondacks eroded and were eventually covered by the ocean during which time they received a layer of sedimentary rock. Then, in the last 50 million years or so, the Adirondack area began to rise in its dome shape and the sedimentary rock layer eroded away assisted in the last few hundred thousand years by several episodes of glaciation giving it it's current form. The last glaciation left a lake in the Paradox Creek valley, at the bottom of which, my garden soils were formed. It has now receded leaving several smaller lakes - Paradox Lake being the closest to where we live - about 2 miles from our house.

I like to run a little quick time video in my head starting with the 'Big Bang' of 10 or 11 billion years ago and continuing with condensation of various gases into stars and planets including our sun and earth of 4 billion years ago or so, through various geologic ages to the Grenville Orogeny of a billion years ago, where I can slow the process down with some more detail and then continue to the uplift of the Adirondacks and glaciation and ending with me digging some manure into my garden and thinking I'm doing something significant to save the planet?

All that said, this process does give me some comfort and sense of my place in the universe. It puts my life in some perspective and helps me set realistic expectations - a little important humbling and good thoughts on the New Year.