Category Archives: 08. Metamorphosis
California v. II
… continued Metamorphosis About thirty million years ago, the trailing edge of the Farallon Plate began to disappear under North America in the shape of an inverted 90° wedge, beginning at the location of present-day Los Angeles, and proceeding northeast under the continent, leaving nothing but hot mantle where before was the cold, subducting oceanic [...]
California v. I
It’s common knowledge that water is the bane of fire, but the Earth tells us a different tale. Up to about 200 million years ago, at the dawn of the Jurassic Period, there was no California. It might be said that even North America didn’t exist. North America had then part of the supercontinent of [...]
The Hungriness of Stuff
We previously reflected upon the intimate, multifaceted relationship between ancient man and fire, and considered how easy it would have been for a man such as Heraclitus to conceive of the idea that fire is the fundamental constituent of all matter. Heraclitus was, after all, a subject of the Persian Empire, a land of fire [...]
The Burning Bush
When God spoke to Moses, God took the form of a burning bush. Why did an ancient Israelite think that God would take the form of a self-immolating bush? It might be natural enough to think that fire consumes a bush, but there’s another way to see it—the way that many ancients saw it: the [...]
The Biology of Fire
What is the color of life? Green. Certainly, most observers would agree. Yet when one considers what the green represents, one might not remain so certain. Green is the color of photosynthesis. It is therefore the color of the conversion of light energy to chemical potential energy—stored energy. Isn’t life better seen as the active [...]
Sisters of the Sierra
One special characteristic of the Sierra Nevada is that it’s a rare example of a high mountain range in a Mediterranean climate, which means that it is dry and sunny half the year and moist and mild during the other half of the year. This combination makes for a very combustible cycle of fuel production [...]
California As Collision
Along the northeastern shore of the Great Ocean, a long, thin strip of land stretches 1500 miles, in about as straight a line as Nature will allow Herself to draw. The strip is born of the grinding of the great oceanic plate against the continental plate. From Cabo San Lucas to Cape Mendocino, California is [...]
Sierra California
The boundary between Southern and Northern California ignores the compass points, wrapping around the San Joaquin Valley from Tejon to Tehachapi and northward along the Sierra Crest to Tioga and around the northern limit of the Mono Basin. This is made necessary by the Sierra Nevada. The Los Angeles Aqueduct is perhaps the strongest argument [...]
Tending Fire
Soundtrack: REM, Oddfellows Local 151 The phantom slipped away from the ring of smoldering coals, its limbs shifting in slight shadows of starlight, here barely perceptible and there vanishing completely. The shadow’s arms extended into bundles of shadow and fire as it burglarized the smoldering fire of the sleeping scouts. It was a female phantom, [...]
The Mirror
She saw white stone—miles and miles of it, and she heard a pulse—she felt the pulse. It was hot. Deep fractures in the rock screamed with superheated water, and as she looked deeper the heat intensified and the white rock acquired a glow around the cracks. She followed the fractures upward and upward for miles, [...]