I am serious about my religion.
I don’t take its sacraments lightly.
They may cause you discomfort:
A long walk, a trusted companion, an open fire.
I cannot imagine a relic, a book, or a doctrine more sacred.
Perhaps you doubt them.
Perhaps I doubt yours.
A walk through a wood
A walk through a world
A friend
“Man’s best friend”
A crackling campfire
“The most tolerable third party”
A sworn companion
The Logos fire
Henry David Thoreau
A boiling star
Following are some of the topics and materials that were covered in the FBI (Forum for Bahá’í Investigations) site which we might cover here in the future.
It sometimes seems to me that eating fellow vertebrates is a degree of cannibalism, for we do share very much with our fellow vertebrates in the way of anatomy and natural intelligence, and when it comes to dining on fellow mammals—all the more.
Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.
Ishmael, Moby Dick
The consumption of alien beings such as octopi also seems a degree of cannibalism since they too share a degree of intelligence with us, though their intelligence is quite alien to ours.
I am suddenly curious about Ruhi, a Bahá’í indoctrination program, because I have heard so many awful remarks about it. I’ve been told to try it for myself, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen, given that I am a rather outspoken apostate, and frankly, it’s really not designed for the likes of me.
This page is intended to be a slate for me to work out my thoughts on Ruhi upon.
My source is the Ruhi Resources site, which outlines the seven Ruhi books and the units within them.
Continue readingA central principle of the Bahá’í Faith is Unity in Diversity. In practice, however, this progressive goal has been usurped in the Bahá’í community by its evil twin Unity in Conformity. We at the FBI stand for diversity, which means we encourage Bahá’ís to believe all sorts of crazy stuff, all under the same banner of One perplexed God.
Quakers — The unresolved issues of the Bahá’í Faith will be resolved by a horrible disaster which will kill a large portion of the human race by causing their limbs to quake. Then and only then will everyone want to be a Bahá’í.
Abstentionists — World Peace can only be achieved through complete and universal abstention from political activity.
Continue readingDwight.
There were no trails across the Great Western Divide until the early Twentieth Century. Though some travelers crossed the Divide, most took the Hockett Trail around it. Parties would often take this circuitous route to reach destinations that are now accessed in a fraction of the distance, thanks to the high-tech expressways—er, trails—of the Twentieth Century.
Progress!
The Hockett Trail was completed by Union troops during the Civil War as a light pack trail, with the intention of replacing the trail with a wagon road. There was no dynamite and no steel involved. The stream crossings and slopes were moderate. It was a route that a pack train could follow without any engineering at all.
In 1879, a mining road was completed to the valley of Mineral King, in anticipation of riches that never quite materialized. With this road, the western segment of the Hockett Trail would be bypassed by parties heading around the Divide. The new road was cut through treacherous terrain—not a natural route, but a direct cut through a canyon. From then on, getting around the Divide generally meant crossing Farewell Gap from Mineral King and meeting the Hockett Trail in Little Kern country.
The trail from Mineral King met the Hockett Trail where the latter crossed the Little Kern River, just east and downstream of Wet Meadows.
The trail drops rapidly from the summit of the ridge to the Little Kern, where it is joined by the trail from Mineral King.
Mount Whitney Club Journal, May 1903
The Hockett Trail west of the Little Kern developed a reputation as a rough trail, but this was probably because it was nearly abandoned after Mineral King Road was completed. That decline ended soon after the creation of Seqouia National Park in 1890. As before, the Hockett Trail was the labor of soldiers.
I have stated that the Hockett trail is the worst in the mountains. It has been greatly improved within the last year or two by the soldiers stationed in the Sequoia National Park.
Mount Whitney Club Journal, May 1903
The first trail blazed over the Great Western Divide appears to have been more circuitous than the current Coyote Pass route that replaced it.
During the summer of 1900 Forest Ranger, Ernest Britten marked out a trail from the vicinity of Bullion Flat (southeast of Mineral King and Farewell Gap) to the lakes on Kern River.
Mount Whitney Club Journal, May 1903 — Important Trail Work, pg. 83
The cut-off was soon re-routed and improved, and by Summer 1902 much of the old circuit around the Divide was largely abandoned. Soon after that, a bridge was built across the Kern River, and the old ford was abandoned as well. This, in turn, meant the old trail up the north side of Volcano Creek was also abandoned.
Early in the year 1901 the Visalia Board of Trade expended more than one hundred dollars on the “cut-off” from the vicinity of Bullion Flat to Kern River, improving the grade, and shortening the distance of actual travel to less than one half of that of the old Trout Meadow route. This is now the only trail regularly traveled between these points. Money has been appropriated by the bodies previously named herein to further improve this trail and to build a bridge across Kern River. The work will be done with the assistance of the forest rangers and the Mt. Whitney Club as early this season (1903) as the melting snow will permit.
Mount Whitney Club Journal, May 1903 — Important Trail Work, pg. 84–85
Though the original Hockett Trail fell into disuse within about 16 years of its completion, much of it is still maintained, and much of the rest can still be followed without too much difficulty. The old ford is still there, of course, and the route is relatively free of cliffs and dangerous stream crossings. The Hockett route, in fact, is much as it was when the trail was first blazed in 1863.
I was born in California and raised in transit. In my parents’ fifty years of marriage, they have resided in forty different places in a half-dozen states and nations. My father is a restless man. He gives the term “blind ambition” new meaning: he is quite literally blind, and seems charged with a deep, innate pride. He lost most of his eyesight at age three, and then lost his eyes at age twenty. He doesn’t regret being blind, perhaps because he has achieved a great deal in his life that he might not have achieved had he been sighted. He has seen success after success as a chiropractor. As a wrestler from Mount Kisco, New York, he was once crowned state champion. They called him “King Kong of Kisco.” Blindness seemed to give him better body-awareness, and it sometimes distracted his opponents, though it was not quite enough to stop the national champ from pinning him at the national tournament in San Francisco.
My mother has also leapt some hurdles. A child of a Dust Bowl farmer, she fell victim to rickets (malnutrition) as a child, and grand mal seizures as an adult. Her tremendous will power has helped her to stabilize her blood sugar metabolism and avoid the seizures that once vexed her. Though she was timid and bereft of self-esteem as a young adult, she has since blossomed and shown herself to be a natural businesswoman with a particular knack for accounting. She and my father appear to have been made for each other, though she has never found a cure for his wanderlust.
Just after my first birthday, my family moved from south-central Los Angeles to Frogmore—a Gullah village on an island off the South Carolina coast, where my parents once attended a meeting of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). After Frogmore, we returned to California, and bounced around Santa Maria for several years. Then we returned to South Carolina, where my parents bought what had once been a boys’ home in a hamlet named Jericho. They’d planned to make the three-story hotel-of-sorts into a regional religious center, but the old building was a maintenance nightmare, and only served to impoverish them. Long before my parents ever managed to sell their “Hotel Jericho,” we moved across the low country into a small trackside house. There was no hope there to make a living, so we moved to the edge of a black neighborhood in nearby Walterboro, where I happened to attend a small Catholic school where I was the only non-black student. After that, we moved up near Greenville. A year later, nearly penniless, we returned to California and moved into a mobile home on the Mojave Desert near Lancaster, then moved to Hanford in the San Joaquin Valley, where business was always good. We did so well in Hanford that we moved to South Africa. That didn’t work out, so we returned to California and pitched our tents in Red Bluff. Next, we returned to South Carolina, and bought a house in Lancaster—our second hometown by that name. We soon went broke again and returned to California. We settled in Tulare, again in the San Joaquin Valley, and business was good—so good, in fact, that we returned to South Africa—well, almost: on the way to Africa, my little brother and I got jobs as security guards in Israel, but our parents went ahead and moved to Africa, and not for the last time, I might add.
Most of that moving was done either for missionary purposes or to finance further missionary work. All the motion left me a bit dizzy and not particularly rich in friends, but it was a valuable experience. It was an ongoing lesson in faith and financing, to say nothing of restlessness and alienation! It has informed my personal view of the world, which has always involved maps.
The maps began as the wallpaper of my childhood. There were the maps we used when moving across county, state, and country. There were the maps used to plan moves that we never made—Belize, British Columbia, etc. There were the maps used to plan missionary campaigns throughout the countryside. At age twelve, I began to explore the countryside on my own, with the help of a county map. Then I discovered the trove of maps at my local library and the libraries of the cities that we visited. I wrote chambers of commerce everywhere, and was rewarded with more maps. Maps became my personal window into the world.
Maps present the world in a form that is at once abstraction and art. They showed me the world in a way that text and photos never could. They facilitate both exploration and imagination. It is in this capacity that maps introduced me to the Sierra Nevada. I can still see in my memory the images of maps that inspired my excursions into those mountains during my high school years.
What I learned from the Sierra Nevada became part of me. With its giant sequoias, granite domes, golden trout, caverns, canyons, wildflowers and wildfires, dizzying heights, blue lakes, waterfalls, alpenglow and starry nights, the Sierra Nevada instilled in me a passion for nature and the natural sciences. The Sierra introduced me to earth science and astronomy, and by association, taught me to enjoy physics and mathematics. More recently, the Sierra has inspired me to study geophysics and plate tectonics, to understand the mechanisms that have forged the Sierra, California, and our planet. From what I have read, it seems that earth science and planetary science are in the midst of a golden, revolutionary age, and I’m off to join the revolution.
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 plate.
Burial of the Farallon Plate
Over the past twenty million years, that trailing edge has been crossing the Sierra Nevada region, and it’s traveled nearly as far north as Mount Lassen thus far, creating a great triangle between the trailing wings of the subducted Farallon Plate and the Pacific Plate.
With no more subduction to trigger the kind of volcanic activity characteristic of Mount Lassen and the Cascade Range to the north, the Sierra Nevada has transitioned into a new phase of plutonic activity. The hot, underlying mantle has pressed up through the great triangle, causing uplift and, as the uplifted dome has increased the surface area above, spreading. The spreading, in turn, has created grabens such as Owens Valley.
Though the stone that makes the Sierra Nevada was formed long before this uplift and spreading, it was this event, beginning about thirty million years ago, that actually gave rise to the Sierra Nevada that we know today. Still, there have been much more recent events that have contributed greatly to the general, large-scale structure of the range.
A New Age of Volcanism
This new incarnation of California lacks the Cascadian volcanism of its past, yet the existence of the eruption of the Long Valley supervolcano 760,000 years ago attests to the volatility of the present-day Sierra Nevada. It was an eruption 500 times the size of the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption and 30 times the size of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, surpassed by only four eruptions over the last million years:
There are no stratovolcanoes along the spine of the Sierra Nevada, but there is evidence of something more terrible.
Localized Foundering of the Farallon Plate
As the trailing edge of the cold, dense Farallon Plate was detached from the supporting mass of any trailing oceanic plate, that trailing edge must have begun to sink — not merely as a caboose follows a train downhill, but rather more directly down, as it was no longer supported on its western boundary.
Delamination and Mantle Drip
Such a sinking mass must have pulled on the lithosphere above it, and possibly pulled the dense root of the Sierra Nevada downward and away from the mountain range. Once the trailing edge of the subducted plate passed, the detached root of the Sierra — being relatively dense — may have begun to sink more directly into the depths of the mantle, causing local downwelling.
Sinking mountains east of Fresno
Asthenospheric mantle flowed in to fill the gap where the Sierra’s root had been — probably liquefying under reduced pressure, and the Sierra, without the ballast of its dense root, became more buoyant, and began to rise, pulling even more asthenospheric mantle up with it, some of which would have liquefied. As magma, it would have injected itself into cracks in and around the thin Sierra block, ushering in the current phase of Sierra volcanism.
As the delaminated Sierra root descends into Earth’s mantle, it has created a local convection cell. The sinking root is causing downwelling in its wake, and pushing mantle rock downward and outward ahead of it. This downdraft appears to be causing subsidence in the Tulare Basin and the western Sierra adjacent to the basin.
As the displaced mantle rock is pushed aside, it then begins to rise, creating upward pressure at its edges — probably more along one edge, due to asymmetry. The upward pressure creates a local updraft, which may be adding to the uplift of the Sierra.
Further Reading:
Active foundering of a continental arc root beneath the southern Sierra Nevada in California
It’s common knowledge that water is the bane of fire, but the Earth tells us a different tale.
The continents of Pangaea
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 Pangaea, which was about to break apart.
As ancient peoples once imagined their world an island in a great sea, so Pangaea was an island in a great sea. For eons, the rivers of Pangaea carried sediments to that sea, loading down the dense, cool crust beneath the waters. That crust, it turn, was floating upon an ocean of lithospheric mantle, but the crust was getting heavier and losing its buoyancy, until finally it gave way, and began to list like a ship giving in to the sea.
Around Pangaea, ocean floors began to dive beneath it for the same reason, leading to what we know today as the Pacific Ring of Fire, and the Triassic supercontinent began to fracture under the strain of the spreading triggered by the suction of ocean floor subducting into its perimeter.
Here on the eastern shore of the great ocean, the Farallon Plate was born out of the disintegration of Pangaea. As this young oceanic plate dove under Pangaea (and later Laurasia), the uppermost layer of the plate was scraped off and piled against the edge of the continent, and so Cascadia was born. Cascadia is that land commonly known today as the Pacific Northwest. When California was young, it was part of Cascadia.
The continent was pulled westward and stretched along its margin, giving rise to the forearc basins known today as the Puget Sound, the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and California’s Central Valley.
The water-loaded serpentine hydrated the rock beneath the continent, liquefying the rock and causing streams of melt to form. This led to the formation of a volcanic arc along the Pacific Coast, and deep below, the plutons that would eventually uplift to become the Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountains of the present.
The hydrated magma streams that feed the volcanoes of Cascadia are not pacified by their water continent, but contrarily, rendered all the more volatile by the resulting steam, making for explosive releases of subterranean fire, not unlike the sudden expansion of a grease fire when fed with water.
Down in Cascadian California, there was no San Andreas Fault, nor any great granitic Sierra Nevada. These and other characteristic features of present-day California would arise as the trailing edge of the Farallon Plate began to disappear under North America.
To be continued …