Lifetimes as Mere Seconds

“Sorry I can’t, I have to go sit in the woods.”

I shot this text to my friend on a chilly Tuesday morning in November after being asked if I want to meet for breakfast. If I had to guess, this was probably met with a chuckle on the other end of the phone. The response, “Classic environmental studies major,” gave me a good hint. It was a funny habit that I had developed, but not one that I came up with on my own. I was sent to the spot of my choosing (vaguely, the woods, more specifically, the forested area behind my apartment) once a week to observe. I found that starting my mornings with the observations allowed me to enter a relaxing meditative state before my day devolved into constant movement. So, there I sat, steam rising from the cup of coffee next to me, yellow field notebook in hand, just sitting in the woods.

The site I chose was behind my senior year housing in the North Campus apartments. My apartment is tucked nicely near the woods, and when I leave a little too early in the morning, I get to commute with deer by my side. Before I began observing, I counted the woods only as an afterthought, something to provide a nice backdrop to the house I share with my friends. It was only through this experience that I began to spend time amongst the trees and birds that were also my neighbors. These organisms that I thought of before as something in the background were, not too long ago, occupying the land in which my house now sits. The North Campus apartments were completed just in 2013, creating a village where a blank space once sat. My favorite place to do my observations was a brick wall, a physical boundary between the houses and the woods beyond. The marker between the manicured green grasses and the untamed woods was the perfect place for me to turn my back on the life I held in that house.

The location where my house now sits was taken over by the woods up until 2013. Through my research, I was able to find satellite images of the location from 1985 until 2019. The bird’s eye view that a satellite offers is so different from the image I created from the lived experience of the location. So scientific and rigid, the satellite image somehow still feels wrong to me. The buildings could not possibly be that far apart! Looking back at what the place looked like before is even worse. I can’t even conceptualize what those buildings and trees would be, and certainly not in the place I’m familiar with. It’s off-putting and uncomfortable to flip to a new image, such as between 2012 and 2014, and see a completely new environment.

My favorite wall appears in the timelapse in 2017, four years after the construction of the NCAs. The defining barrier between what was and what is wasn’t even there when the time came to construct the new. It is such a defining part of the landscape, shaping the boundaries of how and where the wild pokeweed bushes can grow and the mowed grasses can begin. What would it look like if the wall was never constructed? Would nature overtake human-controlled land? Or would the battle between old and new now be active rather than passive?

My experience in class has been primarily shaped by my shifting conceptions of timescale. As difficult as it is to contextualize my familiar life in the course of a lifetime, it is ten times more difficult to place that human lifetime within the geologic timescale. Both personal and geologic history is built on slow transitions, not drastic events. I’ve only just begun to appreciate that through my observations. As I sat at my site every week, I thought about just how nature persists and adjusts, shifting in its form across all timescales. From the death of a single plant to the transformation of a landscape, the earth has a funny way of making it work.

Even before satellite images, Kenyon College, or even the concept of the United States of America existed, there was a history beyond. Before there can be my memories and my house, there has to be a geological base. The formation of the Black Hand Sandstone can not be captured in a simple before and after photo, but rather a slow accumulatory process. In order to create a sandstone, the natural process of sedimentary rock has to take place. To begin, a sedimentary rock obviously needs plenty of sediment. For that to accumulate, the natural process of weathering and erosion must take place and be transported to our location of formation. The sediments that would eventually become this rock were likely deposited in a deltaic environment, transported by a large river to its mouth (Bhattacharya, 2006, 239). For that to happen, the land that was once Ohio must be flooded by an ancient ocean, something incredibly foreign to the woods in which I sat once a week. From there, the processes of compaction and cementation are given their opportunity to mold the sediments into the lithified rock that humans were able to build their own history upon. We owe our conception of Ohio to a 350 million year old sedimentary rock that flakes under our fingernails.

Although, not all of the rock under our feet is Black Hand Sandstone. In fact, a great amount of the sediment is till, sediment deposited directly by a glacier (Glacial Till and Glacial Flour, 2018). As difficult as it was for me to sit in my own world and imagine an ocean where my feet stood, it was almost impossible to picture a glacier ice sheet, miles thick. In order for a glacier to function and be built, snow must be able to persist through the summer and, by the time winter comes again, there is still snow on the ground (How Are Glaciers Formed?, 2020). Although Winter in Gambier does feel like it lasts all year, my Gambier winters are nothing like the winters that this land once faced. A shifted climate vastly changes the experience of a place. The wonderful deciduous trees I spent so much time among could have never grown. Glacier dynamics are less slow and steady than the sedimentation process. As ice flows under its own weight, all sorts and sizes of rock are ripped from their resting place and moved to a new location (Glacial Till and Glacial Flour, 2018). From there, a transformed base layer forms, hidden under the glacier.

The construction of the North Campus apartments was not unlike this process, the removal and relocation of rock and soil in order for the new normal to be created. It is odd to me to think of a Kenyon College without these idyllic white houses, but as with geologic history, transformation is inevitable but not permanent. To recognize a past without is just as important as picturing a future with. The wall that I sat on every week was a reminder of just that.