Understanding our place on the planet

Aug. 6, 2023 5:00 am

Out here prehistory lingers all around if you know where to look. Four hundred and fifty million years ago the earth was quite different and, as I understand it, continents were in different places because geologic, tectonic plates which make up rock beneath the earth’s surface were, and are, constantly moving and the 75-mile-deep North American plate was close to the equator, not where we sit presently.

Anyway, 450 million years ago the earth was in what is called the Silurian Period, and this place where I live lay beneath a warm, shallow ocean. Life on Earth consisted of brachiopods, mollusks, other sea creatures, and maybe a few spiders and centipedes. Fish were just beginning to evolve. The limestone bluffs with their caves beneath my house were formed then and are filled with fossilized remains of the period. Humans and other beings with limbs were millions of years in the future.

I was never very good at science, or school in general for that matter, so I apologize if this sounds like a lesson in earth science. No, it’s more a question of perspective, of trying to understand our place on this planet. Compared to the age of the earth, humans have only been here a short while, something I think about when I’m working in my hollow. It’s always quiet down there and maybe even a little spooky, knowing that there has been life there for more than 450 million years, not just ghosts but life that, to this day, must eye me with curiosity when I pass.

Later this fall when summer is out of reach I plan to carve a deer head in a large limestone rock at the foot of a trail that leads to the hollow, carve with the hope that some future human a thousand years from now (if we haven’t killed the planet by then) stumbles upon it and gives some thought to who and what has come before, imagining creatures that once called this place home.

There have been reports that the firefly population is diminishing worldwide. I can attest to it. The field in front of my house once teamed with blinking lights, and these days it’s a mere handful. It brings to mind a time 60 years ago when my mother gave me a glass jar with a metal lid, one in which I’d puncture a few holes so that the fireflies I caught could breathe. (do fireflies have lungs?) By morning the creatures were dead, so I only captured them a few times. On judgment day I don’t wish there to be a bunch of fireflies taking the stand, pointing at me, and saying, “He’s the one. He killed us.”

This place gives rise to odd thoughts just ahead of an August dawn, thoughts of dying fireflies and of a piece of land as some sort of Valhalla, a place of an afterlife, a place where those, like me, who can no longer run with the night, no longer soldier on, will reside in some way or other for another 450 million years.

Soon enough Autumn will arrive. It has been a tough summer. July was reportedly the hottest month the world has ever known, which doesn’t bode well for our future. We seem to ignore the signs of our ultimate demise. We have damned our future. I’m as much at fault as anyone. I am part of the problem, an elderly white man who understands that my world will not change substantially in the time I have remaining, so I leave the difficult work to others. My life is yesterday, so please carry on without me, and do the right thing. Enough of this talk. In time gentle snows will fill the air, blanketing a place, my place, that was once a warm, shallow sea filled with early life. I can see the snow from here, and it looks beautiful.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. His book “The Iowa State Fair” is available from the University of Iowa Press.

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