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How can we compare
four day to a million years?
It could be
measured within the different scales of life. Even
if seconds tick like years, life has its measurement
is some way. The land of the desert’s past is aged
with the flow of its current rivers. Like a heart
beat to a human, the river carves the life beat out
of stone and earth.
It took four days
to float from bridge to bridge on the John Day
River. The only development was nature’s creation of
the crags, crevices, valleys, boulders, bends, and
curves. The carved canyon walls edges look like they
stretch for 1000ft upward. There are no human structures
for seventy miles. The air blew warm and the water
even warmer, sheets of sagebrush blanketed the
surrounding hills. Bass swam in the corners and
eddies of the river. The sun rays were heavy and lit
up spectacular view of the surrounding high cliffs
with reds browns and yellows. And the most peculiar
of insects burrowed circular holes in the sand to trap other
bugs.
The John Day River
flows north 281 miles linking into the Columbia.
It’s only raft able in April, May or June. At one
point of geological time Eastern Oregon was a lush
thriving forest. It had a mild and wet climate that
grew conifers, maples and supported forested ecosystems.
Tortoises and three-toed horses lived in the area.
At a time before that, the land was under water and
the Cascade Mountains weren’t yet born. Shells can
be found in the ground. During the
time when Eastern Oregon was a forested area a
series of volcanic events occurred. Million of years
ago, eruptions of lava blanketed and engulfed the
forest and animals rapid and violently. Today,
layers of fossils entombed in rock are found through out the John Day fossil
beds signifying these volcanic events. I wonder what
the Paiute though of the fossilized big leaf maples?
Obvious the terrain is quite different to produce
such a tree. The fossils are ancient photographs
through out canyon layers.
We packed up
personal Sevlor rafts with camping gear, beer and
food. Jason, Laura my brother Jacob and I learned to
live on the river during these four
 days.
The languid drift of the river etched a period of
tranquility into our lives and memories. The
volcanic events that covered the earth with basalt
layers in the life of the river, where like four
days in our life in the desert. We floated along as
the canyon walls stacked
layers of columnar joints spaced 10’s of millions of
years apart in time.
Timing of our trip
had to be about perfect. The river sauntered along
its path drifting us past watering holes and shallow
ripples leading to shoots of rapids. The heat wasn’t
too extraterrestrial and plenty of sunshine
prevailed. The sounds of trickling water soothed our
tempers and pace. "Did you guys go over the Clarno
Rapids?" asked the river ranger from the side bank,
"You guys are nuts." The ranger takes the
opportunity to photo our drift as he shakes his head
to see inflatable kayaks used as water craft. The ranger knew every bend and heel of the
water course and has written several guidebooks
about rafting the John Day. Maybe we will make it in
his book under the chapter; This is Not for the
Feeble. My personal impression was that the other rafters we
encountered were more nuts. The crap some of these
parties brought, oh my! Propane tanks, table and
chairs coolers full of cans with full size pop-up
tents. I wondered if the other rafters either
idolized Lewis and Clark’s adventures or are they
just plain Americans with too much junk.
The desert usually
gives the impression of expanding indefinitely. A
distance looks virtually close until you start
walking toward an object and it forever looms. This
type of land yields a greater size scale compared to
our normal perception of space. It’s fascinating to
learn about the physics within different size
realms. Quantum mechanics is derived from the
human’s view of theoretical and experimental physics
of the atomic and subatomic level. Sir Isaac Newton
first described universal gravitation and the three
laws of motion. The physics associated with Newton’s
laws, human’s can understand
by physical movement, touch, feeling and intuitive
sense. Newton also wrote a whole new language of
mathematical calculus. Interactions of the greatly
huge and expansive universe are explained to humans
from Albert Einstein’s Theories of Relativity which
are erratically intuitive. Yet these laws and
theories can’t apply equations to the other’s
applications, therefore a cohesive model is lacking.
One of the biggest
questions that ponder astronomists is whether the
universe has an end or not. Is it infinite? Does it
have some barrier or border? What I wonder about is
the limitations of size. Does small reach infinitely
small, will there will always be something smaller
than what in relative to you? And what is beyond
that? Does infinitely big
just keep expanding as well? Or is a total size of
the universe quantitative and therefore, nothing
beyond. Maybe the universe is like a circle as the
earth represents. In this case the ends can connect
at both sides and form a big loop. If this were to
be true, history can be written with a video game
company first documenting that the edges of the
universe connect to each other. This recorded theory
would be from the creation of the Atari game
Asteroids.
There has to be
some quirky relationships between size and time. If
you are bigger your perception of smaller objects
portray the the object to be traveling at a slower rate. This perception has
to be relative, viewed only from the eyes of the
gigantic object. For instance, say if you are
gigantic all other people would move slower relative
to how fast you could move. Let’s say you
 were
tiny like an ant, now the bigger objects are moving
much faster and covering more ground than the time
it would take you to. If there were no limit to
size, then becoming infinitely big would at some
point pretty much render the infinite small as not
moving at all. Not completely stagnant of course,
maybe something very close to absolute zero.
What if we really
big and could look through the relative eyes of a
small object? Now the small object would seem to be
moving incredibly fast. Smaller size things would seem to be
traveling much faster. For instance humans looking
at a molecule at a molecule’s size view would see
the molecule moving incredibly fast. Humans see the
planets at a planets view moving slowly. The time of
scale of this smaller object is set at a lot faster
pace. If you were to shrink down to the size of an
atom, your time would speed up greatly.
So why then,
depending on size, would any thing or animals ‘time’
be any more important than another’s? The amount of
time in a certain size is only convenient to that
size. As if human’s time were worth more than ants,
yet ants may just live an average of seventy years
on their own time. Can then humans look down upon
ants piously? Ants also build empires which crumble
just the same. It didn't take that long for Babylon
to become ruins.
Intuitively ,
planets and the universe for that matter have a much
longer life span compared to the size of a human’s.
What a truculent universe we are apart of that very
well may, expanded or contract to infinity. Find the ends would
be like a dog chasing it's own tail around and
around.
The desert
installs a peaceful relaxation in me when I think
about how old it is. As we ended our river
trip packed our boats and drove back to Portland I
felt extremely calm and mellow. The wisdom of the
desert has something to do with it? I came to a realization that
the city is just a infant compared to the old desert winds.
Driving off of I-84, the busy city life instantly
exploded with a jostle for a person's personal time,
aggression, movement, laughter and anxiety about not
being somewhere one should be. Portland will have to
disappear at some point and the
desert sands of the John Day River will still blow
when it does. After this river trip, it made me
think that people get to frantic about their days,
while clueless about the grand time
scale of the universe. The John Day River made me
feel real sublime about life, and interested on how
much a day means to a human's life. Let's see, 70
yrs (average human life) = 25,550 days. 10 million
years (the youngest layer of rock) = 3,650,000,000
days. Is that why we feel a need to rush, when truthfully would
it not really matter? Will it start to be more about
the way things
happen. The next few weeks after our trip to
the John Day, I sunk into a melancholy content
of life and checked my speed to match the river's. Then I got honked at
and flipped off by some busy ants.
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