Layers of Time

[note: this is a short piece I produced for the Nature Writing class, taught by Jessica Gigot, that I took in summer 2025 through Hugo House in Seattle]

In May I’m pedaling along the Klickitat River with Adam, my friend since the second grade. We’re in the shade of the canyon wall, but the slope on the other side of the river is still bright in the late afternoon sun: grass gold, oaks emerald, with lichened branches and trunk opalescent. The cliff to my right is a stark wall of cool, brittle, hexagonal furrows of dark rock. Thirty feet up the pattern breaks down, pixelates into a lumpy disorder, humps out a little, and then reasserts itself above.

Sixteen and a half million years ago the earth opened up a few hundred miles to the southeast. Molten viscous basalt, glowing red oozed out and out and out and spread across half of what we now know as the states of Washington and Oregon. It moved just a few miles per hour, filling the valleys and plains, igniting forest fires on the mountains it passed by. It crawled down the Columbia River drainage until it reached the sea. The lava cooled and it hardened. 

This happened once, and then it happened again, and again, and again. Sometimes a few months, sometimes a thousand years, or a hundred thousand, in between. Layer upon layer, in some places up to a mile thick. At cliffsides you can see the breakpoints visible. And after each lava flow rain would fall and pool, dust and dirt pile up, plants grow, animals live and die; a long peace another tidal wave of fire, and a new weighty layer.

Now I’m drenched in sweat, hiking upslope in the July afternoon heat with my brother Noah. The imperative of harvesting huckleberries along the trail slows our progress. Wild strawberries too in places. We’ve been down in the valley, down below the valley, under the ground in lava tube caves, formed a few hundred thousand years ago. The caves are cool, dark, dimly lit by warm green light reflected off the trees above. A slow cadence drips on coffin-sized shards of rock. Their angular geometry is accentuated by the point-source light. Others are covered with a red-grey fuzz of cinders. 

Later when we get back to the car we’ll drive out and park and walk onto the Big Lava Bed, the most recent formation in this area, when lava filled a 16-mile valley just eight thousand years ago. There were people around here then. Depending on the time of season they may have been up here, harvesting huckleberries, when it all began, saw the forest burn, and the earth open up. I wonder what they felt, what it would be like to witness the impossible moments that shape the land for ages to come. The scar is still raw here, the trees thin and struggling in the shallow dirt. My brother indulges my photos with exaggerated expressions of awe next to a somewhat underwhelming rift.

I take in supernatural stories the rocks tell into my fleshy, bony body, not as young as it was, aching back and receding hair. Is thirty eight years a long time to be alive? The rocks don’t think so. Is five years a long time to love someone? It sure felt like it. Are five months a long time to sleep alone? How many years until the earth opens up and swallows my home? What does it mean to wait sixteen million years to see the sun? 

It’s a welcome escape to leave my mortality, fly above – and below – the earth, travel through time, discover the stories of why this here and that there and know it’s been going on so long before me and will go on so long after. This feeling of meaning, of being part of a story that’s unfolding all around is thrilling and humbling. But the rock repels me even as I try to grasp it. The story is told in thousands and millions of years, and my brother, my friend, myself, we can have nothing to do with that. We hurtle through one year, one day at a time, not sure where we’re headed, how long we’ll be there, what we’re supposed to accomplish, or what we’ll leave behind.