400 million years in the mountains

Windows that open into an earlier world are all around us. We usually fail to notice until a glint of sunlight draws our attention. We may drive by a hillside or a rocky ledge a thousand times without giving it much thought. Then, one day, we see what was always there.

So it goes with the rocks around us. They’re just there until we pick one up and notice that it’s an arrowhead or that a fossil is imbedded in it. Then, researching what we found, we learn that the arrowhead may be 400 years old and the fossil may be a million times older yet.

You can get a glimpse into this world of geology from the “Passionate About Rocks” series that began in last week’s Morgan Messenger and concludes this week. You don’t have to go far to find fossils and other things of geological interest around here.

Years ago, we pulled dozens of fossils from a shale bank near Hedgesville in just a matter of minutes. They turned out to be the remains of small, invertebrate marine life from as far back as 400 million years ago.

We think, too, of the Sideling Hill Visitor’s Center west of Hancock, where the highway cut exposed layers of rock. Studying Sideling’s innards, you can see why some conceive of the hill as a valley, not a mountain at all. The idea is that once ridges rose all around, but the force of water and erosion over millions, if not billions, of years cut out our mountain of today.

Man, a later comer to the Earth, never saw the ocean that once covered the land, but we find the clues in those fossils of sea life and shells left stranded inland.

In his book Fossil Collecting in the Mid-Atlantic States, Jasper Burns wrote of meeting an old man on one of his excursions 30 years ago. The fellow invited Burns to his home in the mountains and showed off the fossils he’d gathered through the years. While none was rare, Burns noticed that as the man picked up each rock, “his eyes danced and his face shone with pride and wonder.”

While the man didn’t really know what each fossil was, he understood that each one was a miracle in its own right, that it was a piece of the long history of the mountains and of mankind.

The old boy probably knew instinctively that those fossils and rocks are, like the mountains themselves, ancient and full of secrets. He sensed that since we are only young upstarts passing through, we’d best learn from our elders.