Soul of the World (15 page)

T
IME
P
ORTAL
: T
HE
S
ANGAMONIAN
B
RICK
W
ORKS

It’s already September. The summer flew by, though early September is, for me, the pinnacle of August. The weather is hot and clear, the cicadas are singing, and my yard is at its lushest. The banana tree has six big leaves, and my palm has a new leaf beginning to fan open. This evening, when the sun was just beginning to throw the south side of my house into shade, there was a moment when every little bump and crevice on the bricks was cast into relief. In a brick just above and to the right of the back door, I noticed something that looked like a pawprint, and I stood up and took a closer look. It
was
a cat’s footprint—judging from its size, a kitten’s. “How’s that possible?” I thought. Then it struck me. Many years ago that brick, along with other wet bricks, must have lain on an outdoor rack before being fired in a kiln. That’s when a kitten walked across them. I began to search for more pawprints and I found some, probably from the same kitten, on several bricks in my house. I found one on a brick in the alleyway between my neighbour’s house and my own, and two others on the front of my house. I fantasized about removing the bricks and reconstructing the kitten’s path, like a dinosaur trackway in a museum display. But they’re fine where they are.

Long before I saw the kitten prints, I’d noticed other impressions in the brick: four indentations in a row that look like they were made by the tips of someone’s fingers, and something that resembles the imprint of the side of a hand. Also, many of the bricks have ridges, possibly from spaces between the boards in the drying racks. All these indelible imprints, like footprints in wet concrete, are a permanent record of transient events—a kitten walking over damp clay on a warm spring evening, a worker testing the firmness of the bricks before he slides them into the red-hot kiln.

I did some research on the history of my house and discovered that it was built in 1913 and that the bricks used to construct its walls were supplied by the Don Valley Brick Works, located in a ravine in the city’s southeast. At that time the bricks came in two colours, red and yellow. The yellow bricks were made of the clay quarried at the site, while the red bricks were made from limestone found beneath the clay. Because my house was built in 1913, I presume that my bricks were fired the year before, at least. They are a lovely hue of red, a warm, Pompeian terracotta. But my relationship with the brick works goes even deeper.

As I went through the history of the brick works, which began producing bricks in the late nineteenth century, I discovered the site included a unique prehistoric deposit from an interglacial era called the Sangamonian. I was hooked. The Don Valley Brick Works turned out to be the only place in Ontario with 120,000-year-old fossils from the Illinoian glacial period. Even more importantly, a very remarkable layer, the Don Formation, consisting of clay from the Sangamonian interglacial period, overlaid the Illinoian deposits. The name was exotic, lovely. It rolled seductively in my mouth. But it was the Sangamonian climate that I really liked. At the height of the Sangamonian, 115,000 years ago, Toronto was much warmer than it is today. Osage orange trees, pawpaws and wild rhododendrons adorned the slopes beside rivers where beavers the size of black bears swam. Semitropical insects got stuck in the clay, and sabre-toothed tigers prowled the thickets.

I decided to visit the fabled brickyards and see if I could find any Sangamonian fossils. The brick factory has closed down, but the city recently turned the buildings into a historical site and created a large park with ponds and walkways where the quarries were located. The works themselves are set in a large bowl formed by tall clay cliffs on two sides. Towards the west side are a few ponds where the old limestone
quarry was located, and behind it is the famous north slope of the clay quarry. I clambered up the slope and spent the next half-hour splitting dry pieces of clay apart, looking for fossils. I didn’t find a thing. I went to the western edge of the property, where Mud Creek cascades in a small waterfall, and walked along an embankment strewn with discarded limestone pieces. Here I was happily surprised.

The rocks were full of fossils: shells, feather stars, trilobites and coral. Some pieces even had ripple marks. During the Ordovician period—the time the limestone was formed—Toronto was on the equator (due to continental drift) and land plants hadn’t evolved. It was late evening when I stumbled upon this treasure, and the sun was almost setting. It was a perfect summer evening and it had that Balthusian light, almost pink, as the sun neared the horizon, warming the foliage and setting the red-brick buildings of the old factory ablaze against the blue sky and grassy hills. It seemed then that time leaked like a mist out of the limestone around me. It seeped out of the prehistoric clay and lingered over the ponds. A night heron flew overhead, croaking noisily, and above the ponds swallows performed their acrobatics. There was something moody, desolate and marvellous about the abandoned buildings with their empty windows. The architecture of the old factory seemed emblematic of another time, another place, an evening almost a century ago when a kitten walked over wet bricks and looked up to watch the swallows.

W
HY
H
ISTORY
G
ETS
C
LOSER AS
Y
OU
A
GE

A few days ago over lunch, a friend and I were talking about aging, and I submitted that the past gets more recent as you get older. “It’s the flipside of the converging age paradox,” I said. He asked me what
that was, and I pointed out how, the older we get, the more that people who are younger than us “catch up” to our age. For example, if you are twenty and your younger sister is ten, then she is half your age. But when you’re thirty and she’s twenty, she gains on you: she’s now two-thirds your age. When you are fifty and she is forty, she is four-fifths of your age. And so on. “Eventually,” I said, “everybody ends up, more or less, the same age.”

“But I’ll always be older than my sister,” he argued. “She’ll never catch up completely.‘ I agreed, but said that it hardly matters when your relative ages are so close. It’s the same as historical perspective, I went on. I told him how, when I was a child watching old black-and-white World War II footage on the television, the 1940s seemed remote and primitive compared to the smooth, sophisticated world of the late 1950s. So here was another effect of the age paradox. The Allies had declared victory barely more than a decade before, yet for me, watching from my living-room rug, it might as well have been hundreds of years ago, because a decade was over twice my lifespan up to that point.

“The older you get, the closer you are to history,” my friend observed. Exactly, I said. An event that took place ten years before you were born was equal to the entire length of your life when you were ten, but only half of your life when you turn twenty, and less than a third of your life when you turn thirty. Recent history, and all of history, gets closer to you the older you get.

It’s a little like the distance paradox, my friend said—the one where, if you go half the distance towards a wall, and then half that distance, then half that distance, you approach the wall quickly, but in the end, you never quite get there. Like Zeno’s Arrow, I said. He nodded. He then went on to offer his own theory, one that had to do with degrees of separation in time.

“We know history directly and intimately through people. Most of
us have contact, through friends and relatives, with almost a century of history. If you take the future into consideration, the same thing applies. Some of the infants you know will still be alive almost a century from now. Its like degrees of separation, only in time. When I was young I met my grandmother, who had been born in 1850. Now I know a grandnephew who will most likely live at least eighty years, given today’s life expectancy. When you add it up, in terms of generations, then, by proxy, I am one degree of separation from almost two hundred and fifty years of past and future.”

A
NCIENT
B
EINGS AND
L
IVING
F
OSSILS

I liked my friend’s idea, and when we parted I began to think of it in terms of a personal connection with time. What would the giant sequoias on California’s west coast tell us if they could communicate all the history they’d witnessed? What would animals that live longer than humans tell us? Parrots, large tortoises and crocodiles are among the longest-living animals, sometimes surviving longer than a hundred years in the wild. Humans would also have to be numbered among the longest-living animals, though only in special centenarian cases. The lengthiest documented human lifespan was recorded in southern France, where Jeanne Calment lived to be 122 years old. That would have given her direct, living contact with approximately three hundred years of human life, past, present and future. But in terms of longevity, the prize goes to tortoises. The oldest documented tortoise was named Harriet. She was rumoured to have been brought to England from the Galapagos by Charles Darwin in 1835, when she was only five years old. Later in life she was returned to the South Pacific, though to Australia instead of the Galapagos. She was a giant tortoise, and
like all giant tortoises she grew for her entire life. When she died in 2006, at age 175, she weighed over 150 kilograms and was the size of a dinner table.

Plants, of course, completely outdo animals when it comes to lifespan, because their internal clocks tick that much more slowly. Nothing evokes the passage of time as eloquently as the growth rings of trees. We’ve probably all seen pictures of polished cross-sections of the trunks of giant redwoods adorned with arrows and little tags showing historical dates, such as the signing of the Magna Carta and the birth of Christ. A giant redwood’s perspective on human history must be like a time-lapse film, or like the view of the fast-forward universe that you’d see if you fell into a black hole.

A few of the giant sequoias of coastal California have watched millennia come and go and are as gnarled and unyielding, if not as tall, as small mountains. The oldest known living redwood tree is 2,200 years old and is located in Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California. Two thousand, two hundred years amounts to 31 seventy-year human lifetimes. If we convert human years to sequoia years, then an average human lifespan of seventy years is just a little over 2.2 years for this old tree. Like Yggdrasil, the eternal world tree of Norse legend that supports the universe, giant redwoods seem immortal, surviving century after century and sustaining a forest world beneath their branches. Also like Yggdrasil, they are subject to distress. As it says in the Norse veda
The Gylfaginning
, “The Ash Yggdrasil suffers harms, more than men can imagine.” A few decades ago, a giant redwood in California was struck by lightning and caught fire. Because redwood, particularly growing redwood, is not very flammable, the fire smouldered for months until it was extinguished by a snowstorm in the late fall. Fortunately, the tree was hardly affected.

For all their great age, redwoods are youngsters when compared to their elders a few hundred miles to the southeast. High in the White Mountains of California is a timeless forest of living trees so ancient they are hoary with time. Not tall trees, rarely growing higher than twenty feet, bristlecone pines nonetheless constitute a charmed grove of millennial bonsai. Most of them look like upended bits of living driftwood, or like the skeletons of mythical creatures. Their bleached branches and seemingly dead trunks, twisted and spiralled, resemble narwhal tusks or the mandibles of giant albino staghorn beetles. They gesture against the clear alpine sky like white antlers garnished with a few living branches of improbably verdant foliage. These gnarled pines, with their thick bases and weathered trunks, are miracles growing out of blanched scree, sand and boulders. One of them, with rings dating back 4,600 years, is the oldest tree in the world. A human lifetime, in bristlecone years, is barely twelve months long.

It almost seems as if these old trees, the sequoias and bristlecones, acquire a form of immortality by becoming partially inanimate, or simply by being so old. They contain so much dead tissue—bark, wood, dead branches—that they provide a second earth from which new life can spring. Like Yggdrasil, they rot and grow at the same time. The grey trunks of bristlecone pines that appear as monumental and lifeless as rock, so ancient they are almost geological, still manage to conjure forth new leaves each spring.

Up until 1997 the 4,600-year-old bristlecone wasn’t just the oldest living tree but the oldest living plant. That honour now goes to a shrub discovered by scientists in a remote valley in southwestern Tasmania. The shrub is a member of the “King’s holly” species, though this particular plant is a genetic freak, unable to produce seeds. It has been estimated to be forty-three thousand years old—thousands of years
before humans entered North America. It’s not tall, but it’s quite large, covering two isolated river gullies. Yet even this Methuselah is not the oldest living
thing.
In fact, it’s like a newly hatched tadpole compared to more recently discovered unicellular organisms.

In May 1995 scientists isolated a species of forty-million-year-old bacteria,
Bacillus sphaericus
, from the stomach of a bee encased in amber. The bacteria turned out to be in a state of suspended animation and, miraculously, scientists were able to revive them in a laboratory. These ancients were trumped in less than five years. In October 1999 250-million-year-old bacteria were discovered buried in ancient sea salt deposits beneath Carlsbad, New Mexico. They were also revived. They had survived inside their hard-shelled spores in the same state of suspended animation as the
Bacillus sphaericus
, except for millions of years longer. I wonder if they infected eurypterids. If only we could see the world the eurypterids knew. The urge to resurrect ancient creatures seems to be an almost universal fantasy, from Crichton’s
Jurassic Park
to the work being done in Russia and Japan to clone mammoths using frozen DNA. But in one sense, in the form of living fossils, many ancient creatures have already been resurrected.