For a moment there, I wanted to enter a Lilliputian world of Gulliver's Travels, and explore that crack like some desert creepie-crawlie would. To them, this finger-width and foot-length crack might seem like a slot canyon.
Presumably this crack was caused by shrinkage. With the unseasonable rains, would the wet ground swell and partially close the slot canyon? I checked, and it did.
I have always been fascinated by the idea of cracks, faults, and rift valleys. My appreciation of the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico and the upper Arkansas valley of Colorado blossomed when I learned that they were part of the same rift valley.
Perhaps famous cracks and rift valleys would make a great unifying theme for travel, just as rivers did for my spring or fall migrations when I traveled as a full time RVer.
I used to avoid California, unfortunately. The north-south line of the San Andreas fault might be a great migration path. Even a place as geologically understated as eastern North America offers a chance to travel along the Niagara Escarpment from the Tobermory peninsula, which practically bisects Lac Huron, down to the eponymous Falls.
There is a 70 mile long escarpment in southern Utah know as Hurricane Cliff. Its southern terminus is the Grand Canyon where a fault shares the credit with erosion from the Colorado River, for doing the magnificent work.
With the aplomb of an experienced traveler and man of the world, I used to tell a local cyclist in Hurricane, UT, that this escarpment was the first Utah topography that I fell in love with, at least enough to sleep with. She would give me a sly wink. In fact I did camp on top of the 1000 foot high cliff with my RV. There was a wrinkle in the cliff that allowed the Honeymoon Trail to surmount the cliff. Mormon couples, after tieing the eternal knot at the tabernacle in St. George, would take this trail to ranches all over the four corner states. Who knows how many spent their first night of connubial bliss right where I was...oh dear, I don't want to think about that.
Perhaps the longest rift valley in the world is the one that starts in the north at the Dead Sea, and terminates in the south in Kenya, where the Great Rift Valley is, and where the famous Lucy fossils were found.
Although cracks, faults, and cliffs usually make good eye candy, this is only secondary. Something as big as the earth doesn't really engage the human imagination. We need something more bite-sized and concrete. Perhaps we need to be able to kick it with our own feet before it is real, just as Samuel Johnson once refuted "if a tree falls in the forest..." nonsense to his biographer, Boswell. [*]
Oh how I would love to kick at this rift valley shown in a Wikipedia photo, from their article on plate tectonics. It's in Iceland, where the rupture and splitting of the North American plate from the Eurasian plate rises out of the depths of the middle Atlantic.
The human mind probably has the same problem of not being able to appreciate long time periods. Even something as finite and concrete as consuming one more day of your life doesn't seem to sink in until a sunset focuses the issue for you.
It is strange to admit that life itself seems like a cold abstraction until it can be focused in time and place. Seeing that tarantula on the road reminded me of a couple things that had never seemed connected before. I once knew a woman who would catch flies with her bare hand and then release it outdoors. This irritated me for two reasons: 1) I resented her moral posturing, as if the rest of us are supposed to feel guilty for using the fly-swatter. 2) I have never been able to do it.
Somewhere or other, Tolstoi wrote about how ridiculous the moral pose was of never hurting a fly; and Tolstoi was a moral-poseur nonpareil. Recall how obnoxious his apostle Gandhi could get with all that.
Still, when I see a caterpillar moving across a road in autumn I hit the brakes on the bicycle, and carry the caterpillar across the road. A long term cyclist knows too many people who have been squished by cars; but the idea doesn't really crystallize into genuine feeling and action until I see the caterpillars.
The cold-blooded tarantula in the photo above might have been dormant on the cool morning that I photographed him. I came back in the warmth of the afternoon to find him; he was a few feet away, in the tire ruts of the gravel road, squished.
[*] See Boswell's "Life of Johnson," on Gutenberg.org.
"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together
of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence
of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I
observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is
impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which
Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large
stone, till he rebounded from it, 'I refute it THUS.'
"
