A Line in the Rock

Whitefish, Montana

These rainy days in Whitefish, Montana, press hard on me.  They close the mountains in clouds and forebode coming winter that will shut the high country til June.  They lead me into dark queries and puzzles where answers come scarce and faulty.    

Craggy Range Bar and Grill,
Whitefish, Montana

Buffalo Cafe,
Whitefish, Montana

I sit in Craggy Range Bar and Grill on Central Avenue and listen to good-ol’-boys talk about big fish and bucks shot,  And again in the morning at the Buffalo Café, before they go out to cut mountain maple that clutters the grassland.  It takes a good sport of a woman to get on with them.  They like a good sport.

The bar is “L” shaped, and I peruse the men along the other side of the L. 

“Where ya from,” he says.

“Southern California.”

“I’m sorry,” and he’s not joking.

At least they haven’t used that Midwest cliché, “From the land of fruit and nuts,” that I heard so often on a cross-country bike ride.  I confess to being a nut, and try not to show any leaning toward “fruit,” but preconceptions are hard to override with mere trying.

Good-ol’-girls don’t do that.  They take me for a nut, and don’t care.  And the barmaid, cool as Liz; I imagine her behind the bar, good sport, handling the good-ol’-boys.

Song of geology, lyrical in my eyes, strong in my books, vivid in my expectation.  Earth, not the same everywhere, as poems are lyrical, but not the same.      

Here we go again, into the rock.  Sorry, they pull me down.

Reynolds Mountain 9125’
with a dike of intrusive magma,
now hardened into rock,
running up through it.

Magma pressed up beneath the earth’s crust, so hard it cracked the cold, solid limestone.  Can you feel it here, see it in this picture, the past it represents?  (Click on the picture to make it larger.)  And once cracked, the limestone opponent, like a weakened boxer, cowered, then succumbed.  Magma punched into the crack, widened it, and kept moving upward, into the weakened foe.  See it here in the dike running at about twenty degrees upward through the sedimentary establishment.

The revolutionary underground movement broke the conservative level layers above it, pressed harder than they were prepared for. Not satisfied, the intrusive magma pressed outward between the layers, pitting them against each other, revealing weak places between them.    

On the wall of the Craggy Range Bar and Grill, I see a picture of Reynolds Mountain, the same peak I saw in first light, before clouds removed the mountain.  A distinct line struck across its layers.  To you, maybe, it’s just a line in a rock, easily shrouded in clouds.  To me, it’s a force that nags and tears, a movement that disturbs the established order.