The Moment the Gendarme Fell
Part One
“It sounded like the jets that fly up from Norfolk all the time. Then we saw a giant cloud of dust rising. When it cleared, the Gendarme was gone.” ~ Seneca Rocks climber referring to an event that occurred at 3:27 p.m. October 29, 1987.
“To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die…” Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
The human concept of time is one that evolution has customized for a relatively short lifespan. We humans early on adopted the now famous movie line, “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse,” because that best describes our lives throughout much of human history.
On the other hand, much of the natural world measures time on an entirely different scale.
“A century-old” describes less than one percent of the human population. In the geological time scale, a hundred years is but a millisecond. And most of us are resolved to the fact that we probably won’t live even that long.
Egos aside, we may be somewhat inconsequential in the big picture, so perhaps we should live, love and enjoy each moment of life. Consider leaving something beautiful behind.
Gravity always wins – eventually!
Then there are those living organisms that fall way short of geologic time but far exceed the lifespan of humans. One specimen of bristlecone pine is more than 5,000 years old; that amounts to 200 human generations.
Humans rush about while nature takes its good old time. We cannot rush nature’s work, and that has never been truer than with a substance called pitch.
Pitch is derived from tar, and if you held a chunk of it in your hands, you would swear it is a solid. If you took a hammer to your chunk of pitch, it would shatter like glass. Yet, it is considered a liquid that is billions of times more viscous than water.
And, being a liquid, it acts like all liquids; when suspended, it drips.
In a laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia, an ongoing experiment began in 1930 and continues to this day. You can watch the Pitch Drop experiment live on camera only if you possess interminable patience.
In 1927 a professor named Parnell melted down some pitch and poured it into a glass funnel, sealed the bottom of the funnel, and allowed it to settle for three years. In 1930 he cut away the obstruction and began waiting for the first drip.
The first drip finally fell from the funnel to the bottom of a beaker. That first drip took eight long years to develop and succumb to gravity. Since that first drip in 1930, only nine more drips have occurred to date; that’s 92 years.
(As an alternative way of describing the human lifespan, a centenarian will live through a little over ten drips of tar in their lifetime. Now, that’s depressing!)
The experiment has had three custodians over the entire span of the experiment, yet no human has ever observed one of the drips.
The people who watch for these drips have much more free time on their hands than most of us, yet they persevere.
Why? Well, it has to do with the status conferred by being in the right place at the right time when something extraordinary happens.
You feel special about being a witness to such an event because of its rarity.
Martha, the last passenger pigeon in the world, died on the afternoon of September 1, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo. Her death was unobserved. No one happened to be visiting her cage when she fell from her perch. Her fall signaled the complete and total end of an entire species.
The iconic rock outcropping in New Hampshire, the Old Man of the Mountain, collapsed sometime during the post-midnight hours of May 3, 2003.
The rubble that bore the striking countenance of the old man was discovered at the base of the cliff by park rangers that morning while on routine patrol. Not one person reported witnessing the collapse of this much-loved figure.
I have spent a good bit of my life in the woods, and, to date, I have witnessed only two mature trees spontaneously fall over without being toppled by high winds or heavy snowfall.
I regard both instances as special moments because each of those trees had lived many decades, judging by their size. The second of these took place at Watoga State Park in 2017.
It was a quiet Saturday morning when I began working on the Honeymoon Trail about 300 yards up from the trailhead at Cabin 34. After cutting a small tree off the trail with a handsaw, I looked up and saw an enormous pine slowly start to topple over.
It was about 200 feet uphill from my position on the trail. As the tree picked up speed, it began shearing limbs off nearby trees. The impact with the ground could be felt through the soles of my hiking boots.
It was at once a delightful and terrifying experience. I was grateful not to be in the path of the tree, but witnessing its final act seemed a blessing.
In next week’s edition of For Your Consideration we will visit the charming little village of Seneca Rocks, West Virginia. Here, on a bright fall day in 1987, a popular geological formation plummeted to the base of Seneca Rocks after standing for eons.
Unlike the collapse of the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire, the Gendarme’s fall was witnessed. It is the backstory to this tragedy that offers a rare glimpse into how we perceive time and the role of time and gravity in our lives.
Until next week,
Ken Springer
Ken1949bongo@gmail.com