Round Pond

When it comes to finding subjects to write about, there’s a stream of consciousness thing or perhaps just a meandering of my attention that gets me exploring around to who knows what. When there’s some specific task in my little brain, deciding what to write a book about for example, the wandering can be pretty frustrating, though I try to take it in stride as more than once there’s been unexpected fruit in these tangled bushes.

For the moment, writing about road cuts is on my mind. Road cuts after all may be the longest lasting remains of our civilization. And of course I’m working at my computer so there’s the world wide interweb at my fingertips. I find reference to a few notable road cuts - Mugu Rock, Hookers Cut, Sideling Hill and Pikeville Cut. Interesting place names and for better or worse some incredible alterations of the landscape. But there’s just so much to say about road cuts.

The wanderings then take me into train schedules and the weather forecast and motorcycle batteries. Spring is in the air in New Mexico and das motorrad has been sitting in the garage for a long, long time. Then a particular road cut in my old home turf comes to mind and I turn to Google Maps for satellite imagery and there it is. This would be exit 8 from I93 north near Manchester, New Hampshire. The first time I took it, years ago - whoa! The ramp sweeps around and smack dab into a hill of solid granite. In the blink of an eye you’re confined by jagged rock walls of a curving box canyon and then as quickly you’re out again and on Wellington Road, a suburban main drag indistinguishable from any other. W-what happened?

Zooming out a few clicks I have a look at the southeastern portion of the state. Satellite imagery is so cool, we get to live vicariously the life of soaring birds. It takes another couple of clicks to learn Rüppell's Vulture holds the record for high altitude flight at 36,100 feet above sea level. About half way between Manchester and another of my old haunts, the seacoast, is a very distinct circular puckering in the land. What’s this? Zooming in, it looks like a volcanic crater with a neat lava dome in the middle. Funny, I never associated volcanic activity with the features of the New Hampshire landscape, but, duh, granite is an igneous rock if there ever was one. The crater is in Pawtuckaway State Forest and I zoom in some more to the perimeter, and there is Round Pond.

I send an email to the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services asking for information on my find. Lee Wilder gets right back to me, “Yes! It is the badly eroded remains of a Jurassic age volcano ( ~180 MYA). There are several of these in NH. It formed as Pangaea was breaking up and the North American Plate was drifting over a hot spot.” And (a few emails later) it turns out Lee Wilder was my Junior High School science teacher and I was one of his disciplinary problems. Small world. Brave soul, Mr. Wilder.

Oh, Round Pond… when I lived in New Hampshire I spent a lot of time there. It’s a beautiful little body of water in the woods, with big glacial particulates scattered all around, one of which is a balancing rock, perched, waiting for something… it’s a magical place. I have Nordic skied Round Pond Road at night, have canoed the pond, skinny dipped in it, painted watercolors by it, and sat quietly and watched an Osprey dive for fish in it. I visited an ash tree by the shore beavers were cutting down, each time there would be more chips on the ground, and the stick became thinner and then one day it was fallen into the water. There were some 125 annular rings in the splintered stump.

I got lost in those woods in the failing light of a late autumn afternoon. My mother once told me when lost in the woods we have a propensity to walk in circles. To test this I set a cairn of rocks on the ground and walked off with my best intention to get back to the road. Sure enough I walked back to the cairn. It may still be there.

I’ve crawled around in the last bit of open field of a nearby abandoned farm site to dig day lily bulbs. The smaller than usual flowers were a beautiful wine red with golden throats. For my toil, I ended up with a few bulbs and the nastiest ever poison ivy on my forearms. Hiking into the pond for a dip, I found jewelweed growing in a marshy spot and discovered the juice does in fact make the itching go away just like that. Thank you Euell Gibbons.

Having been drawn back again and again to the edge of an extinct volcano has me wondering. Every place on Earth goes back the same amount of time and every place is the result of many, in this case geologic, events. If we ascribe significance to a particular place or event, what if anything is there to it? Are we connecting to something beyond us or is that just our wish?

Gordon Bunker

Image courtesy of USGS