Dark, Salt, Clear Read online

  I soon realise that a geologist’s sense of time is not like that of ordinary people. It is not even like that of ancient historians. Roger refers to the last ice age, over 11,700 years ago, as recent history. His arms rise automatically as he speaks, describing the dramatic landscape into existence before my eyes. He tells me about the Devonian age, around 400 million years ago, when the continents were just rising from the previously borderless ocean, and Cornwall lay in tropical latitudes south of the equator. It was in Devon that the red sandstone from the period was first found, but the era is also known by the more appealing name, the Age of Fish, marking the period during which the first ancestors of sharks and amphibians, as well as thousands of new species of fish, evolved.

  We travel on through time, past the mass extinctions at sea that coincided with the end of the Devonian age, to the start of the Permian period, at which point every continent was united in the vast form of Pangea. In those ancient days, Roger explains, Cornwall’s landscape resembled a red desert comprised of great sloping mountains. By the end of the Permian period, 280 million years ago, the continents had begun to split, soon forgetting they had once shared an undivided earth. Devon and Cornwall were first joined together in a granite landmass called the Cornubia, the medieval Latin name for Cornwall.

  As we use tales gleaned from ancestors to make sense of the fabric of our own lives, so I hold onto this information in my understanding of Cornwall. There was a time when Cornwall and Devon were an island, a great, granite ship drifting through the seas. It was not until the Cretaceous era that Cornubia was bound to the rest of the British Isles and mainland Europe with it. Erosion gradually reduced its once imposing mountains to gentle plateaus. As told by Roger, these natural changes acquire an almost mournful tone, as if this land, once regal and violent in its contours, was pacified by the elements. Though much of the original granite has been long covered over by the slate and sandstone, there are places where it is still exposed today, like the Tors in Bodmin, areas in which the past cuts back up through time.

  Where rows of houses lie neatly today, mountains burst up through the ground, and plains of desert stretch out into the sea, onto which I drop the fishermen of Newlyn, their faces covered by scarves to protect them from the heat and excoriating winds as they trek across red sands towards their distant ships. Time races on. I see oceans come in to envelop the land, before washing out again. I see whole ice ages crawl up through the dunes, allowing only the most meagre tundra to survive within their barren landscapes, and then I see them thaw once more. I see the trees of the now sunken, petrified oak forest below the waters of Mount’s Bay – still visible when destructive waves strip the coastline right back. Finally, Roger draws for me the first human inhabitants of the area, who initially occupied a small corner of the bay, finding shelter beside what was once Gwavas Lake – gwavas a Cornish word meaning winter dwelling. Through Roger I understand that humanity’s mark upon the earth is truly infinitesimal; our claims of ownership over this peninsula that we have barely known, that has barely known us, laughable. As his timeline rolls slowly down into the present day, Roger packs his maps back up and we leave the fisherman’s memorial behind to make our way down onto the pebble beach between Newlyn and Penzance.

  The tide is at its lowest ebb for our rock tour, the water leaked right out, revealing the secrets of the beach’s rocky bed. Today there are large swathes of sea mist draped over the two ends of Mount’s Bay, the wind howls and the beach for once is clear of people. Roger starts by pointing out an almost imperceptible line of rocks jutting out of the water parallel to St Michael’s Mount, which he explains is the top of a long dike (an inclined table of rocks that cuts through the bedding of the existing ones) of blue elvan – a greeny-blue, fine-grained rock almost exclusive to Cornwall. In the eighteenth century, multitudes of rich, black cassiterite (tin oxide) veinlets were discovered within this dike – which could be profitably mined, if only someone were able to get to them. It was not until 1778 that Thomas Curtis, a poor middle-aged miner from Breage, near Helston, sought to construct a mine right under the sea to extract the precious mineral. A retrospective piece on the mine, written in 1949 and published in the Mineralogical Magazine, describes Curtis’s plan for the Wherry Mine with hyperbolic delight as being ‘unique in the boldness of its conception, romantic in the extreme in its situation and execution.’

  Most assumed that Curtis’s scheme was the daydream of a madman, expecting him not only to fail, but most likely to lose his life in the undertaking. And yet, undeterred, he single-handedly set out to build a submarine mine using black gunpowder to explode the wet rock – a miraculous feat in itself. Curtis had to limit his work on the mine to the summer months since that was the only time of the year when the dike was exposed above sea level. It took him three years of intermittent but intensive work before his submarine mine was completed. During this time the sea burst through the mine on several occasions, destroying the shaft and forcing him to begin from scratch.

  By Curtis’s death in 1791, the subterranean ‘Wherry Mine’ – so-named because the mine had been worked using wherries, light flat-bottomed boats, to carry the ore to the shore – was one of the most profitable in Cornwall. Accounts tell that the mine was 17 fathoms deep and that while working in it you could hear the sea roaring above you, threatening at every moment to break through and drown all those inside. In 1798 an American ship cut adrift in a storm and struck the turret, destroying the mine – summers of work in extraordinarily precarious conditions lost to the sea in a matter of minutes. Despite several plans to reopen it, the Wherry Mine remains untouched. Its dug-out crater hides just below Mount’s Bay, an Aladdin’s cave filled with a ‘groundmass of pinkish fine-grained orthoclase with sparsely distributed phenocrysts of quartz and innumerable small cavities plugged with scaly crystals of secondary chlorite and occasionally minute prisms and radial aggregates of dark brown to black tourmaline.’

  We set out along the beach. Every now and then Roger pauses to pick up a rock that has caught his eye in order to map out its complex composition to me. Each rock is a time capsule, he tells me. A dark, hexagonal rock speckled with white flakes is porphyritic. The reason you can see the crystals inside it, which look like ripped-up fragments of paper pressed into the stone, is because it is fine-grained. Roger holds the rock gently, feeling along its sea-smoothed surfaces like a palm reader, following the lines along it that lead to plains of elvan, which inform him this rock has itself come from the Wherry Mine. In between these moments, with our heads down scanning the rocks, Roger begins to describe to me the lines that have gone into making his own life.

  ‘The time of the now,’ wrote philosopher Walter Benjamin, ‘is shot through with chips of messianic time.’ The past runs in veins through every present moment like the striated lines of minerals – quartz, tourmaline, copper. Roger tells me that his father worked at Penlee Quarry, just along the coast from Newlyn, and would bring home rocks for him to study as a young child, instilling in him a wonder in the knowledge that every rock can teach you something about the planet. It was this spirit that Roger inherited. He recently found a black and white picture of his mother and father, taken long before he was born, grinning arm in arm while deep below ground exploring an old tin mine. They made each other adventurous, Roger tells me, a quality he not only admires, but believes is paramount if one is to truly live in the world.

  Finding a student who was genuinely excited at the prospect of geology, Roger’s teacher at Newlyn’s Tolcarne School set up an informal geology club during the dinner hour. It was in these sessions that Roger would learn about the different ages of the earth, the formation of its volcanoes and the glinting minerals that traverse its rocks. After he finished school, Roger worked briefly at the Penlee Quarry, as his father had.

  At twenty-one Roger’s desire for exploration took him on an aeroplane to South Africa to work on a De Beers diamond mine deep within the bush. He picks up another rock, much smaller than the
last, and holds it out to me. It is quartz and schorl, a deeper black version of tourmaline, a rock-forming mineral. ‘I reckon it could have come down the Coombe River,’ he tells me; this is the river in Newlyn that flows from a reservoir somewhere between the two coasts and all the way out to the sea. As soon as he places one rock down, he finds another just past it that fascinates him even more – ‘You don’t know where to stop!’ The words he uses to explain their compositions are pure poetry: granitic, porphyritic, quartz, olivine and feldspar – itself a mineral that varies from red, pink, and white (orthoclase) to green, grey and white (plagioclase) – each speckled and pockmarked by flakes of fine grains and crystals. There is always some trace, Roger tells me, of the history of things, the impressions humans have left on them. The term for the study of rock layers in geology is stratigraphy, but it is also used in archaeology to describe the technique of seeking out the contexts of rocks, discovering the events that have left detectable traces on their surfaces – in the same way we might scan one another’s bodies, looking for those distinctive lines and marks which tell us something unspoken about the stranger opposite us on the train, or the friend we grew up with but have not seen for years, or the person we are falling in love with. A geologist’s task is to see beyond the ways in which time tries to smooth out difference, examining layers in order to isolate each shift to our world, to feel every fault line. We discuss how hard this is to do this with people, to imagine our lives not as one continuous line, but comprised of hundreds of versions stacked up behind us, and hundreds more ahead of us too, like those pairs of facing mirrors that make your reflection curl up infinitely on either side of you.

  It was during this period in South Africa that Roger first met Poppy. He says her name in a way that I have never heard anyone speak a person’s name before. Without needing to mention their relation, that single two-syllable word ‘Poppy’, seems to stand for the whole earth, all matter. ‘Who’s Poppy?’ I ask, faltering over the word, knowing, without quite knowing how, that such a question cannot be answered casually. ‘She was my wife,’ Roger tells me. ‘She died this year.’

  We walk on. Like most young people, I am not yet comfortable with silences and desperately seek a new thread of conversation amongst the stones below us and at last ask whether Poppy was a geologist too. Roger shakes his head: ‘To her rocks were rocks. She liked beautiful things, though.’

  The first time they met was at a party during Roger’s first year working in the bush. When he asked the quiet seated girl to dance with him, the rest of the room fell away and the world turned back to the very beginning of time. They danced close together until the music stopped and all the guests had left. Just before they separated, Poppy whispered her address into his ear and asked him to come for dinner with her parents. Roger echoed her address the whole way home to make sure he would not forget it; he remembers it perfectly to this day. The following week Roger went to see Poppy and continued visiting her regularly throughout his time in South Africa, soon falling deeply in love with her. Roger worked for a while as a diver in Cape Town, while Poppy trained as an acrobatic dancer, before they left the city to trek cross-country together, finding adventure through companionship in the same way Roger’s parents had.

  I pick up a rock that seems especially beautiful to me. It is so black that it looks like a hole in the ground. When I ask Roger what it is, he puzzles for a while. ‘This is porphyritic too, but it’s much darker.’ He pauses. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know what that is … Well, you can’t expect me to know everything!’ He bends down and reaches for another, half-buried beneath the cement-like grey sand, digging his fingers around its edges to loosen it. When he finally lifts it, we see the rock is much larger than he had thought: a huge bulk of charcoal black stone, striated with thin golden lines. ‘What do you think of that?’ he asks me. And I, not knowing how one ought to talk about rocks, say something like: It looks a bit like a tiger?

  Roger looks at me wryly. ‘Got quite an imagination, haven’t you?’ He shakes his head. ‘Looks like a tiger,’ he smiles and carefully slots the rock back into the bubbling hole of sand he clawed it from, without telling me any more of its history.

  Roger’s story has its own cracks and fault lines. He and Poppy stayed in London for a while, a place she grew to love. So much so that, when Roger got another job at a goldmine in South Africa, Poppy did not want to leave, knowing there would no longer by anything for her out in the bush. She was not the kind of woman that could ever be her husband’s assistant, Roger tells me, and he knew he had to let her go.

  By the time Roger returned to London, Poppy had found someone else, the discovery of which sent Roger into a spiral of self-destruction. He lost himself entirely, not even his work giving him pleasure, and he was eventually diagnosed with bipolar, a condition he was told had been buried within him, waiting to be unearthed by some tremor across his life. A prescription of lithium helped to make his moods more bearable, but he found the chemical also shifted the way he perceived the world. Now and then a dreaminess would come over him and he’d feel himself slipping away from reality. It took him a long time to adjust to this new way of existing, finding meaning through work once more, this time in a goldmine in Australia.

  The next rock Roger chooses is a piece of granite, bisected by veins of jasper, known as chalcedony, a cryptocrystalline form of silica: ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it? You never know what you’re going to find out here.’ Just as he was becoming accustomed to his new life, Roger received a letter from Poppy. In it she wrote that she loved him, that she always had and that she was in London waiting for him. Roger left his life in Australia without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Love is love,’ he says simply: it is not something you can compromise on, it’s too big for that. They quickly started a family and moved to Newlyn, swapping their youthful adventures for a quiet life, staying in most nights, watching TV or listening to the blues. But then, while they were on holiday last Christmas, another earthquake ripped through their foundations, dismantling the life they had built together.

  At one point in Californian essayist Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking – the devastating meditation on the grief she experienced after the death of her first husband John and then her daughter Quintana – she considers the years she spent searching for meaning as a young woman. She often contemplated the episcopal litany, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end’. The young Joan Didion interpreted the phrase as ‘a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shore and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away’. It took several readings before I could see the similitude between these two ways of regarding time. The continuity in the world, the one principle that unifies each moment, is change. It is this mutability that holds life together, drawing a line between time’s beginning and all that which is yet to pass.

  Geology is not only the key to learning the earth’s past, it is the holy book for how to live in the face of such shifts. It reminds us of the ever-turning nature of the planet – from which mountains appear from nowhere, before disappearing down into the sea once more; where red deserts roll back across the landscape to reveal beneath them green fields and villages; and in which one day your wife is bounding through life, and the next can barely stand. In this way geology teaches us to see ourselves as we really are: finite landmarks within an infinitely shifting world. When we use the phrase ‘natural disaster’, geologists remember that these events are only coloured disasters for and by humans. When we talk about ice ages or huge storms at seas, they are not disasters themselves; the disasters are that humans become involved in them. They are just how the world goes. I look back at the town behind us at the edge of the sea. It remains a fishing port, as its community hopes it always will, and yet it changes every second too: the older fishing families die away; political diktat
s from afar transform its inner workings; new technologies wash over it, redrawing its landscape again and again.

  Places do not hold still. I get an impression: I see a stone on a floor and its pattern is perfect. I pick it up, making certain of its shape in my mind and the shape of the space that I occupy in relation to it. I drop the stone to the ground again and try to draw how it looked. And then I pick the stone up once more and see its other side, which sticks out differently, has new lumps and colours, provides a completely divergent experience of the stone. I turn the stone back around again to rediscover that initial shape, but I can no longer find it. I cannot return to that first impression of perfection and two-dimensional certainty. In this way, we each of us try to grab the time of the world by the neck, holding it there tight to our chests for a second, before it skips away and we are swept onwards.

  ‘That’s a metamorphosed sediment,’ Roger tells me, stooping and gesturing towards a line of light pink quartz that passes through a group of rocks leading out to sea. Minerals enter rocks through cracks that open up gradually over time so that the mineral is able to spread right through it.

  It was during that Christmas holiday when Poppy suddenly lost weight, the first mark of an aggressive strain of pancreatic cancer beginning to consume her body. Within a month, it had taken her life. We start walking back up the beach towards the bronze statue of the fisherman. Now he is alone, Roger tells me he is having to teach himself once more how to be a person who is not joined to another body. He’s started going out to gigs with his children and their friends, seeing the world through them and refusing to lose that spirit of enquiry he learned from his parents. The world keeps changing, parts are eroded and new formations grow out of their absences. ‘You can’t help it,’ he says. ‘You’re walking on the planet and you’re just thinking …’ – his eye traces along the line of the green elvan dike where the Wherry Mine is buried deep below – ‘it gives you a sense of wonderment.’ He picks up another rock and stares at it for a while, before chucking it back down. ‘I think that one’s a piece of a brick, actually.’