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Mountain Time
- Vanderbilt University Press
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141 Mountain Time THE vibrancy of the equatorial rain forest depends upon webs of interconnection between the animals and the plants, the soils and the air. But these connections cannot be seen. They ebb and flow with rhythms much different from your own daily cycle. The nutrient cycles, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle; climate cycles of drought or cold; cycles of beetle outbreaks or plagues of ants or fungal wilt cannot be understood when their effects are glimpsed for only a moment between fronds and creepers that veil the broader view. You only see snippets as you pass along the trail—events that would be better understood if put in their broader context. At first sight their manifestations may appear more like natural disasters than evidence of constructive cycles that support the forest’s vitality. Perhaps the walk you have come to take today will deepen your understanding. Things may grow clearer if you can lengthen your perspective—raise your point of view to match that of the Black Mountain. As you glance upward you can make out the shoulders of that mountain cutting diagonally behind the branches in every scene you pass. Its dark pyramid imposes thousands of feet into the sky over the lowlands. This mountain may sleep through your entire lifetime, but it is an active volcano. Its symmetrical peak stands in sharp contrast to the dormant cones on the horizon. Their crests are collapsed and sunken, the geometry of their ramparts disfigured by centuries of monsoon rains. But from the summit of the Black Mountain, a step in any direction leads straight down a slanted flood plain. The smooth cinder slopes there are repaved regularly—on mountain time. The skirts of the mountain spread out across the plain here, slanting the trail you walk along. The banded layers of rock that underlie that trail are revealed as you come upon a stream cut. It 142 Threads from the Web of Life would be a mistake to assume that the brick-oven colors of these bands—ochre, charcoal black, red clay—are sedimentary strata, akin to painted canyon walls where each vertical foot represents thousands of years of gradually accumulated sediment. In fact, each layer in these strata was emplaced in seconds. These are deposits of pyroclastic tephra. Each layer is spawned in a cloud of incandescent chips of rock blown above the dark summit, then collapsing of its own weight. The billowing volcanic avalanche skids frictionless down the slope on a cushion of compressed steam. The hiss escaping from countless pressurized bits of basalt merges into a blastfurnace roar that accompanies the unchecked acceleration of a wall of red-hot fragments. Its luminous leading edge spills through the forest, incinerating everything it touches, erasing the established trails and landmarks in the moment of its passage. To eyes witnessing the event, this “stone wind,” is a disaster. The widening tumult slides out across the plain at the base of the slope, its slowing advance marked by a spreading wildfire, leaving the area behind as sterile and featureless as the ash-gray desolation of the moon. But the ground here is hundreds of feet deep in pyroclastic deposits: the stone wind blows across this slope regularly—not in your time but on mountain time. It passes over any given parcel of land often enough to bring a new infusion of phosphorous , sulfur, magnesium, iron, and other minerals to the forest . Seedlings spring from the ashes in its path. The trees stand mature all around the base of the mountain; the highest reaches of the canopy grow from the most recent swaths of compacting tephra, the largest concentrations of animals and insects live there. You can see the foliage pushing in from the margins of the exposed wall here, burying traces of the destructive cascade in green. Great fallen trunks cover the rocks on either side of the streamside notch, their bark breached by troops of tiny orange mushrooms. The omnipresent ants scavenge among them. The recycling processes are evident everywhere you look, all working to regenerate and perpetuate the stable, vibrant forest. As you hit your midday stride a thunder shower turns the ground slippery where the path detours around a leaning [44.200.77.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:01 GMT) 144 Threads from the Web of Life basalt monument two stories tall. Festoons of mosses and flowering vines drip the rain onto a crew of burying beetles working a mound of earth under...