Bonding at Comb Ridge

A master and apprentice sort out something special in life's geology

Text by Craig Childs Photographs by Adriel Heisey

two minds meet at Comb Ridge

The bedrock face of a plateau rises out of northeast Arizona. An arc of stone called Comb Ridge sweeps 80 miles around the edge of Monument Valley. Here, rock formations bend upward, nearly vertical. Logs of petrified wood protrude from the ground, old-growth trees of dinosaur age, their trunks bright with rings of quartz and orange chert.

Two of us come walking through this place under the steel ball of a July sun. We carry days of supplies on our backs. We are master and apprentice. The master is a geologist in his 50s, an old-school researcher who still fawns over paper maps far more than he does over computers. I am the apprentice, in my mid-30s, a younger man full of questions.

The master looks tired, his head hanging in the heat, hair matted in dried sweat. The drinking water we carry came from a hole in the bedrock a day back-a black well of ancient rainwater, bubbles burping up from the mulch at the bottom. It tastes like death, but it is better than nothing. We fill our water bottles without looking, drinking without paying attention to the smell. We have miles to go, and the sun makes this journey seem impossible. He groans. I gesture ture toward some shade. We both stumble over, dropping beneath a natural stone overhang. The shade is not cool at all. It feels like horse breath.

We have come to a place robbed of soil, where bare stone is ravaged by the wind. I am looking for stories of the Earth, tales of what lies beneath my feet.

When I look down, I can just make out seams and fractures caused by migrating continents and plates of stone moving across beds of molten rock. I have a wish here to be a shaman of geology, a sorcerer who can see what is not visible.Comb Ridge, popped upward through a crack running from Utah into Arizona, is a perfect place to see what is happening below. The Earth is alive. It is breathing, turning in its sleep. Every itch and scratch of the planet's fluid interior ripples across this stony surface. I have come here to read the secret language that toils deep inside.

But I am only the apprentice. The master, the geologist, knows things I barely imagine. Yesterday, as we sat at a camp along a sandswept ledge, he told me about research he had done. He was taking gravitational measurements, going from place to place to weigh the Earth. He said that the gravity kept changing. The Earth beneath him was becoming heavier and lighter and heavier again. Tides were passing through the planet, waves of molten rock rising and falling, sagging with iron or floating on silica. Who had imagined that this was solid ground beneath us? It is not. His gravitational measurements changed as he moved.

I have never heard of such a thing. I have always thought of gravity as constant. This landscape I have so often thought of as firm suddenly begins to melt around me. This country of ridges and canyons becomes in my mind a thin sheet of fabric thrown over an invisible and heaving animal.

In the heat of our shade, he reaches into his pack. He says, "Let's see what we've got here," and digs out a ream of folded maps. He lays them out on the ground revealing the jigsaw

colors of geological formations. Each printed color shows a different type of rock, like wood grain exposed by the blade of erosion. Canyons carve down through layer after layer of geology, bringing up greens, blues, yellows. The map of Comb Ridge is colored with pink and blue ribbons, one formation after the next shoved upward, a deck of cards viewed on-edge. The paper is marked with clandestinelooking symbols of science, strikes and dips and faults.

This master is my stepfather, a man named Dick Moore. I have floated down the Grand Canyon with him and back-packed through snow-blustered days in southern Utah. He frequently gets down on one knee to draw in the sand some diagram of geology. He was once a professor. Always, my mind is tired at the end of the day with him. I ask questions incessantly: What does that crack in the rock mean? Why are those layers superimposed? How do gypsum crystals squeeze up through the ground? And I do not rest, thinking that this is always a rare opportunity, walking with a man, a geologist of such encyclopedic curiosity.

Dick traces his finger across the map, naming the formations as he goes, these Jurassic and those Triassic. The Navajo sandstone, the Wingate. Comb Ridge has to be the result of something deep, he decides. You see here, the bright red zones of volcanic activity, how they follow the corridor of Comb Ridge, suggesting movement down deep. Something way down in the basement of the Earth is causing this uplift. Maybe it is a thin spot in the crust being snapped in half, or maybe it is a lighter, more buoyant piece of the Earth floating to the surface.

We walk across a surging ocean. Bits of flotsam and jet-sam keep popping up and sinking, mountainous rises of sandstone bolted up from the ground. But they are not hap-hazard. They form judicious patterns when you look closely at the map. Comb Ridge bows beautifully across the surface of the planet. From the maps and aerial photographs we have with us, this place looks not at all like a wreck. It looks as if it was sculpted gently and gracefully by hand.

"So, that's why you are a geologist," I say to him. "You see patterns. You want to know why they are there."

But does he hear me? Dick keeps looking at the map, running his finger over monoclines and meanders, tracing shapes in the landscape that I do not see until he has defined them.

I see something in the map. On one side of Comb Ridge, all the colors denote formations from Jurassic times, places of big red cliffs and buttes. On the other, they are of the Pennsylvanian period, bands of thin shales and limestones. I point this out, asking if Comb Ridge might itself be a division in the continent, a place where the planet has broken in two, revealing different levels of crust.

Dick smiles and nods. "Yes," he says, "I see it also. There must be some significance here."

I keep a serious look on my face but an inward smile blossoms. The master has learned from his apprentice. He is still nodding. "Good question," he says.

When the day begins to cool into evening, we move on. Comb Ridge strikes up from the ground beside us. It is a stone giant, the Earth thrown back like a tidal wave. I feel beneath my feet the rising of rock formations. I can sense the trembling planet, the undertow of geology. Here, the Earth's surface has been pounded into existence as if by a drum, a landscape of rhythm. We pace ourselves across it, walking on open stone, reaching down to pick up a colorful rock, a glassy piece of petrified wood.

I study everything Dick hands to me, turning it over and over, trying to see what it is that catches his eye. He seems to investigate each item I hand to him with the same curiosity. We are windows for each other.

Day after day, we drift through the heat, creeping across the burning back of Comb Ridge, sleeping along its cliffs, waking to the glaring sun. As we go, we map out the underworld, sending our imaginations down into the cracks.

Walking northward, we come upon a heap of geological chaos, something that looks like a volcano sprouting from between the seams of the ridge. It is a giant mass of black and green rocks piled up through a half-mile-wide hole in the ground. An eruption happened here. But it was not a volcano. It came from deeper in the Earth, below the level of volcanoes, where the stone is no longer molten, but plastic.

These rocks around us came from 150 miles beneath our feet. We wander through a great heel crack, a place where the geology has unfolded, revealing the deepest interior. Diamonds come up in places like this, belched up from nearer the core than anything I have ever seen.

My stepfather collects samples from the ashen and boul-dery slopes. He cracks the rocks against each other, opening them like walnuts. He shows me the beautiful squares of garnet crystals, threads of greasy, blue-green serpentine.

He names the minerals as if he is calling creatures up from the bottom of the sea: sodalite, alkali pyroxene, brith-olite, lujavrite, phlogopite. There are xenocrystals and chrome-diopsides. Chunks of house-sized rock have been coughed up out of the Earth's mantle, green with olivine.

He reminds me that these rocks and minerals that have broken through Comb Ridge are only from a thin veneer. They are skin deep. One hundred fifty miles is almost nothing, a brushstroke of paint across the globe.

Thousands of miles remain between us and the steel core of the planet. Geologists hear the echoes of seismic activity. They ponder the constant shifting of the Earth's plates and the pressure between the moving plates that produces the earthquakes they hear, but they do not know what is actually in the center of this planet.

A crease pushed Comb Ridge up, and a bubble of inner-Earth escaped along the fracture, exploding to the surface. It happens around us all the time. Mountain ranges rise and fall. Canyons collapse downward. Volcanoes throw earth into the sky. Earthquakes grumble like uneasy stomachs.

As Dick tells me all this, I inspect the samples he has brought, eyeing them with a small magnifying lens. Wait, I say. I have found a diamond. Here, look. It is smaller than the tip of a hair, glowing with a clear, pinkish light.

He looks at it closely. Has anyone ever found a diamond along Comb Ridge? He looks up from the magnifying lens and smiles at me. The master regards his apprentice with pride. And I smile back.