(Con) Temporary

(Con) Temporary  

   Here in the Cornish coast (located on the southwest side of England), the beauty of the crashing waves against the brownish-blackened rocks is reminiscent of rural parts of Hawaii, particularly the Big Island of Hawaii where the fresh lava flows meet the ocean (thus creating the Hawaiian islands, the newest island of Loihi slowly ready to emerge; and molten lava pools can be huge as seen by the Pacific ocean's "ring of fire" that outlines much of the western hemisphere...the recent discovery of the connecting pools of magma underneath the Yellowstone area is estimated to be about the size of eleven Grand Canyons, thus the recent label as one of several "super" volcanoes overdue to erupt).  The landscape is always changing, even here as cliffs collapse into the ocean, much of the more visited areas and paths now guarded by sturdy fence rails some five feet back of the edge.  But it wasn't that changing coastline that caught my eye, for coastlines regularly change, but rather the green hills behind them, beautifully covered in grasses and crops and sheep, rolling throughout the country as is so typically England.  Fascinating, for these green plains and hills were once all forests, and now they are completely gone.

   Much of the story comes from an Irish tale near the town we're in, an Irish king casting or cursing his daughter to marriage to a pagan prince.  The daughter took a ship to Cornwall and landed nearby, but the prince had followed her, and "chased her through the forest" as described in a manuscript at the University Library of Cambridge.  That forest written about is the grassy plain across from us.  Of course, like many mining areas, the wood of the forest had many uses beyond burning (much of the mining in this area, despite being done for centuries here, was heavily industrialized around the time of the steam engine arriving). Wood propped up the mine shafts and built the rails as well as the ships for transport (the Cornish coast is not only filled with ship-destroying rocks, but also many caves which hid many a pirate and a smuggler).  But mining was not an easy life.

   In her book, On Extinction, author Melanie Challenger writes:  During the heyday of mining, miners were old by their forties.  In 1837, a survey found that their average lifespan was thirty-one years.  Predictably, they were superstitious, unwilling to work on Midsummer's Eve or Day, cautious not to whistle underground.  The dim glow by which they worked flickered from a candle stuck to the gallery wall with clay.  A shift was eight or nine hours, and progress was agonizingly slow, a few inches a day...some mines were so deep it took an hour for the miners to emerge.  Once there, they gasped like stupefied fish out of their element, puffing out sighs of dark, smoky breath.  Children as young as eight or nine worked in the mines, dressing the ore alongside women.

   Thus the origin of the Cornish pasty as well, a folded pocket of pastry in which meat and vegetables were placed and cooked; some of the earlier pasties even had a pocket of jam, baked in (no longer seen, even in traditional pasty shops, which now offer curry, goat cheese and many other "new" flavors).  And these were quite large, as they represented the entire meal for the miner, the dinner and dessert (the jam) all in one.

   The mining goes way back, almost to the day's of early man from tools found near the area.  That and fishing, the early Heurs working together to capture schools of pilchards (sardines).  But it was mining that predominated, polluted, and produced, all the way to the Iron Age and even some evidence that goes back to the Bronze Age.  Tin and copper (remember tin foil, tin cans and other such items?) were the most extracted minerals, at one point, the mines of Cornwall producing 50% of the world's tin (back in 1926).  But with those minerals came arsenic, cadmium and zinc, filling rivers and streams and destroying the plant life and animals and making way for other forms of life that could adapt, lichens and a changing landscape of birds, bugs and even fish (who once used the waters to breed and give birth).

    But a mining town is a mining town and even places such as Park City in Utah lie treeless for the most part, a fragmented landscape far from what is was before the earth below was disrupted and it's balance torn asunder.  After hundreds of years of man tearing it up, it is as if the land simply sighs and patiently decides to start again, letting cliffs fall and marshy grasses anchor the soil as best they can.  As Melanie Challenger continued:  The ancient granites that propped up the moorland, the tough crust of Cornwall in which the minerals of the region's former prosperity had lain.  Three hundred million years ago, these rocks boiled up to the domicile in this landscape.  Three hundred million years ago!  Time bound meshes of natural history into the thickness of these ancient rocks.  Curiosity or enterprise led people to rupture them, unsealing ancient realities that revolutionized their minds.  These rocks had pushed up through the border of the Permian and Triassic eras, when the unstoppable progress of mass extinction eradicated nearly all of the era's species...

   And so there I stood, knowing that not only was I, little ole me, here temporarily, but so was this changing landscape, everything from the gaudy modern hotels and condos dotting the landscape (but with terrific views), to the grassy knolls that made this area so attractive.  It was all so contemporary for today, and yet fittingly on a geological scale, here today and gone tomorrow.  Quite likely, as author Challenger speculates, future digs will uncover us and find that this city of Porth and Newquay once held an entire population of humans and was covered in both pavement and grasses, a civilization and landscape to be added to the others that preceeded it, the Heurs and the miners, and the princes galloping through forests.  And behind it all, even behind the archeologists struggling to piece it all together, the ocean and the rocks will continue their back and forth play, ever patient and ever repairing.