Extinction Event
I have a brachiopod on my dresser from the last time I visited Ohio. It's not a prime specimen--both its wingtips are broken off--but still, I love to hold it in the palm of my hand and remember "Fossil Hill," an eroding creekbank along the ravine near my childhood home.
Recently, I came across another eroding creekbank at the mouth of Scalzo Creek. I happened along it by hiking the Primrose Trail: A waterfall cascades down a wall of rock to join Coal Creek there, and along the top of the ridge, majestic trees tower above the landscape. From the obvious soil erosion under the cedars, I could tell that many hikers had visited the place, climbing the sides of the waterfall for the heady view. The ground is literally crumbling away beneath the tree roots, a progression that will eventually make the trees fall over, but for now, offer a tempting playground.
At my childhood Fossil Hill, the roots of the maples and oaks on the top of the ridge were twisted and bare along the eroding slope, too, making perfect handholds and footholds for clambering up and down. I still remember nestling among those roots, combing the soil for hours for brachiopods. I almost never went home empty handed--true to its name, the hillside was a treasure trove. I vaguely knew what brachiopods were: marine creatures that existed in a different geologic time period on Earth. I didn't really appreciate just how old they were, though--around 450 million years, by most estimates--or how they'd met their demise during a mysterious shift in the earth's climate, something now referred to as an "extinction event."
Standing at the base of the Scalzo Creek waterfall, the childhood memories of Fossil Hill bubbled up in me, and before I knew it, I, too, was contributing to erosion, grasping at the tree roots, climbing to the top of the ridge to stand above the waterfall looking down, hungry for the bird's-eye view. I was an innocent kid again, till I reached the top, that is, where a large black plastic pipe snaked up the hill where the creek should have been. The creek bed itself was stony and dry, a shocking substitute for what should have been a babbling brook. Water was spitting out of the pipe at the lip of the falls so it looked natural, but it really wasn't.
Whatever for? I wondered. Why was the creek confined to a severe black tube, even its color an affront to the greens, grays and browns of nature? And where had the vital, teeming microcosm of small creekbed creatures gone when deprived of their wet world? Perhaps, I thought, in this one example of human efficacy, I witnessed an example of the progress of our own extinction event, which is, inexorably, upon us.
