The sublime today. (photo by Johanna Titus)
We wonder if we can be just a little philosophical in this column. We are scientists, so perhaps we are not allowed such freedoms. Maybe we should always be focused on the search for facts and dry knowledge. But that is not the way it always works out. As geologists, we have our moments, especially in front of campfires late at night after a long day of field studies. We gaze at the flames and ponder the mysteries of our science in a most remarkably philosophical manner. Let’s try to illustrate.
Our noses are almost always aimed at bedrock when we are deep in the Catskills wilderness. Bedrock carries knowledge about the distant past; it transports us to many of those varied pasts, and we very much enjoy our journeys. But then, we sometimes stand back from the rocks and gaze all around. We can turn a full 360 degrees and see almost nothing but trees. We are, after all, in the great temperate jungle that is the Catskills today.
Have you ever flown over the Catskills? You gaze down and you see an almost endless expanse of trees. And much of that forest is miles from any marked trail. This is wilderness; we mean real wilderness. There is what seems to be an endless expanse of forest when you look down from a plane. It is breathtaking. It is worth seeing.
This is something that the Hudson River School artists explored and attempted to paint. They were a varied lot and not all of them valued forests as much as others. When it comes to painting the depths of the forest, our favorite is Asher Brown Durand. He is probably best known for his “Kindred Spirits,” 1849, commemorating the close friendship of Thomas Cole, the painter, and William Cullen Bryant, the writer and poet. But our favorite Durand works are images of the deep woods. Run a search under “Asher Brown Durand” and then hit “images;” you will soon see what we mean. Look for “A Stream in the Woods,” 1865, or “Rocky Cliff,” 1860. Even better is “In the Woods,” 1855. All three show deep forest interiors, locations unblemished by human activities. Durand takes us far into the wilderness and shows it as a raw, broken tangle. This dense temperate jungle was the Catskills before the tanning or timber industries invaded. Take a good look at any of these paintings; Durand was a supreme draftsman; he produced meticulously detailed paintings. Look for yourself and absorb the whole of each image; you may overcome your natural inclination to admire wilderness. These are pretty untamed locations; you could get lost in Durand’s forests and never find your way out. There might be animals in there that could — and would kill you — and eat you! These places are pretty, but they are also scary!
These images lie at the core of what was the Hudson River School of art. These artists saw nature in its wildest, rawest state of existence. Their forests are knotted jumbles of broken trees, intertwined with snarled growths of weeds. You lose all sense of direction in these woods; you cannot tell how far you are from any fragment of civilization. These are dangerous places. And that is key to understanding their beauty. It’s a beauty that they called the “sublime.” It’s a beauty that stands in sharp contrast to the manicured landscapes that were being painted in Europe at that very same time. But the sublime deliberately had an element of cold fear in it.
But we write these columns as geologists, not art historians. What is our angle; what can we contribute? Well, we can ask a simple question: How long has the recent Catskills forest been here? The quick answer is not long. Most of the trees were cut down for use in the tanning industry, or for heat and lumber in the 19th century. But that is not the right answer. The question we should be asking is “how long have the forest ecologies existed here within this, the physical space we know as the Catskills.” The simple answer is since the Ice Age, but that won’t do either. The Ice Age, like the human destruction of the 19th century, was a brief interruption in a seemingly endless sequence of events. Finding the correct answer takes us back through time, the full immensity of geological time.
In an effort to answer those questions we got our Historical Geology textbooks out and searched for illumination. These books present us with a series of what are called paleogeographic maps, showing what our northeastern United States was like during the many chapters of our distant past. We go back to the time that long preceded the Ice Age, a time called the early Paleogene Period, perhaps 60 million years ago, and we see this, the northeast, labeled as one enormous subtropical forest. What an image! Imagine the dense jungles that Asher Brown Durand would have found to paint!
We travel farther back into time. Plate tectonics is at work; our continent is retreating south, across the equator. We follow and arrive at the Jurassic time period, perhaps 150 million years ago, and we find ourselves in a landscape that was fully tropical. It would have been covered with thick jungles of gymnosperms: ancient pines and conifers; few broadleaf, flowering trees had yet evolved. The animals of those forests would have included many dinosaurs and its forest trees would have teemed with primitive birds, but mammals would have been small and probably scarce.
Our grandest image has us traveling another 150 million years into the past, arriving at the Carboniferous time period, at least 300 million years ago. Off to the east, the Appalachian Mountains were rising to elevations only seen in the Himalayas today. Hereabouts, however, this was a time of primitive, yet dense rainforests. Trees called lycopsids and sphenopsids, and weeds called psilophytes would have carpeted extensive coal swamps. You would have found them most exotic, most strange. Insects were not entirely new but they had only recently evolved into the diverse and pesky populations that we know today. Twilight, back then, would have beckoned a chorus of chirping and singing “bugs.” These sounds, at least, would have seemed familiar to modern folk.
Our journey into the past will end at a period of time called the Middle Devonian, about 360 million years ago. Here we see something called the Gilboa Forest, the world’s oldest and most primitive forest ecology, when even the very notion of a tree was new and quite a novelty. And what about the animals of that forest? You would have recognized them as silverfish, centipedes, and millipedes.
Now we have discovered an altogether different view of the sublime. We see the dense broken and matted forests of Asher Brown Durand as having a truly ancient ancestry. He saw them in a natural state, a modern one, but now we can imagine them in another natural state, an ecology that stretches back, continuously, almost 400 million years. That is a concept of the sublime that our landscape artists would found hard to believe. That is a notion of the sublime worth imagining in front of a campfire.
Go out and find the thickest stretch of woods that you can. Stand there and realize that this forest has been there for almost 400 million years.
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