One thing you notice about Maine is that everywhere you look, giant humpbacked masses of granite are breaching the landscape surface, pods and pods of them, and it do make you wonder: what went on here?

A place has to be over-urbanized for me to not wonder what it’s been up to for the last billion years. So I avail myself of the wonderful work of geologists almost everywhere I go. Here on the coastline, where I spent a geologically insignificant few weeks, granite predominates. And that means volcanic shenanigans.

The first site I checked out stated that Maine’s geologic past is unknown prior to 650 million years ago. Well, yeah, who was even here? But the fact is just about nobody knew anything until about sixty years ago. In my very lifetime, it was generally accepted that all the land masses on Earth were basically in the same spots they’d always been, minus the occasional shoreline erosions. I remember learning about geosynclines: a whole theory about how the topography wrinkled up and how mountains were formed that was revealed to be solid bullshit only when I was in high school. Oh, there was a cartographer who proposed what was antiquely known as Continental Drift as far back as 1596, but that notion was resoundingly batted back numerous times over the centuries by more sober scientists. Preposterous, said they.

It’s a lesson in how the things we think are sometimes just that, and only that—the things we think.

Anyway, the reality of seafloor spreading was validated when I was about thirteen. And that freed up geologists to deduce the most marvelous things. Such as that the granite here on the coast of Maine was whomped up volcanically 317 million years ago. Deer Isle Granite “displays a beautiful array of disequilibrium textures, mainly in the form of rapakivi, a textural term referring to the granite’s phenocrysts which are made up of an ovoidal alkali feldspar crystal mantled by a rim of plagioclase feldspar.” Just as I’d imagined.

Actually, that is a flood of information passing over the duck’s back that is my brain.

Undaunted, though, I learned that a lot of this area used to be a microcontinent retroactively called Avalonia; it started out as a volcanic arc like modern Hawaii that glommed onto the big glommy supercontinent Gondwana, and then split off, drifted aimlessly about, and banged into proto-Europe and later proto-North America. And when all that got busted up by the emergence of the Atlantic Ocean, a bunch of Avalonia stayed with our continent and a bunch sided with Europe, so basically part of Maine is here and part of it is in Europe. It’s a remarkable example of earthly foresight that parts of Maine anticipated the current political climate and got the hell out of Dodge early.

All that land-smashing of course was accompanied by volcanism and the crunching-up of mountain ranges. The granite is much in evidence on Crotch Island, so called because it is shaped like a pair of pants, with a fashion-ready thigh gap separating what should have been called North and South Buttes.

The particular granite here is characterized by its color, ranging from gray to pink. Evidently a magma chamber cools and crystallizes and the lower portions tend toward the pink and the upper portions the gray, and what with all the uplifting going on, one of the magma chambers got tilted up on its side, so we see exposed the bottom and the top both. People like exposed pink bottoms, always have. “Pink represents compassion, love, and nurturing,” according to Marketing, although seborrheic dermatitis shouldn’t be ruled out, but in the case of granite, it also represents magma, tectonics, and time, and that is far more valuable.

We can fashion beautiful monuments and countertops but as a species, we are collaborators on a monstrous human asteroid aimed at life on our planet. We probably couldn’t have helped ourselves; and we certainly aren’t bothering to correct course now. My only ladder out of despair is measured in the depth of that time, and the length of a light-year. Strange times to be alive, indeed, here, now, between dust and dust.