The Sarah Kendzior Newsletter
July 3, 2024
The week before my country stopped having a government and started having a king, I went searching for the Great Unconformity. I drove cliffside five thousand feet high, gazing down at crushed cars that didn’t make it.
The Great Unconformity is evident only in its absence. It does not tell the whole story but highlights missing chapters — if you already know enough to know that they are missing. It is lost time in its most literal sense, deleted history bracketed in rock.
I was looking for the Great Unconformity because I wanted assurance I could find it — that I was still sharp, still nobody’s fool. I’m going to need those skills, because our present is dying a little more every day.
We are heading into a future without a past.
That is nothing new for autocracies. Pol Pot proclaimed history irrelevant and started his rule at Year Zero. Stalin pioneered the deletion of dissidents a half century before photoshop. The US, the British, and Israel peddled tales of “lands with no people” while murdering the indigenous people inhabiting them.
Every founding national myth contains a lie. The cruelest lies are those that succeed through erasure.
As the US lurches to autocracy, I turn to geology, because it is an honest broker. It retains every painstaking detail: rocks that grow an inch each millennium, fossils encased in stone. Every rock is a coffin, every coffin is a book.
Geology is an ally at the end of the world. It assures you there was a world, there is a world, and you are part of it.
Except, of course, for The Great Unconformity.
The Great Unconformity is a mystery: a gap of missing time in the geological record between 100 million and 1 billion years long. Traces of it are found in rock formations around the world. There are competing theories as to how The Great Unconformity happened — erosions, explosions. The evidence of absence looks different depending on where you go.
My husband and I began our search for The Great Unconformity by accidentally entering the Colorado National Monument. This would seem impossible, seeing as the Colorado National Monument is 20,000 acres of canyons with sheer cliff walls, but we managed to arrive with oblivious aplomb.
The culprit was a battered guidebook of “America’s Most Scenic Drives” that has sat in the backseat over our twenty years of marriage. I flipped through it on a whim while my husband drove, checking out the Colorado section.
“It says here,” I read, “that if we go to Grand Junction, drive six miles past a cattle guard onto a dirt path, turn onto something called Divide Road, and find the creek that flows two ways, that we’ll have a perfect view of The Great Unconformity!”
My husband agreed that this was a great idea. A mountaintop is a bad place for whims.
We made it to Grand Junction, failed to find a cattle guard, lost GPS, and wound up on the entry road to the Colorado National Monument. We paid the entrance fee, figuring our dirt path maybe got turned into a national monument sometime after the guidebook was published. We were Missourians in Colorado, high on altitude and delusion.
“Do you know where the Great Unconformity is?” we asked a cashier at the gift shop.
“The what?”
“The Great Unconformity!” we cried.
“What does it look like?”
“Nothing!” we said. The Seinfeld of geology.
“Then why are you looking for it?”
“Because we want to see things that aren’t there!”
To the relief of the clerk, a park ranger appeared, confirmed that there was indeed something called The Great Unconformity in the park, but that it was “like, everywhere — there, only not there. You’ll know it when you don’t see it. It’s hard to explain.”
At the Colorado National Monument, The Great Unconformity appears — or doesn’t — as a gap between the brick-red Chinle Formation of 210 million years ago, and the dark gray igneous rocks from the Precambrian era of 1.7 billion years ago.
What happened in between? Who knows. Two layers of time sit on top of each other, like everything’s cool, like there’s not an invisible billion-year mystery gap. All is red or brown or grey and laden in shadow. We were supposed to notice when something looked off and use our knowledge of what looks normal to render that judgment.
“I think I see it,” my husband said at every bend.
“Where?”
“It’s that thing.”
“What thing?”
“You know, the grey, the red — that thing!”
“Oh yeah, that’s it! Or under it. Or above?”
“Or that’s not it at all,” he said sadly.
“Why are you so obsessed with finding nothing when there’s so many things to look at?!” our son demanded from the backseat. He was alone; our daughter was at camp. He was stuck on a road trip with Vladimir and Estragon for parents.
“Finding nothing is important,” I said, “because it’s not there, and we don’t know why! So we need to see it, and then we’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“Why there’s nothing instead of something. Or how. How nothing replaced something.”
“Who cares?”
“I’ll care when our time is labeled nothing, too,” I said, but only in my mind.
Out loud, I told him to get good pictures of the cliffs to show his sister.
Maybe he’d find The Great Unconformity, and capture it, and I’d rest, knowing it could be done.