Being back in central NY brought to mind something from many years back, one of those memories that I can’t define why I find it so compelling, I just do.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties (that’s in years – I still haven’t gone fully metric), I used to go out for walks late at night. I was in a rural area, where nighttime traffic was very sparse and streetlights almost nonexistent. It was very quiet, quiet enough to hear animals moving in the brush alongside the road, like the time I encountered a skunk that way. They’re very easygoing animals, because nothing messes with them, and he was well aware that I was following him, but as long as I kept myself four meters away, he was cool. I watched him scavenge dead frogs from the road where they’d been squashed by cars before he eventually wandered off the road again.
Until I read an article, many years later, about something called, “brontides.” These are seismic noises that no one has yet determined the origin of, that occur in several different distinct geographic regions. Lewis and Clark apparently heard them in the Rocky Mountains, saying they sounded like distant artillery (though if you’ve ever seen the original, unedited transcripts of their journals, it was probably more like “disttent artyllrees” – spelling was optional back then). But that article also mentioned the “lake guns of central New York,” and abruptly, I knew what I’d been hearing.
Or, that is to say, I didn’t know, any more than anyone else, but I knew now that it was a phenomena that dated back to the Native Americans at least, who provided the earliest accounts. There’s been a lot of speculation over the years – echoed thunder, mild earthquakes, igniting swamp gas, and natural gas deposits, to name a few. I feel comfortable putting the kibosh on most of those. I frequently witnessed heat lighting in the summer, which is simply reflected lightning from distant storms (probably cloud-to-cloud activity), and never once heard a hint of thunder from such shows. It seems silly to think that a single thump of thunder (not even a rumble) could be heard when no storm was present and no flash visible at all. Earthquakes have been reduced in likelihood since no recorded auditory event has ever coincided with seismic measurements, which tend to catch things people have never even heard or felt. And while the northern tip of the lake is known for swampy areas, I was close enough to see a lightshow should any gas have ignited, plus the fact that the sounds always seemed to come from further down the lake, towards open water. Not to mention that the spontaneous ignition of gas is extremely rare, but still shouldn’t be confined to such select areas (especially the Rocky Mountains).
To me, the last option I mentioned seems most likely – subterranean natural gas. No one knows how it could produce such noises, but the area is well-known for deposits, and they’d actually begun tapping them not long before I left. It still remains to be explained how natural gas deposits produce the sound, and why only in a few select areas, but so far, it’s the explanation with the best supporting evidence, at least for the “Seneca Guns” as they’re also called (the effect has been noticed for Seneca Lake as well, the neighbor of Cayuga.)
I just find it interesting that something I’ve heard and wondered about is part of an ongoing mystery. There’s also the realization that, in far too many cases, people assign mysterious, exotic explanations to what are usually mundane events. In this one, the phenomenon is right now more mysterious than I (and many others) had given it credit for.
Last weekend, I flew up to central New York – a vast region often called “upstate” to differentiate it from New York City, which is what most people think of when they hear “New York.” If you’re one of those people, go look at a map, and get over it. I grew up in the Finger Lakes region, and returned there briefly for a kind-of family reunion. That was all well and good, I suppose, and I got to meet a cousin I hadn’t seen or talked to in, seriously, 37 years. But I was more motivated to get out and appreciate the area in late summer, because it’s a gorgeous area with some pleasant geography. Not being a winter person, however, I’m glad not to be there when the snows arrive…
This region of NY appears to feature fossils from the Devonian/Silurian period border, somewhere around 416 million years ago. Ocean life was abundant, but just starting to get complex, and terrestrial plants weren’t really around yet. Here I have a brachiopod, probably a spiriferidine, which shows the impression of the underside of the shell (towards the bottom of the photo), as well as the petrified remains of the shell itself (the lighter portion in the center of the pattern). The lines sloping crosswise to the “ribs” are growth lines of the organism. Don’t get the impression I know all of this offhand – I found out most of this while researching this post…
And I have this thin slab, 4 cm across at its widest point, that shows a collection of shells virtually indistinguishable from a modern day scallop – the only thing missing are the little tabs near the joint. Now, think about this a second: in 416 million years, the outward appearance (and primary function) of this organism has changed barely at all. In that same time, the first animals left the sea for the land, developed into countless species (like the dinosaurs), most of which vanished through extinctions, and we ourselves were probably some rodent or lemur-like thing when the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Australopithecus afarensis, commonly referred to as “Lucy” and potentially our ancestor, comes from about 3.5 million years ago and looked only vaguely like us. But “scallops” barely changed at all. That’s what I call a successful organism. Not to mention tasty wrapped in bacon.
My favorite, from the short exploration, is this one. Splitting it open, I found two fossils overlapping. One of them certainly seems to be a plant, and from this time period, it would have to be aquatic, since land plants weren’t this fully formed. And since they rarely fossilize, I was pleased to see it. It’s draped across something that I haven’t yet identified, but I’m reminded irresistibly of chitin, the hard exoskeleton of something. It’s very thin, and actually has a hollow tunnel directly underneath it from yet another species – it appears it may have even conformed to the shape of the underlying organism. It’s also a distinctly different color from the surrounding rock. And I have both impressions, top and bottom, on the split rock layers. The whole chitiny structure is about the size of a fingernail, so the “leaves” are tiny and delicate indeed.
The truth is, even professionals working high-dollar assignments and presenting stunning images to magazines only keep twenty-five to forty percent of what they shoot, on average, and this is without resorting to the new digital technique of “try it and see what happens.” Controlling every aspect that might go into an image is next to impossible, and even if it weren’t, we probably wouldn’t be very impressed with photos that were meticulously staged. But overall, many, many photos go into the trash, and I’m no exception. My keeper rate runs 40-66%, which sounds great in comparison, but it may simply mean I’m less critical and demanding than others.
There’s this funny thing about humans – we seem to have this problem with counting above, “two.” I mean, of course we can do it, but we prefer not to. So every time we have to make a decision, we try to cut our choices down to two. And to make this easier, we tend to resort to superlatives, and try to push choices to their extremes so we don’t have to qualify our decisions any more than is necessary. By this I mean, good or evil, liberal or conservative, smart or stupid, healthy or toxic, nature photographer or lowly peon…
