Isostasy

            When I was small my mom took me to the local pool and showed me how to float. “People are buoyant,” she demonstrated, “You just have to relax.” She held me while I settled down. Gradually, she set me free and we drifted languidly, side by side through the heavy chlorine vapor. “If you get tired,” Mom said, “Just float.”

            Eight millennia ago, Klamath ancestors hunkered in Mount Mazama’s shadow watching a dispute between Llao, Lord of the Underworld and Skell the Sky God escalate into outright war. Hot stone shot from smoking peaks. Sulfur steam fouled the air. The culminating battle between the raging deities blew Mazama’s top. The explosion vaporized a vertical mile of rock and left a hole so deep it took 300 years to fill with rain and snowmelt. Thus, Skell sealed Llao within his smoldering red domain, underneath the world’s bluest water.

            My wife Asha and I first visited Crater lake on a misguided whim, a tangent on the home stretch of a balmy spring road trip, just to take a quick look. Consulting our map, we calculated the scenic detour would add merely three hours to our leisurely drive. No big deal. But halfway up the winding approach, ominous storm clouds obscured the April sunshine. As we neared the summit, dark mist spilled over sharp ridges and the temperature plunged. We had arrived too early in the season. I slid the car sideways into a plow-carved rift between snowdrifts twenty feet tall and we stumbled out into a rising gale. Cold but resolute, we staggered to the abrupt edge of the alleged caldera and stared out forlornly into nothing. The Jewel of the Cascades was totally invisible; we couldn’t see past our frozen noses. We stood, hoping blindly for a glimpse of something, until vertigo prevailed. Holding onto one another, we cautiously retreated. The wind howled our disappointment. Snow swirled. Retracing our footprints and cursing our poor judgment, we found our vehicle, dug it out, and raced the rising blizzard back down the icy grade. We got home nine hours late, edgy and exhausted.

            Wiser, we returned to Crater lake the following August with my Mom and half a dozen of Asha’s Sri Lankan family. We arrived on a clear morning to a stunning vista. After enjoying tea and fish bread in the jammed parking lot at the Cleetwood Cove trailhead, we started down the dusty mile of steep switchbacks toward the lake’s rocky shore. Recovering from her second knee replacement, Mom took it slow. I hung back with her while Asha and the restless Sri Lankans hurried ahead. By the seventh turn, we caught up. The trail became congested where a small crowd was gathering. Asha had spotted a distant blip floating way off in the distance on the lake’s cerulean surface. As Asha pointed, other hikers found it too. Soon we all saw the tiny dot but Asha’s mother. Squinting against the bright sun, Asha tried to help Amma find the peculiar object.

            “See that peak’s reflection? Look just left, where the surface riffles. It’s a little whitish-black thing.”

            “I don’t see it,” Amma said.

             Asha put an arm around her mother’s shoulders and leaned against her, using a stick to point.

            “Follow that rockslide down to the far shore. Now come toward us halfway and slightly right.”
            “I don’t see it,” Amma said.

            By now the growing throng bristled with lenses. Digital devices captured and magnified the distant anomaly. Technology forced obscurity into submission.

            “It’s a stump,” someone said.

            Actually, it was a whole tree. More than a century ago an old hemlock slid into the lake and has been adrift ever since. Bleached, splintered, and balanced upright, four ragged feet protrude, like a prehistoric periscope. Thirty feet of stout trunk extend down into the transparent water to a gnarled root ball. It’s called the Old Man, and it glides freely about Crater lake, propelled by prevailing winds. Geologist Joseph Diller documented it first in 1896, then photographed it six years later. He towed the Old Man a quarter mile with bailing wire, to confirm it was free-floating.            

            Amma still couldn’t see the Old Man. In Sinhalese the word ni’kung means plain. In a culinary context, ni’kung signifies absence of sauce or seasoning. Fries without ketchup would be ni’kung, or tea, without cream or sugar. Amma wanted to find the Old Man ni’kung —without the sweet boost of modern binoculars, or the rich gravy of electronic enhancement. She insisted upon locating the Old Man with her own unaided eyes. But the more we helped her, the more frustrated Amma became. Finally, she grew so impatient with the search that she pretended to spot the Old Man, just to get the show on the road.

             “Okay, okay, I see it,” Amma claimed.

            “No Amma, don’t give up!” Asha said.

            “I see it, I see it,” Amma insisted. She took Asha’s stick and pointed vaguely toward the middle of the lake. “Right there. Small, blackish-white. Now let’s go.”

             In 1886  Captain Clarence Dutton  led an expedition to  Crater lake for the nascent US Geological Survey. From a half-ton boat hauled up from Ashland, Dutton and his crew took 168 soundings at various points using lead pipe and piano wire, pegging the lake’s maximum depth quite accurately at almost two thousand feet. Dutton’s extraordinarily thorough exploration yielded poetic descriptions of the vicinity and lucid explanations of its fiery formation. His study of Crater lake, however, was only a footnote to Dutton’s illustrious career. Three years later, elaborating on ideas set forth by John Pratt and George Airy in the 1850s, Dutton coined the term isostasy (from the Greek equal standing) to describe the mechanism by which huge blocks of Earth’s crust float predictably in equilibrium upon the deeper, softer mantle. Mountains sit low like icebergs, Dutton hypothesized, their dense roots pushed deep by enormous weight. Perhaps, as Dutton repeatedly crisscrossed the lake, collecting data and taking notes, an encounter with the soggy Old Man inspired him.

            We continued down toward the cove. With her new knees warmed up, Mom took the lead. I matched her brisk pace and we talked. She lives in Florida, and I live in Oregon. With a whole rough continent between us, we don’t often get together. So we spoke of crucial things: about her new boyfriend and Dad’s old girlfriend, about death in the family and sickness close to home, about engagements and reunions, accidental pregnancies and deliberate deceptions; intrigue, love, disappointment, hope. We discussed ancestors and associations, relationships and affairs, and how specific choices fill our sails as we navigate life’s sea. We agreed that Emerson nailed it neatly down in his essay Self-Reliance: “All the sallies of [a person’s] will are rounded in by the law of [that person’s] being, as the inequalities of  the Andes and Himalaya are insignificant in the curve of the sphere.” Nobody can resist their own nature. Nothing can. “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks,” Emerson elaborated, “See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to an average tendency.”

            “It’s all about perspective,” Mom said.

            “It is,” I agreed.

            In 1988 underwater exploration of Crater lake commenced. Deep Rover, a 7000 pound, six-foot orb of five-inch-thick acrylic, fitted sleekly with batteries, thrusters, and more extendable tools than a Leatherman®, arrived via helicopter on the conical pumice heap called Wizard Island. Anticipating perhaps twenty dives, each lasting six hours, the Old Man’s random wandering presented a significant navigational hazard. So researchers temporarily tethered him to the island. As the story goes, the moment they secured the Old Man a sudden storm arose, whipping the lake into a furious frenzy. Unable to work, the team waited impatiently through several nasty days until the strength of the squall broke the Old Man free of his ties and the weather immediately calmed.

            We all arrived at Crater lake’s hypnotic perimeter together, breathless and sweating. The day had grown hot. The view from lake level was utterly disorienting. The reflection of  surrounding crags, bounced upside-down off the water through the thin air, appeared clearer by half than the cliffs themselves. Asha and her father proceeded, with her brother and his kids, further along the shore, looking for native crawdads. While Amma carefully set out tea and leftover fish bread on the slick, uneven rocks, Mom and I waded out into the water-filled volcano. The sharp chill distilled ephemeral thoughts as I slowly submerged. From the silence above the atmosphere, the clamor of civilization is muted, and the arc of Earth looks graceful and even. Seen from a little way off, all existence drips with luscious, ethereal beauty. Closer in, upon cursory inspection, our planet is just a grinding jumble of crust buoyed precariously on an ocean of goop. With slight magnification, a curmudgeonly old tree appears, suspended perpetually in a majestic young lake. Zooming in further still, hearts upon hearts of all types beat simultaneously, and eyes of all kinds gaze back, for this globe is bursting with life. The closer we look, the more magic we encounter.

            Skell’s intention in trapping Llao under such breathtaking loveliness was not to destroy him, but to contain him. All the grand mountain ranges we revere depend on Earth’s inner turmoil for their dynamic survival. Just as the relentless convection of the invisible underworld fabricates and decorates the magnificence we enjoy on Earth’s surface, so our anxieties and our fears, our aspirations and personal turbulence, produce our loftiest ideas and our best creations. We each develop along a unique path, as more connections and greater understanding emerge from uncomfortable churning within us. We can’t force our point of view, but we can share it. We can’t control the world, but we can affect it. We can’t avoid life’s brutality, but when we stop fighting and rest, reality’s underlying splendor returns to focus.

            Mom and I reached deep water. Floating isn’t as easy now. Mom’s metal knees tend to sink, and years of hard work and tough times have left me wiry and lean. But as we relaxed and gave our weight to the lake, some of our old buoyancy returned and we floated, not horizontal, as we once did, but upright, like the Old Man, bobbing with our heads barely up and our eyes to the sky, sopping up the immensity of the looming walls and the overhead enormity of infinite space. From way up there all our crooked paths look straight. Our aimless meandering, over time, observed from afar, appears more purposeful than our solitary experience feels. “Society is a wave.” Emerson wrote, “The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.”