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Vacations
center around places and activities that are recreational, refreshing and at
once thought-relaxing and thought-provoking. Places of natural beauty rate highly,
such as national parks, mountain ranges, deserts and seasides. In this issue,
we focus on a special class of places where the soft and hard boundaries of
flesh and rock have been merged or blurred by the hands and minds of humans.
Such places tend to stir us in ways that are, at least in part, at the edge
of our explanation and understanding.
In our first feature, Staff Writer Naomi Lubick takes us to a unique type of
“flesh and rock” vacation destination in her piece, “Petra: An
Eroding Ancient City.” For this pre-Christian trade-route metropolis in
southwestern Jordan, the habitants carved shrines, public places and water-management
structures out of sandstone cliffs flanking a fertile valley. This dramatic
living situation worked fine as long as the control of nature was sustained;
but once neglected, the life-sustaining water, under the influence of sandstone
relief, has set about to undo all that flesh had done. Fortunately, scientists
are working to preserve the cultural site. Similarly, in a sidebar to this story,
Staff Writer Megan Sever tells the story of the tragic destruction by the Taliban
of two enormous Buddha statues in excavated caves in Afghanistan and the current
preservation and possible reconstruction efforts.
In the United States, “Memorials in Stone” visits the shrines of Stone
Mountain in Georgia, and Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, in South Dakota. Rooted
as each is in its separate niche of American experience, they conjure similar
emotions from “flesh and rock.” Contributing Writer Sara Pratt, in
“Memorial to the Old South,” makes at least this Yankee intent on
a southern vacation swing. Megan Sever then whisks us northwest to the Black
Hills of South Dakota for engaging visits with Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse.
No matter what you learn from these stories or see on a visit to these extraordinary
places, the deepest and most lasting impact will be the indescribable feelings
they arouse.
Nowhere are those feelings more apparent in the state of New Hampshire, where
residents have been mourning the fall of the naturally formed Old Man of the
Mountain since May 2003. We commemorate that event in this issue, with a story
by David Wunsch, New Hampshire state geologist, and Brian Fowler, long-time
protector of the Old Man. In “Revisiting the Fall of the Old Man of the
Mountain,” they discuss protecting the strikingly human profile of the
Old Man. Until last year, it had hung out precariously over a glaciated valley
bewitching New Englanders who attempted for more than a century to secure him
with pins, cables and turnbuckles — all to no avail. I celebrated the one-year
anniversary of the sad loss last week by climbing to his perch — remembering
the profile that once watched over New Hampshire.
Thanks to our authors and best wishes to you for your holiday explorations.
Believe your compass and your gas gauge,
Samuel S. Adams
Geotimes Editor-in-Chief
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