Sunday, May 04, 2003
Gone but not forgotten
Somewhere around 15 percent of my life was spent as a resident of New Hampshire. I was a student at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1972. Sad to say, that makes me one of the last of the real Dartmouth Men; women were officially accepted as (non-exchange) students in Hanover in the fall of 1972. Nearly a quarter-century later, after sojourning through Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and back to Pennsylvania, I returned to the Granite State to take a position at a Medicare contractor similar to the one at which I currently work here in Washington state. During my four-plus years working in New Hampshire, I lived in the wonderfully historic Seacoast Region of the state, even farther from the rugged White Mountains than is Hanover (located on the Connecticut River, across from Norwich, Vermont).
Though I never lived all that close to Franconia Notch, I had seen the Old Man of the Mountain any number of times. In New Hampshire, you really couldn’t get away from the Old Man. He was right there on the state emblem, right there on the standard automobile license plate, and right there as the reverse of the New Hampshire quarter (wags called it the only two-headed United States coin):
So I felt a great deal of sadness when I heard that the Old Man is no longer with us. The best engineering efforts of human beings, in particular the late Niels Nielsen and his family, during the last century or so were not able to counteract the forces of nature’s freeze-thaw cycles. All that’s left of their attempts to shore up the five rock strata that constituted the Old Man are the failed turnbuckles and cables.
The Old Man lived for some 10,000 years, a very short piece of geologic time ... even though it exceeds the entire span of recorded human history. He reminds us of the inexorability of geologic time. Though the geologic cycles of uplift and erosion, of tectonic movement and sea-floor spreading, are all but undetectable to humans (with our infinitesimal century-long lifespan), those cycles are always with us. Cannon Mountain, once thousands of feet taller than its present 4100 feet, will eventually wear away to nothing. That a certain tiny portion of the cliffs of that mountain was perceived to resemble the profile of a man is more a statement about human pattern-seeking than anything else. We humans ascribed such symbolic meaning to those rock layers that some of us devoted themselves to what turned out to be a fruitless effort to preserve the appearance of those juxtaposed layers.
It will certainly be interesting to observe the human fallout of the collapse of the Old Man of the Mountain. New Hampshire governor Craig Benson has already stated that he will have the state try to “revitalize” the Old Man, whatever that means. In fact, he has already named Steve Merrill, who preceded Benson and Jeanne Shaheen as governor, to head the project.
Will New Hampshire change its state emblem? My guess is that they won’t, that the symbolism is more powerful than the mere fact of the Old Man’s existence ever was. After all, the reverse of Connecticut’s state quarter displayed the Charter Oak, which is the state’s official tree even though it toppled over in a storm way back in 1856.
At least New Hampshire was saved the embarrassment of having the Old Man collapse during the year in which its state quarter was minted.
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Posted by N in Seattle on 05/04 at 12:19 PM
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