Rock, Gravel & Sand - theHumm December 2021

By Susie Osler

Displaced

The rain is pelting down — splashing, seeping, excavating, and running through the soil around my home. Rain-made rivulets, originating atop the hill in the gravel road I live next to, weave small watersheds that wiggle downhill, becoming jagged channels that wind into even bigger canyons carved from the soft sediments of the road’s shoulder. Following the path of least resistance, the flow curves down our laneway — a tumbling migration of water and accumulated debris — bending around the house and spilling into the pond.

I live in the western part of Lanark County. Our house is held within a bowl of rock and sand. To the west through the kitchen window, and beyond the tributaries being formed by the deluge outside, I can see a south-facing slab of bald granite so familiar to me now that its presence is often overlooked.

This rock slope articulates the north side of an old pit — its scraped, hollowed remains are what is left after a history of extraction. The Depression-era make-work project that was the construction of Highway 7 from Peterborough to Perth required an abundance of locally sourced sand and gravel. Many farm families barely subsisting here abandoned their efforts to farm “soils” of sand for the more lucrative enterprise of extracting and selling it, in the service of pavement and progress.

Dismantled

Approximately sixty percent of the Earth’s crust is composed of silica in one form or other. Its durability helps to make a tough, impervious surface when locked within rock such as granite, quartz and gneiss. Here, glaciers excavated and scoured the landscape, leaving large deposits of sand between outcrops of this ancient rock.

Sand’s value lies in the seemingly limitless applications of its use in human exploits. Without silica, the infrastructure for modern life as we know it — the buildings we live and work in, the roads we travel on, the dishes we eat from, the screens we type on and look at (to name but a few of the most obvious examples) — would not exist. Disassembling the Earth, refining, and reassembling its parts in novel ways has been the relentless endeavour of our history of engagement with progress. And yet, as we’ve myopically focused on manufacturing the human systems and structures we now depend on, and the wealth such systems accrue, the Earth’s crust is being dismantled to death — at a truly alarming rate. How is this defensible? We are in an era of peak silica, peak oil, peak water, and perhaps also peak pleasure, yet China (only one example of many) now consumes more sand every three years to make concrete than the US consumed in the entire 20th century.

Try as I might, it seems impossible to imagine how I could extricate myself from this entangled web of dependency. I depend on many materials — clay and silica to start with — for the fabrication of my pots and sculptures. Minerals are mined across the world for paint pigments and glaze ingredients which I use. I drive on roads, still dream of flight paths, use the internet, type on computers, use a “smart” phone, live in a house with windows… and on it goes. What would it take to collectively extract ourselves from extraction? It seems as though doing as little as possible, as often as possible, is at least a partial antidote.

Archaeology

Tomorrow, after the deluge of today ends, the barnyard will predictably present me with an assembly of unearthed relics from the relatively recent past of this place. A pig femur, rubber sole, flakes of machinery, ceramic shards, glass, a tartan sleeve and other flotsam may surface out of an excavation conducted by rain.

What will the geology of this place reveal 100 or 10,000 years hence? I discover new settler-sized middens; almost one a year. The land is peppered with them — lichen-covered stone piles, rusting family dumps, car cemeteries, pet burials. The sediments laid down during my brief existence here are likely to be an even deeper and more disparate jumble of random bits — objects, soils, minerals, bones, building materials, clay — extracted, displaced, refined, assembled and imported from places entirely unrelated to here — tchotchke from travels, chemical compounds, genetic strands, soils, flora and fauna. What will the sediments of our times have to say in another millennium?

Regeneration

I woke up this morning dreaming of a bull elephant shaking the fence surrounding my garden. Eventually, I realized he was after the remnants of his ancestors — a small pile of bones partially unearthed in the garden that I had not previously noticed. He needed to retrieve them, and attend to them properly, with the honour and reverence they deserved.

Truths are being unearthed. Pulled blinking into the light, the unchallenged hymns of our times are eroding like glacier-scoured stone, releasing — layer by layer — its clinging particulate. As these old bonds break, perhaps something truly novel may be conjured from the crucible we are in. Something wiser, life-serving, reconnecting, regenerative, whole and — perhaps — novel. Something wizened in our bones is seeking hydration. It is time to sit with your people in the belly of the pit — our collective excavations — and begin to speak truth together. Awaken the embers under the cauldron, and begin concocting the elixir we need for these times.

Showing the Local Love for the Holidays! - theHumm December 2021

By Kris and Rob Riendeau

Here at theHumm we’re big on local economies. The retail and service businesses in the small towns that we cover play a huge role in the cultural life of those towns. Each store, restaurant, or small enterprise attracts and serves a particular clientele — some inside the community, some from outside. Some businesses host their own special events; others join together with local festivals to make the whole experience more vibrant. Many provide support in cash or in kind to local initiatives. All of them add their own particular flavour to the delicious mix that is small-town Ottawa Valley.......

Rock, Gravel & Sand - theHumm December 2021