Reading Our Region
Essays from a Regional Writer
Susan Charkes enjoys hearing and telling stories, especially those involving the environment, farming, and sustainability in our region. Discover her poetic view of the outdoors and be inspired to visit the places she describes. Learn more about Susan, her writing, and even hear her podcasts at www.susancharkes.com.
Sample these selected writings:
| Featured Items: |
Frozen Time: High Falls at Ringing Rocks Park
by Susan Charkes
From there to here, then to now, birth to death, we keep going, on and on. We experience a kinetic time: Time that we perceive as propulsion, moving ever forward, carrying us with it. Eventually we wind down and stop. But by then it's too late. The world – time – goes on without us.
Living beings have failed miserably to wrest time out of its relentless flow, freeze it, and examine it from all angles. Oddly, that is the province of liquid things, of streams and rivers, lava flows and mudslides.
There is a place nearby where, in deepest, coldest, bluest winter, you can encounter stopped time. Go to Ringing Rocks County Park, in Bridgeton Township. Skirt the justly famed boulder field – leave it for another season. Continue on the wide, rocky woods trail. After a few hundred yards, the dense deciduous woods dissolve into spacious light, feathered by tall hemlocks. The trail gives out to an immense swath of dark boulders.
Below the moat of boulders is a flat-bottomed gorge. Tilting toward you, it's rimmed with jumbled rocks on the low side and sloping bluffs on the far side. Along, between, and over the rocks, water runs. Falls Creek has cut this ravine into the steeply rounded hillside the way a baker might have slashed a plump, rising loaf of raisin bread.
The origin of the creek's name becomes evident as you look upstream, where the ravine seems to have been dislocated upwards. Along a cliff-face, 30 feet high, appears to be a portico with immense translucent columns, crystalline shutters and glistening alabaster swag. This three-story mansion is High Falls, the highest waterfall in Bucks County. Frozen now, only a thin trickle of water flows underneath the icy gingerbreading.
Clamber over the boulders to stand at the base of the waterfall. In spring, the noise of the falling water would be deafening. Now, a damp chill takes its place. The cold seems to suck warmth out of the air the way the cacophony of falling water vacuums up silence.
Behind the ice, along the cliff face itself, layers of reddishbrown rock are stacked like ryekrisps. At the falls' base, ice forms thin top sheets in shallows, etched in intricate patterns. At the margin of the tilting ravine shelf and the low creek bank, massive frosted boulders lie in piles like abandoned cookies of a giant toddler.
You can, if you're restless, walk across the ravine above the falls, and look down the immense gash, then continue on to the other side. A trail also leads along the ravine on the near side. The ravine bottom itself is flat and easily traversed even by dogs and children.
Or just stand still. Be with time stilled in the rocks. Be with time stilled in the ice.
Frozen in the flat red rocks – Brunswick shale – are the courses of rivers that flowed 150-250 million years ago. Sediments eroded from the highlands washed into the waterways, swirled and settled. Layer upon layer, bed upon bed, the sediments built up, were buried, and lithified.
Frozen in the dark boulders – igneous diabase – is the intrusion into the orderly layered sedimentary world of molten volcanic magma. It erupted through crevices and flowed over the shale layers. As it did so, the magma baked the shale, and, like the top of a loaf of bread, cracked it. The sheet of molten lava cooled and hardened into diabase. Over eons, it fragmented into blocks, and then into boulders. Meanwhile the creek was cutting down through the hillside: scouring the layers of soft shale, one by one. The baked shale offered more resistance, thus becoming the bed for still flowing water: as it is now and was then.
Frozen in the ice is falling water, interrupted in its inexorable adaptation to circumstance. Flowing or stopping, rushing or pooling, water does not so much seek its own level as accept the level that it is given. Frozen, it reveals the conditions it last experienced, limning temperature, height, velocity with visible form; stopping the temporary and making it – for the time being – permanent.
Are you still standing at the frozen falls? Tarry not, lest you too be stilled. For humans, time goes on.
Route 32 to Bridgeton Hill Road, right on Ringing Rocks Road, parking lot 0.2 miles on right.
© Susan Charkes 2007