Sunrise Over Sanibel Island

I opened my eyes in the dark bedroom and noticed a trace of morning light reflecting off the walls. Quietly I slipped downstairs to the living room where out the window I saw dark grey cirrus clouds streaked across the eastern sky, their undersides tinted a deep raspberry pink. I ran back upstairs to throw on a sweater and grab my camera, and then headed out the back door and down to the boardwalk with high hopes for a colorful sunrise.

A fresh green scent mixed with the salty air as I walked along the trail through the dimly lit stands of sea grape and oat grass toward the ocean. Osprey in flight called to each other from the tops of the tall pines. I stepped beyond the shrubs and onto the soft, silvery sand. The tide was low, exposing a vast expanse of beach fringed along the shoreline with shallow pools of water. A glowing band of coral light across the eastern horizon cast a subtle glow all around.

Waves crested lazily onto the beach and spilled into the shallow pools, creating small ripples that traveled across the water. The rebounding ripples interfered with oncoming waves, exchanging energy with each other and filling the surface with a geometric dance of infinite troughs and crests. Out beyond the pools, sea-going birds alternately plummeted toward the ocean and soared across the sky while fishing for their breakfast.

All at once, the coral pink color of morning began to seep from the horizon onto the clouds above, except for where a distant thunderhead cast two conspicuous streaks of gray shadow. A spectacle of iridescent light began to fill the sky as the long rays of morning sun stretched across the Earth's curved surface.

With the increasing amount of daylight, I began to notice ripples of sand at the bottom of the pools which mimicked the movement of the water that formed them. Some of the sand ripples broke the water's surface creating linear chains of tiny islands floating in a sea of pink and blue. These ripples looked very much like those preserved and hardened in the sandstones I collected as a geology student in college. Layer upon layer of wavering sediments deposited over hundreds of millions of years under the same sun and perhaps on a morning just as beautiful as this.

Further up the beach I saw a banded sea star on thousands of tiny, undulating legs slowly making its way toward the water, its appendages leaving long furrows in the wet sand. A small crowd gathered around to watch the progress, until a knowledgeable man stepped in to say that the star would die if it remained on land too long. He gathered up the creature into his hands, its arms threading through his fingers and trailing down the sides of his palms, and gently carried it to the rippling shallows as the sun peeked over the horizon.

Precious Stones

I take slow, deliberate steps along the shore of Lake Superior with my head cast down, gaze sweeping methodically across the ground. Thousands of small pebbles are scattered in tiers on the sand, some glistening at the edge of the ebbing waves, others pushed further up the beach by past storms. They create a colorful earth toned mosaic punctuated by bright flecks of mustard, terracotta and slate blue.

My eye is most easily drawn to the layered nuggets of maroon and gray, which glow like hot embers in the shallow water. These rocks known as banded iron formations were created in the region two billion years ago when oxygen first became abundant in the atmosphere. This element combined with dissolved iron in the oceans to form iron oxides. The oxygen was produced by photosynthesizing algae, thus preserving the first breath of plant life in stone and laying the future economic foundation of this entire region.

I spy an oval shaped slip of white rock scored with telltale tubular striations contrasting against the grainy brown sand. It is a piece of fossilized coral from the ancient shallow sea that covered this land 400 million years ago. I imagine a watery world blanketed with coral reefs. Sea lilies sway in the current as the perfectly spiraled shell of an ammonite jets by, squid-like tentacles streaming in its wake. Trilobites scuttle across the sea floor over and around clusters of brachiopod shells. A seagull’s call brings me back to the terrestrial present, but thoughts of geologic time and transformation continue to swirl in my mind.

I am determined to collect a rainbow of rocks. Oranges and blues are mostly igneous rhyolite and basalt deposits from a 1,200 mile long rift through the heart of North America that opened up one billion years ago. It extended from modern day Ontario down to Kansas and branched over into Michigan. A large basin formed at the junction of the northern and eastern arms of the rift, which was ultimately filled with water by retreating glaciers to form Lake Superior just 10,000 years ago. I add them to the metamorphic green epidote and yellow chert already in my pocket.

Red, brown, purple and white sandstones represent deposits from ancient rivers and streams that flowed off the volcanic mountain ranges in the region 500 million years ago. The brown sandstone was particularly prized by architects in the late 1800’s as a building material, referred to as Lake Superior Brownstone, and was used to construct many stoic buildings and residences in the towns that ring the lake. These sandstone formations were also carved and smoothed by wind and waves to form the Apostle Islands.

The individual colors of rock all blend to steely gray as twilight approaches. I sit on the beach listening to the hush of the waves lapping onto shore, holding the accumulation of two billion years in the palm of my hand. Sunset casts its glow as the lights of Washburn begin to twinkle in the distance. I dig my toes down into a confetti of geologic time to feel the lingering warmth of the radiant summer sun still in its grains.