You think about things.
Interstate Route 78 headed east to NYC. Usually you’d be zipping along, doing sixty-five.
The giant lighted sign said INCIDENT AHEAD! Stop-go-stop -stop! You try to not feel frustrated. You’re not getting anywhere fast. You’re stuck. Trying to get to the Holland Tunnel.
“The drive west along I-78 across New Jersey is one of the most exceptional highway geology tours of North America” geologycafe.com (I was driving East on 78 but the rocks looked the same on either side.)
Years ago I read about the Geology along Interstate 80 in an essay in The New Yorker , north of my route. I thought of that piece when I saw these rocks.
There are signs warning “Falling Rock”.
John McPhee, author of In Suspect Terrain one of four volumes now combined in Pulitzer Prize winning book Annals of the Former World writes “Human time, regarded in the perspective of geologic time, is much too thin to be observed: the mark invisible at the end of a ruler.”
“The interstate leaves the Newark Basin and enters the Highlands of the Reading Prong. The next fifteen miles includes some of the most complex geology in the region. The road crosses sections of folded and faulted Precambrian rock, early Paleozoic sedimentary rocks, and additional outlier patches of Newark Basin rocks. Near exit 7 the interstate climbs Musconetong Mountain then drops” From the Geologycafe.com
You can’t pull over, stop your car and get out of to take a photo on an interstate but you can roll down your window when you’re stopped. a
nd think about just how old these rocks are.
