The Bank by the Road

Where they cut a road through a hill, they leave a wall of the hill’s insides standing on either side, and if you are stuck in traffic there, or pulled over, you can read it. A road cutting through rock is one of the few places ordinary life brings you face to face with deep time — not the time of grandparents and old buildings, but the other time, the vast and vertiginous kind, laid bare in bands of colour in a bank of stone beside the carriageway while the cars crawl past indifferent.

You can see the layers. That is the astonishing thing, the thing that ought to stop every driver and stops almost none: the rock is striped, band on band, each stripe a different colour and grain — a thick grey layer, then a thin rusty red one, then a pale crumbling seam, then more grey — and each band is time made solid. Each was a surface once, a sea floor or a riverbed or a plain, sediment settling grain by grain over ages we have no feeling for, then buried by the next, and the next, and pressed to stone, and lifted, and finally sliced clean through by a road crew with explosives and diggers so that we could shave four minutes off a journey. Millions of years, stacked up in a bank you could touch, if you dared the traffic, with your hand.

The mind cannot hold it. That is what I keep coming back to. You can say the numbers — this band took a million years to lay down, that boundary marks an extinction, the whole exposed face spans a stretch of the past longer than there have been creatures with backbones — but you cannot feel them, not really. The body has no sense organ for a million years. We are built to feel a day, a season, a life, a few generations back through the memory of the old people we knew. Beyond that the scale simply exceeds us, and the rock face beside the road holds up, patiently, a quantity of time so large that the entire human story would be a smear too thin to see at the very top, in the soil, above the last stone band.

There is a vertigo in it, if you let it in. We go about our lives on the assumption that our own scale is the real one — that a year is a long time, that a century is ancient, that the pyramids are unfathomably old. And then you stand at a road cutting and see that the pyramids are yesterday, that the oldest thing any human hand ever made is nothing against the youngest band in that wall, that the whole of recorded history would not register as a line in the stone. It is humbling in the most literal way, humbling as in of the ground — the ground itself, opened up, showing you a depth of past that puts every human measure in its small place.

And then the traffic moves, and you drive on, and forget it, because you must — you cannot conduct a life while feeling the weight of all those millions of years pressing up through a rock face. But it is good to have seen it. Good to have been reminded, once in a while, stuck in a queue of cars beside a blasted hill, that the solid unremarkable ground we hurry across is deep, unthinkably deep, and layered all the way down with time we will never feel, and that our own thin bright moment is happening at the very top of it, in the soil, above the stone.