‘At the risk of alienating petrified wood enthusiasts, the author admits to a lack of personal excitement regarding the processes involved in its creation and, generally, in the substance itself. Consider the following interaction:
‘Do you know what this is?’ a parent might ask their child.
‘A rock,’ the reasonable child would answer.
‘No, imbecile-child, look closely and see it was once wood.’
‘How?’
‘Time and weather have replaced the decomposing wood with minerals. This is the fate of many things.’
‘So, it is a rock?’
‘Yes, child. Now you understand.’
Petrified wood does itself no favors in its found form, being mostly indistinguishable from other rocks with less interesting histories. It has little value, practically or monetarily, and it takes an amount of previous knowledge and a healthy dollop of imagination for petrified wood to inspire genuine wonder. The wonder is short lived when one considers that this is just another of the earth’s natural processes, normalcy on an extended timeline. It is a fossil, yes, but these rocks were not once the lizard-titans of our Earth’s shadowed history. They were trees, like those that remain.
Now they are rocks.
The ‘East Continental Petrified Forest’ is rife with rocks, with petrified wood. There is very little wood left un-petrified; there is very little remaining life at all. A place of jutting ruins, like dry, jagged teeth, the ‘East Continental Petrified Forest,’ composed of any other substance, might be called a wasteland. A desert.
The park rangers have posted signs asking that no rock be removed from the ‘East Continental Petrified Forest’ and warning that they patrol the boundaries of the park vigilantly and at all hours. Smaller signs, deep in the park, suggest the rangers have trained dogs to sniff out petrified wood, that visitors smuggling even the smallest amount of petrified wood will be captured and prosecuted.
Later signs admit that, due to funding cuts, the trained dogs have been laid off and ask for donations so that the program might be re-instated. The previously trained dogs have been released into the park, they say. Beware feral dogs, they say.
‘But if you’ve made it this far…’ they say.
It is the author’s theory, perhaps biased, that neither the rangers, nor the dogs exist and that all signage to the contrary has been constructed to further insinuate the imaginary value of petrified wood. There is no reason not to believe your eyes, reader. They have not failed you previous to this. If it looks like a rock and feels like a rock and bludgeons like a rock, it is a rock.’
-excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
