Let me illustrate. Late morning on a mild fall day; the year is 2007, which means the airwaves bulge with hos and booty, George Bush and Paris Hilton, get-rich-quick and hours-long erections. The icecaps are melting. Governments everywhere seem mean and dim. Yet there stands Calder—greying hipster hair, blue mackinaw, green army pants, distressed hiking shoes—on a beach that is canted on an angle of a couple of degrees into the waters of Chignecto Bay, putting everything in its proper perspective. When Calder looks at a section of cliff, he doesn’t just see rocks. He considers the looping bands of land—the messy stuff that looks to an untutored eye like a dragon’s spine, interspersed with featureless layers that even I recognize as sandstone—and sees entire continents shifting, grinding together and colliding. He glimpses chains of mountains erupting skyward and then covering unimaginable chunks of the earth. He sees the world pulling apart and superoceans rushing in. When Calder looks at a rock on the beach with a couple of squiggles on it—or at least that’s how it looks to me—it triggers in his temporal lobe images of plants shaped like feather dusters stretching high into the prehistoric sky.
