When this world was still in its infancy, and all about
it was still being formed, there was a vast sea on the face of the earth.  Long before the first dinosaurs ever walked, or crawled, or swam, or flew, hundreds of millennia before the North American continent came into its present being, there was Rock.

Rock’s existence began well over a billion years ago.  In that epoch, long obscured by the mists of time, the area we now know as Eastern Ontario and upper New York State was covered by that sea.  For five hundred and fifty million years sediments were deposited on
the sea-bed: between 1.8 and 1.25 billion years ago, inexorably the elements settled on the bottom of that basin.  In those sediments were the earthly “flesh and bones” that gave birth to Rock. That primordial soup of fine clay materials, silica and calcium became one cemented mass, pressed down and compacted by its own sheer weight. Rock, and the millions of his clan, were born.

Rock and his clan had a peaceful existence under the sea, and may have been there still were it not for the birth-pangs shaking the entire globe.  The earth’s fiery centre was still most active, poking molten tongues upwards through the crust of the earth towards the heavens, and swallowing huge swaths of that crust back down into the bowels of the earth. Thus it was that Rock was taken by that fearsome maw, still a billion years before the first dinosaurs.

Deep, deep into the earth he went with many of his clan, millions upon millions swallowed up by the insatiable appetite of the fires burning in the depths.  Finally the long plunge stopped.  Rock was buried 20 some kilometres down.  His clan was dissipated to other fiery graves, their tombstones ranging from 15 to 20 kilometres above them.  And there, in the terrible heat they remained.

The crucible in which Rock found himself reached searing temperatures, at least 700 degrees Celsius.  And the pressure from the weight above him was incredible.  He found himself undergoing a metamorphosis, then another and another, and gradually he was transformed into marble.  But he found comfort in the fact that the other members of his clan were similarly transformed.

Then fate intervened yet again, this time in the form of hot magma from the lower part of the earth’s crust.  That magma carried with it super-heated fluids rich in silica and water, which now bathed Rock and his neighbours in this subterranean rocky womb.  Again Rock found himself changing, this time to a mass of coarse-bladed crystal, as white as the snow that he had never yet seen. But again he rejoiced that his clan too had changed as he had.

And there he rested again for millennia while the earth’s surface moved around him.  Mountain ranges appeared, then disappeared.  The continents drifted together and then parted.  The great age of the dinosaurs came and went, and still Rock slept. But Rock’s destiny was to emerge from the earth, and his long journey at last was realized when the last great Ice Age retreated, taking with it the last of Rock’s blankets.

He gazed upon the heavens, saw the stars, breathed the pure cool air, discovered the miracles of rain and snow, plants and animal life.  Here he could be king, above all that could be seen.  Yet he had no voice, no personage independent of his clan.  It took the two-legged animal that stands upright to give him those gifts. Man took Rock from his resting place and put him up for all to see:  a weathered survivor of two billion years, guardian of his clan, beacon to the world.

Rock welcomes the world to his domain.