I Remember Rodinia

It is true, that ancient supercontinent haunts me to this day, almost a billion years after I walked its strange, eroded landscapes. Glaciers came and went, so many times, leaving dune and boulder, rushing river and haunting mesa. Such Ice ages it had, engulfing the planet in a manner so severe as to make the last half million years look like a Los Angeles snowfall.

A big place. No trees. No grass. Only sky, and alkali earth. Only crashing waves against algae-encrusted rocks. No oxygen in the air, but warm winds of Nitrogen and water vapor, dust and salt spray. I could not light a cigarette on the beach. No dinosaurs. No people. Only a few, fresh impact craters, hosting impossibly green lakes.

At night, the strange young moon looked down on me, larger and closer than I see it today. So vivid, its mountains easily counted through the clear terrestrial sky. Mars looked the same from here, but far away on its surface, its ancient Northern and Southern oceans boiled and stormed. Rain fell, and huge volcanic plumes dusted the waters with ash. A peaceful Venus was just then erupting into a sea of lava, from deep below, well-worn rock and dry basin from evaporated ocean, features oozing into nothingness. A Saturn with no rings, Jupiter, larger even than today, with 7 magnificent haloes. No planet pluto, not where it is, at least. The star-bright sky studded with giant blue stars, as the galaxy enveloped a smaller partner, the nearest star so close a person could almost touch it, a yellow supergiant, with planets of its own. I like to think that the particulate cloud those planets passed through included some life-bearing meteorites, some archaea, an archaeocyathid, but I have never found it again, that place. The closest I have ever been is Pluto, which was theirs, not ours.

Instead, I see dry river valleys. I see strange, blue stromatolites. I see the Earth with a ring from a deadly encounter with a strange asteroid, long ago. I see iron settling to the bottom of the ocean, deep black and red. I see an Earth I lost one billion years ago. I dream.