Tuesday, July 26 2011: Crawled gasping from the sea
Repeated from the book list, but the quote is sufficiently cool to bear repeating.
"Once, aeons ago, the Appalachians were of a scale and majesty to rival the Himalayas....That the Appalachian Mountains present so much more modest an aspect today is because they have had so much time in which to wear away. The Appalachians are immensely old--older than the oceans and continents (at least in their present configurations), far, far older than almost all other landscape features on earth. When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them."
-- Bill Bryson, A Walk In The Woods
"Once, aeons ago, the Appalachians were of a scale and majesty to rival the Himalayas....That the Appalachian Mountains present so much more modest an aspect today is because they have had so much time in which to wear away. The Appalachians are immensely old--older than the oceans and continents (at least in their present configurations), far, far older than almost all other landscape features on earth. When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them."
-- Bill Bryson, A Walk In The Woods
