11 Resistant Rocks Stand High in Relief

I grew up in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, with un-dulating hills and a climate well suited for small tobacco farms. Tobacco was the first cash crop from the Americas, starting from Jamestown, and its profits motivated the first use of slaves, some of which are buried on land I own in back of my childhood home. Winston-Salem, the nearest city, gave its name to two brands of cigarettes originally produced there by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. When I was in sixth grade, our class toured the cigarette factory, the best employer anywhere close. Getting a job at RJR set you up for life, or at least we thought so then. RJR even had its own in-house doctors, dentists, and pharmacists, something my cousin, RJR’s comptroller, said helped keep out the unions. It certainly produced employee loyalty.

If RJR at that time represented enlightened capitalism, the tobacco fields represented a more primitive approach, often with child labor. When I started as a nine-year-old picking tobacco, little was mechanized. Occasionally, sleds were still dragged through the fields with horses instead of tractors. Much of the work-force came from us neighborhood kids—the opening of school was even delayed if the crop was late ripening. But using eight summers’ earnings, I bought my first car, a wrecked and rebuilt Ford Pinto.

Some of the tobacco I picked may have ended up in the Marlboros that my mother smoked for fifty years and that shortened her life by at least ten years, ending after her third bout with cancer. My father avoided both smoking and becoming a tobacco farmer. He grew up on a tobacco farm and was glad to leave a crop standing to go off to World War II. His father and oldest brother remained behind, continuing to produce tobacco for the cigarettes that American GIs became famous for handing out.

After tobacco, textile mills offered a distant second option for employment, particularly Hanes Mills, also based in Winston-Salem. My neighbor, Minnie Ruth, worked at Hanes and arranged for my mom to shop at the company store where they sold seconds, the pieces that didn’t turn out quite right and failed inspection. For decades, my underwear were always from Hanes, stamped Seconds.

When the ancestor of Hanes opened the mill in 1901, the cross-ing of north-south and east-west train lines determined the factory’s placement. But the presence of textile mills on the U.S. east coast goes back much further to a geologic feature, the Fall Line. The coastal areas of the Atlantic seaboard are underlain by unconsolidated sediments—sand and muds. But the Piedmont area is underlain by igneous and metamorphic rocks formed millions of years ago by plate-tectonic forces. As streams flow from the Appalachian Mountains to the coast, they drop off at the Fall Line from the hard rock of the Piedmont onto the soft sediment of the coastal plain. The early mills grew up along these rapids and waterfalls that powered their early looms.

Metamorphic rocks are formed by extreme pressure and heat, but not enough heat to melt them. Such pressures are common where rocks are caught between colliding plates, accounting for the metamorphic core of many mountain ranges. Between and preceding the colliding plates, beaches form along the shorelines. Waves rework the sediments, sorting out and removing the fine clay particles, leaving only the toughest minerals to form the sand. Often this is pure quartz, the mineral from which glass is made, a mineral harder than steel. The feldspars and micas weather to clays and wash away. When the sandy quartz beach is caught between the plates, all the space between the grains is squeezed out, and all the quartz is fused together into quartzite, a rock so tough that when a friend of mine accidentally ran his BMW over a chunk, the quartzite sliced through his steel-belted radials.

I grew up exploring Hanging Rock State Park in the Saura-town Mountains, named for a local tribe that smallpox eliminated. Quartzite tops that isolated mountain range in my home county. Those rocky heights were where I first climbed a peak, swam in a mountain reservoir, and hiked in the moonlight while high. The park’s bathhouse, reservoir, and trails were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, young men away from home, finding a job through one of FDR’s programs, sending money home to their families, as my dad had a bit later from World War II.

Nowadays, the government successors to the CCC, like Ameri-corps, are constantly under threat of the budget axe. Most textiles are manufactured overseas. RJR was bought out and taken private, moved to Atlanta, and generally gutted. The small tobacco farms I once worked on went out of business years ago. Like a pebble rolling downstream, I and many of my peers left the region for new terranes. And my parents, like the Sauras before them, are dead.

But the quartzite peaks continue to stand high, resisting the erosion that has worn down less tough terrains. And a few small tobacco patches still unexpectedly pop into sight as I drive the roads of my youth, resisting the change that has carried away most of the blanket of broad green leaves that once colored the late summer fields.

Notes on Mountain Building Processes:

The oldest mountains in the U.S. are the Appalachians. They should have worn down long ago except for the process of isostatic rebound. It works kind of like lopping the top off a piece of floating wood—if you cut off the piece above waterlevel, it rises up to float higher.

Erosion cuts the top off mountains. Other processes raise them up:

Isostatic rebound, as discussed above is the rising up of mountains (and continents) due to them being made of less dense rock than in the mantle below. As erosion cuts off the top, they rise, the most resistant rocks sticking up the highest. Example: Appalachian Mountains.

Volcanism creates new mountains through volcanic eruptions at subduction zones and mantle hot spots. Example: Andes Mountains.

Continent-continent collisions form mountains by thickening the continental crust at the point of collision. Example: Hi-malayas.

Block-fault mountains from due to rotation of large blocks of rock, forming ridges along the edges uplifted and valleys along the ridges downdropped. Example: the Grand Tetons.

The mountains are then sculpted by erosion, particularly by Alpine glaciers. Example: the Matterhorn in the Alps.