Trekking through time

Like old-fashioned carnival bumper-cars, or like lovers swept up in passion only to bitterly break apart, the pieces of our world have come together, separated and come together again.

I know well the Appalachian Mountains that span my country's eastern edge and continue into Canada. A continental collision eons ago thrust them up. But not until recently did I stop to think about the tectonic partner, the spurned spouse in this titanic clash.

It is, of course, Europe. And so, it makes geological sense that a range of mountains spans western Europe, north to south, from Scotland all the way through Spain and even into Morocco, Africa. They are the trans-Atlantic reflection of the American Appalachians -- the eastern consequence of the crash.

Now I read that some enthusiastic folk are planning to expand one of our country's great ideas, the Appalachian Trail, across the Atlantic and down the spine of those European mountains.

Very neat.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2010/06/07/general-international-appalachian-trail_7665369.html?boxes=Homepagebusinessnews

Pyrenees Puzzle

45 million years ago, in the Tertiary period, a certain island crashed into the western edge of Europe. Today, we call it Iberia, or Portugal and Spain. The impact shoved up a mountain range at the collision point, which we call the Pyrenees.

Not well-versed in the science of plate tectonics, the ancients had other ideas about the creation of those mighty mountains. The hero Heracles/Hercules, it seems, wandered that way during the performance of his 12 labors. Here we run into an ancient he-said, She said. Some versions of the story have him raping a Girl named Pyrene, others that She attacked him, and they all involve some brutish cowherd named Geryon. All of the stories, sadly, end with Her death. In his grief, Hercules piled up great heaps of rocks at Her burial site, forming the mountains which are named for Her.

I spent a lot of time online last night (hey, some guys watch football for hours, so sue me) trying to figure out what ancient writer actually told this story, especially since the modern re-tellings conflict so greatly. I have an obsession with going to the source of things.

I scoured my notes on Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, etc., to no avail.

It appears that a first-century Roman named Silias Italicus preserves the earliest extant retelling of the myth, in an obscure book called Punica.

Tangent-ially (is that a word?) check out this link for a scholar who connects the whole scenario to Celts and ancient ritual: https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0812&L=CELTIC-L&E=quoted-printable&P=379088&B=--_618a290a-522f-4d8b-98a9-860ced371477_&T=text%2Fhtml;%20charset=Windows-1252