Wouldn’t it be marvellous?
I LIKE to marvel.
I love to be surprised by the sheer magnitude of things.
I haven’t had much opportunity to travel but if I did now and had the cash to do it, I’d like to go to places and see things that fill me with wonder.
“Like what?” you may ask. “An example?” you may indeed, ask.
My first answer would be, like when I saw the stromatolites.
My friend and I were in Western Australia. We’d hired a motorhome and while our main aim was to tour around the South West, we had two items on our tick list that took us a long way north of Perth.
The first was Lesueur National Park.
In a State famous for its wildflowers, this may have seemed a poor first choice.
For one, it was too early in the year to see the breathtaking massing of wildflowers out in the open paddocks across land one could reasonably describe as ‘scorned even by goannas’.
For another, the places where one could see that type of wild and wonderful flowering in Lesueur weren’t easy to reach.
But Lesueur packed us full of wonders. In one section, the drive (or very long walk) in early Spring takes you along the side of a gently sloping ridge.
Look up the ridge or down to the tree lined creek and you marvel (well, at least we marvelled) at the sight of such a diversity of shrubs and groundcovers.
Even more marvellous was how, in this untended wild country, the plants seemed to have been placed by a gifted landscaper. Groundcovers beside the track framed by low growing shrubs behind them and then behind them were shrubs that were slightly taller … and so it went till it reached the tree line.
And so many of them were in flower … so many flowers of varying size, shapes and hues … amazing.
But back to those ugly, salty water critters, the stromatolites.
Not so much critters as very industrious bacteria.
I’d read about them – cyanobacteria that have changed little, if at all, in the last three billion or more years. They can be found in Shark Bay where the brown ‘bodied’, black topped, mostly small, humps formed up in the calm, shallow waters of the Hamelin Pool.
Those humps are made up of the microbial bodies (dead and alive) of cyanobacteria and trapped sediment. The humps you see from the shore are about 2,000 to 3,000 years old and represent what remains of a landscape that once proliferated around the Earth.
When they first evolved, the air was made up of only about one percent oxygen. For the next two billion or so years, through the process of photosynthesis, they huffed and puffed enough oxygen out into the air to make life possible for much more complex beings.
My friend was far more impressed by the dolphins of Monkey Mia.
But me, well I could not get my head around how many microbes puffing out unimaginably small amounts of oxygen would be needed across the millennia to change the world. And it seems the monotony of their task has not daunted them as they are still at it … amazing.
My other example is a bridge built during the Renaissance in Florence.
Known as the Ponte Santa Trinita, the five-arched bridge was built around 1570 from a design by the famed Michelangelo and Bartolomeo Ammannati. It withstood all that time could throw at it, but was blown up by the retreating Germans in World War II.
The loss of such an aesthetically appealing, and useful, bridge was great but what followed was amazing.
After the war, some of the bridge stones were recovered from the riverbed, the remainder were sourced from the quarry where the originals were first hewn and stonemasons shaped them using copies of tools used by the original builders. It re-opened in 1957-58 as an exact replica of the one which was lost.
A marvel of magnitude in relation to pride of workmanship and an even greater marvel that a city government and its community would willingly and wholeheartedly take on such an endeavour.
And those are just a few of the marvels waiting to be seen around the world.
So now, all I have to do is win the Lotto but perhaps that would be the greatest marvel of them all as I so often forget to buy a ticket.
