Scheherazade – VI — The Sandbox

Dec 10, 2023

Alright, class. Let’s settle down.

To understand the geologic processes that brought the Blue Tarp Attic Mountains into existence, we need to look at the various layers that comprise them and consider the surrounding topology. It is only through careful investigation of both surroundings and structure that we can gain a true understanding of this site’s rich and varied content.

We’ll begin with the vast Boxed Book Desert that surrounds the Blue Tarp Mountains. This great flood plain of variegated reading material was deposited here at the close of the Barry Nathan Gastric Carcinomic Era. A Diluvian wash carried roughly a hundred of these granite heavy boxes from the Midwestern Plains to the Eastern seaboard on a river of father-son glacial liquefaction. The alluvial plain that resulted spread out in even, gently undulating, symmetric box rows in every direction as far as the attic horizon, a view from the top of the attic steps that remains awe-inspiring.

If you chip carefully into the plain exteriors of the boxed rock formations you will find highly compacted sedimentary build-up of both personal and professional reading materials. Miniature libraries on art, science, mathematics, politics, management strategy, human relations, engineering, and religion. Although they remain unmined, high-value quarries of symphonic music and early show tunes are believed to be embedded as well. While the natural mining rights to these lands have now been divided equally among two smaller enterprises, scant site development has occurred at present. The difficulties of extracting and transporting the high-value deposits from the site has largely preserved the area’s original beauty.

The geologic foundation of the Blue Tarp range at the center of this flood plain is our primary interest because of its rich familial narrative value, but to access this core layer, we must first dig down into the Blue Tarp hillsides to work our way through the bulky, more recent outer depositary layer. The loosely compacted outer layer was transported here by tsunami and pyroclastic surges after the eruption of Mt. Gail on Valentine’s Day, 2003, an unexpected blast some 1,500 miles away that left these deposits and destroyed that once lush volcanic island, submerging it below ocean after its 68-year ocean-surface existence.

Fraying jeans, scarred rubber spatulas, microwavable dish sets, magazine clippings, rubber-banded stacks of museum guides, theater programs covered in both jaded and ecstatic handwritten margin critiques, shoeboxes of tangled silver-chained necklaces, Mahler Symphonies frozen in a CD player at the time of the volcanic upheaval, an upholstered garage sale footstool, broken staplers and desk implements, expired saline bottles, crescent-shaped beige plastic boxes with false teeth, hastily folded Exxon road maps and other practical but geologically unremarkable objects – these are now what remains of the collapsed volcanic island. While this superficial geological layer contains some noteworthy features for further academic study – most importantly post-millennium diaries and “Please, Please Get Well, Ms. Westgate” cards from concerned schoolchildren – we are primarily interested in the earlier familial and ancestral history collected beneath this outer layer.

I need your attention, people. I’ll wait.

We can do this on my time, or we can do this on your time.

It’s your choice.

Thank you.

The geologic subsurface at the base of the Blue Tarps can be traced to major events at the close of the Great Montessori Era. Gail Nathan (Latin: Gail Yvonne Westgate) led the school she founded through touch-and-go early years in the late 1960’s into a newly constructed campus in the mid 1980’s serving grades K-8. Its remains can be seen to this day outside Princeton, New Jersey. This new campus came into being on structural plates pressuring their way upward on the strength, vision, and tenacity of the mantle-tough Westgate plate. This tectonic uplift was driven by deeper tomological revelations of love and a deep respect for children. We still do not have delicate enough instrumentation to analyze or source the underlying forces – but their impact is unequivocal.

In isolating critical geologic features at the close of the Great Montessori Era, Geomorphologists place great emphasis on actual diary entries, extant school board minutes, miscellaneous letters and documentation found in the Blue Tarps themselves together with useful, but less reliable contemporaneous supporting histories. Together these various sources establish a reliable and consistent overall geologic narrative. As early board meeting minutes reflect and peer reviewed studies have confirmed, nobody wanted the head of school job for those first 18 years when the school was still located in the substrata of an unglamorous convent basement and the head of school role amounted largely to lifting large igneous emotional burdens and transporting backbreaking mantle from classroom to classroom on weekends.

This pattern shifts in the mid-1980’s, and it is here the geology gets particularly interesting. Coincident with this period of steady growth and seismic professional stability, larger geologic masses began to exhibit stress fractures in the Westgate tectonic bedding. While focused on financing and developing the construction of a new campus for the school, Westgate relinquished her day-to-day administrative post. Soon after, a chunk of the school’s operation broke off from the main plate as well, creating a critical shift in internal management tectonics.

This shift was profound in two key respects. The first is that the stress of bringing the new campus into being took its physical toll on the Westgate torso, a mid-strata composed largely of weak and un-concretized sedimentary rock and brittle shale. Stress fractures erupting from the core flared outward in these marks evidenced here in these hospitalization invoices for intestinal tremors. As a result of the extreme stresses, critical load-bearing rock liquefied under the enormous underground pressures, and the Westgate plate lost mass rapidly and precipitously.

In the health and managerial turbulence that followed, a previously stable, dormant plate was suddenly able to slide freely into the Crone’s and Delegation Ruptures. This new geologically unremarkable, but solid load-bearing granite broke through with unexpected force on an upsurge of magma-pressured ambition. Prior to this event the load-bearing granite was incorrectly believed to be moving in concert with, or even attached to, the larger Westgate Plate. Whether it was ever actually attached or simply broke-free is a matter of speculation, but it powered into the exposed breach along these iron pyrite fault lines seen both here and here [Note: the instructor indicates the Administration Office and a “Head of School Only” parking spot].

In so doing, an underling teacher who could hear no music and an et tu Brute? secretary ground down over the weakened Westgate Plate driving it out of the parking lot and towards the Western United States – but not before leaving evidence of a) managerial crust turmoil b) fascinating metamorphic internal changes we may examine later and c) the subducting undertow of the School Board. The staggering scale of the era’s subduction can best be understood as the predictable geologic response of an environment favoring seismic stability over all other competing forces in a time of massive upheaval and transition.

Geomorphologists tend to remain indifferent to outcomes in mass structural movements, but here there is near universal academic agreement an unprecedented geologic structural opportunity was lost or, in vernacular terms, the “wrong plate won.” It should be noted that certain academics in other disciplines, namely political science, have noted their disagreement with this thesis. While their concerns are largely outside the interest and scope of our own examination, you may wish to consult “Educational Studies in Early Montessori Realpolitik,” Marsha Stencel & Anthea Spencer, 1986 (out of print).

The dramatic migration and redeposit of the entire contents of the Westgate Hopewell household up the Eastern seaboard involved two additional noteworthy forces. The first is the diverging sinistral plate movement attributable to Westgate’s college-age children leaving home. The second is the continental shelf collapse of a planned matrimonial confluence. The best predictive computer modeling of the early 1980’s indicated the creation of a joint ridge pushing up into a mountainous rock formation not unlike an equilateral cathedral arch, but an internal fault gave way unexpectedly and the arch-like formation collapsed catastrophically. The fiancé’s oceanic crust rolled beneath the Westgate plate, driving its glacier-cold feet deep into the earth from where it could no longer be reached by explanation, argument, or telephone. In the structural collapse large chunks of the Westgate plate were torn off and remained exposed and visible through the close of the Gastric Carcinomic Era.

While there is ongoing disagreement about the relative impact of the various seismic discontinuities, there is a growing consensus that any one of these forces on its own might have carried the New Jersey furniture, wedding presents, mirrors, heirlooms, family letters and photos, salvaged Montessori materials, record collection, and the boys’ things up the Atlantic seaboard, and deposited them in the Blue Tarps during this period, leaving the major bulk of what we think of as the range today. This is at least partially attributable to the small storage space of the California bound Toyota Corolla that was swept along on top of the greater Westgate Plate, a vehicle barely retained in the legal washout with the school board.

The impact of these various forces is staggering, the evidence of which is all here beneath the Blue Tarps. When you can get your mind around these forces and grasp the geologic story hidden here, then you can better spot the unseen forces that may be gathering in your personal or familial transition regions.

Imagine, by way of example, forces in your own life so powerful that the only evidence after eighteen years of work and the realization of your crowning professional achievement is a pro forma “thank you” plaque buried strategically at the bottom of a playground sandbox. Nobody has the slightest idea what your name was or who really built the Princeton Montessori School.

There’s not a trace of you.

Please take your #2 pencils out and pass the blue books to your neighbors behind you. Face forward, eyes to the front, please.

1. Compare the geologic developments in your own family with the development of the Blue Tarp Mountains. If favorable geologic conditions have so far enabled your family to avoid the circumstances described in the Blue Tarp formation, then provide a predictive timeline and sequence for how and when everything will eventually blow apart.

2. In what ways might the instructor’s observations about the Sandbox and the Princeton Montessori School change the underlying geology of the Blue Tarps? In what ways might these observations create seismic disturbances in other ranges?

You may begin.