How the Dinosaurs Died Out

Thursday, after watching Paris, Texas in my cinema class (which was very good), I went to the Parte Vieja to get some drinks with my intercambio and his friend, also from around here, who also speaks very good English, and supposedly German, although there is no way for me to verify such a thing. I thought that maybe I would just have a few and go home around 11, but it was made clear that this was not going to happen when we pooled our money together for drinking (every person gives 10€ to a designated payer, so it is only necessary for one person to fight their way to the front of each bar, rather than 4), after having also met up with my intercambios coworker, from Italy. There was quite a fluid and comfortable mix of Castellano and English throughout the night so that I didn´t feel cramped with only Spanish, but also didn´t feel lame for speaking too much English, and only a few times I was somewhat left out with the Euskera, which is still useful to get used to hearing. At one point we stopped for some coffee, then liquor, and played a traditional Basque card game called Mus, which was complicated to learn, but after a few rounds, I more or less got the idea of it, although sometimes I was betting far too much for shitty cards. (the bets were for centavos used to count points to the win, not Euros to actually leave with). Once I had figured out that I was gonna get home kinda late (actually only 2, which is relatively early), I set 3 alarms on my phone because I had to get up Friday for an excursion that had been planned by the program I am here with. Although with many doubts beforehand, I made it to the point of departure far earlier than necessary, which was ok by me.

The first site we visited was that of a historical baserria, or etxea, or caserio, or farm house. This was a traditional Basque farm house that was originally built in, I believe, the 16th century, then added on to a century later, and has passed down many generations, but is now used as a museum to demonstrate the some aspects of, and the importance of, the Basque farmhouse. This was way cool. Basque farm houses are right up there in importance with cider, with cider having once been something that almost all the farm houses (at least in Gipuzkoa), made for their own use. This is not only because apples were so abundant, but also because the water was not good to drink by itself, so by mixing cider with it, it was made safer to drink. This is why in the middle of the house there was a giant beam press which was used to smash literally tons of apples into juice at once. It is basically a giant lever press, that is in the second floor of the house, with a crank in the first floor attached to a stone that weighs something on the order of 100 tons (or something ridick, it had to weigh more than the pressure of the press on the apples in order to keep the crank from lifting off the ground when pressing the apples). The houses tended to be on hills and mountains, so there is also a door that goes from the second floor directly out to the ground in back of the house, which greatly facilitates bringing in tons of apples to that floor. It should be obvious that not all houses are the same, but they have some general characteristics in common, one of the most distinct of which being the fact that animals were kept in the house, rather than a separate barn, during the winter. This was for many reasons, including heat, the ease of keeping track of the health of the animals, and the ease of collecting their feces to be used as fertilizer once spring rolls around. Also important is the house´s role as a sanctuary, or holy place, making it better for the animals to be under the eaves of the roof. On the other side of the first floor is almost always the kitchen. This is once again for practical purposes, such as heating, with the heat from the kitchen and the animals rising to warm the second floor. Also, with the kitchen being the place that folks would spend most of the time when not out in the fields, its the easiest place to keep track of the animals (through special windows that when opened, allow one to view the stable from the kitchen). With this there is also a religious element, because fire is one of the most sacred things in Basque culture. Because the kitchen is the place that the fire is located, it is one of the most holy parts of the house. In many houses there is a second floor for bedding arrangments, and a third for storage, but in our particular house, the first and second floor were condensed into one, with the bedrooms being assumably warmed sideways-like. However, one important part of the Basque kitchen layout remained, and that was the lack of chimney. This initally seems like a terrible idea, but its actually pretty genius. Instead of a chimney, they have maybe four relatively small holes that let the smoke into an adjacent room, where are stored cheeses, meats, and fish to be smoked and cured by the smoke. At the same time, this is not enough to let all the smoke out, so the room is in fact quite black from soot, but this is on purpose in order to protect from wood worm and termites. Another random amazing thing is that, in the basin part of the beam press, where the apples are smothered into juice, there is a hole to drain the juice, but in that hole is a plant that not only serves to filter out the solids and dirt from the cider, but actually has natural antiseptic quailities that serve to help keep the cider safer.

Also important is that Basque houses don´t belong to the people, but the people to the house. This has strong implications for the way the house is passed down, which is, more or less, to the first born (sex only sometimes important). Once this has taken place, the old owners (the parents) are guaranteed the privelege to continue on in the house, with the inheritor, their spouse, and their children. Other siblings are only allowed to stay on if they are not married, as a baserria is only capable of supporting about 15-20 people. The dead (especially infants) were often buried under the eaves of the house in the yard, or nearby in the yard, and then later this was moved to under the church, and later the yard of the church, because all these places were specially connected and holy.

The next chapter of the excursion was in a place called Arantzazu, where the most famous thing is an amazing cathedral, which was designed by E. Chillida, and is probably one of the few "modern art" cathedrals in the world, or at least the first one I have seen. I can´t really explain it to you at all, but it was really amazing. You can google image it and at least see some of it. In all these amazing cathedrals sometimes I miss being religious, because it seems like it would be a nice thing to do to be able to pray at such a massive and awesome and uniquely beautiful church, but alas, as soon as the thought becomes concrete in my mind in any sense I am forced to remember what prayer actually is, or has been for me, which, unlike the communication with the massive awesome unknown of the universe that I want it to be, has always felt much more like talking to myself. Sure talking to a part of myself that some might say is really the "god" in me, but I have realized that whenever I used to pray, it was just another form of the way in which I sometimes live in my head and not in the world, and it was kind of like a schizophrenic internal reflection with myself about whatever the outside stimulus was, not any sort of communion with the supposed creator of such wonders. I´ve also figured out that when you incorporate these various elements of the fractured reflection into an at least slightly more unified thought process, its a little clearer, and much more self-empowering. Enough of that though, thats just where I am with my journey through complicated manifestations of atheism.


Dinosaur Part
The next chapter of the journey was to see the Flysch of Zumaia, which was something I actually hadn´t known we were going to. The only part of the exursion I knew about was the baserria, and the lunch. The cathedral, and all of Zumaia were news to me. Zumaia was a very pleasant surprise. It turns out this place, on the coast about half an hour from Donosti, is one of the most important geological sites in the world, and especially now. It was really important because of its contribution to the prevailing theory of how dinosaurs, and 90% of the rest of species on earth, died out about 65.5 milion years ago. The rocky cliffs of Zumaia, and really a large portion of the coast from near Donosti to maybe 5 kilometers west of Zumaia, are made of sedimentary rock that was formed when what we know as Euskal Herria was the seabed of the body of water that separated the Iberian plate from the rest of Europe. Eventually the Iberian plate smashed into Europe and formed the Pyrenees, which trickle down and turn into the rocky coasts of Zumaia, where 50 million (100-50 million years ago) years of sedimentary rock have now been pushed up sideways, and create an open book for geologists to study. The important part in all of this is that in the layer of rock that is dated to around 65.5 million years ago, there is an anomalous layer almost totally composed of Iridium. This is curious because there are not natural sources on earth for Iridium, it only comes from meteors. Scientists concluded (from Zumaia, and other similar sites, with the same anomaly, in other parts of the world) that it was likely some sort of meteoric disaster covered the earth in Iridium, and this lead to this mass extinction. Lo and behold, around ten years later, the Chicxulub Crater was discovered in the Yucatan peninsula, and was dated back to the exact time as the Iridium Anomaly, and the theory was well on its way to esteem. The idea is basically that this giant meteor smacked into the earth, and cause all kinds of ridiculous armageddon-like catastrophe, including kilometer high tsunamis, earth quakes, volcanoes, etc, but the thing that really did so many species in was the fact that it covered the earth in a cloud of dust, including iridium, for a good few years (I should really know if it was more like 10 or 1, 000, but I don´t), and this made it really cold and lightless, which killed most of the plants, which, going up the food chain, eventually killed almost all the animals that hadn´t already been gotten by the other catastrophes. Some of the few things that survived were the first small rodent-like mammals that could get by on very little and could live on the scraps of some of the other things, and eventually, these developed into all the other mammals we have now, including humans (yes! human win!). This is important information for the following discussion, about why Zumaia is important now. Besides killing dinosaurs, it is also a very good place to document global climate change, on the order of tens of thousands of years, (for which there are cycles, as well as for 100,000, and a bunch of other ridiculous cosmic cycles). It has been discovered that, for the most part, species are able to adapt to the changes in climate that Earth has experienced, the quickest (except for a few mass extinction events) usually being 10,000 years to change around 6 degrees. (Warning, global warming cliche!) However, the problem now is that the earth seems to be changing its temperature about twenty times faster than the previous climate changes, which, if true, could be devastating for the general population of species on earth. We may be approaching another mass extinction event, and it may or may not be our fault. Here´s where the first story is important, though. Why shouldn´t we care about this? For two reasons, the first being, will humans survive, probably so, and if not, oh well, we have made a pretty good run for it and eventually even the dinosaurs had to go, whose to say our mass extinction event can´t be self-imposed? Secondly, and most important, we deserve to do what we want. We (mammals collectively) survived the last mass-extinction, then evolved into humanoids (who also survived their own mini-mass extinction), then evolved to the fully dominant, in command humans that we now know. Why shouldn´t we be able to have some fun before we´re extinct?