Petrified Forest

Some landscapes become part of our imagination long before we ever visit them. Petrified Forest National Park became part of mine before I could read — as a smooth, colorful, impossibly heavy piece of stone sitting in a bowl on a shelf at my grandparents’ house. I picked it up and asked what it was. They told me about a place in Arizona where ancient trees had turned to stone over millions of years, where the forest floor was covered in wood that was no longer wood — that had been replaced, molecule by molecule, by silica and iron and manganese until it held the shape and the grain of a tree trunk but rang like rock when you tapped it.