Sweet White Cliffs: Chalk Stories

I remember being pretty shocked as a kid when I found out there were entire cliffs made out of the same sort of stuff our teachers used to write on the blackboard. Oh, yes, I’m that old. We actually mostly had greenboards, but it was chalk all the way. I’d get thoroughly excited when I was allowed to clean the erasers. The smell and dryness of the dust whispers learning to me. I still love the click-tap-scrape of chalk on a chalkboard – it’s one of my favorite, most soothing sounds. Until, of course, you get that hard bit in there and it goes screech, which is really terrible.

We had chalk for sidewalks, but not that super-awesome stuff kids get these days. We’d find colored chalk, but it was the usual thin sticks, not the big fat ones I see now.

I remember closely inspecting the sticks, looking at the voids and striations, exploring the textures. I’d break them in half, noting how little strength it took with the long ones, how difficult it would get as the length was shorter. I’d take a cautious nibble and observe taste and texture.

Image shows a small piece of chalk on a dark surface. The end has striations: it has been used for writing.
A bit of chalk. Photo courtesy Brett Weinstein/Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

I wish someone had told me early on this is what geologists do. I wish someone had told me then that chalk was formed from the calcium-rich hard bits in algae, that it was once part of a living thing, and that entire landscapes are made of it.

Image shows the white cliffs of England's southern coast stretching into the distance.
The Seven Sisters, a series of seven chalk cliff peaks along the East Sussex coast in England. Seaford head in the background is on the other side of the River Cuckmere and not part of the Seven Sisters. Taken by David Iliff as a series of 7 frames with a Canon 5D and 70-200mm f/2.8L lens at 200mm. Photo and caption courtesy David Iliff. (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

I saw this up on Wikimedia Commons and knew I had to show you it, and link you Metageologist’s article on chalk and chalk landscapes. Go there, and you’ll learn lots about chalk, and also get to see some pretty spiffing drawings ancient people made by patiently scraping away sod until the brilliant white chalk was revealed. I was so fascinated by that as a kid, huge white horses galloping over the hills. And of course there was that giant dude, whose penis may have been the first I’d seen in art. I was too young to give it more than a cursory glance before going back to the horse.

I found chalk once. It was a small, impure lump just about the right size to fit in a young fist. I grew up in a part of Arizona that was a mix of limestone and volcanic ash. We’d find flint, too, which I didn’t realize was intimately bound up with chalk. They seemed such different things. There was an old Sinagua ruin in the woods behind our house, and we’d find lots of pot sherds, and sometimes, if we were very fortunate, arrowheads made of flint or obsidian. I wonder if the children found their own rare lumps of chalk, and found dark rocks to write on with it? I never realized it then, but those woods would have been full of children like us, clambering over the same limestone cliffs in the little canyon that ran through the forest, digging for ant lions in the sandy tan soils, gathering pinon nuts and cracking them between their teeth to get at the sweet, piney meat inside. All of these things connect us, people from different times and wildly different cultures. I wonder what their faces would look like, if I could travel back and tell them the story of the chalk, show them pictures of places where the whole hills are chalk, show them the arrowheads made by people who dug the flint out of the soft white rock. I wonder what my face would look like, when they pull out pieces of flint they’d found and demonstrate how arrowheads are made. Delighted smiles all round, I’d say.

So many reasons to love this great old Earth of ours. So many stories in stones. So much beauty.

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Sweet White Cliffs: Chalk Stories
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3 thoughts on “Sweet White Cliffs: Chalk Stories

  1. rq
    1

    Hey, I’m not that old, and even I still had chalkboards all through… elementary school. High school was a mix, okay, fine.
    Anyway. Chalk landscapes is one of the things for which I want to make an extended trip to the UK. Because the Cliffs of Dover and the various white horses (or at least, ‘less green’ in the last case).
    And of course there’s this guy. Heh.

  2. 2

    we had very old real slate chalk boards in the church I grew up in. Chalk can be a bit dangerous too. My family has this nasty thing called genetic emphysema , aka alpha 1 antitrypsin deficiency, a genetic failure. Folks who have it have little protection from inflammation caused by fine particles, like chalk dust (and dust from animal feed which killed an uncle of mine). My aunt was a teacher for 20+ years and it nearly killed her. Happily, science has a treatment for it and she is still alive though has to get an IV treatment once a month.

  3. 3

    Old song (very old song)
    “There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover…..” Vera Lynn, circa 1942 I believe….
    The same singer provided the song at the end of the movie “Dr Strangelove” – “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don;t know when….”

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