The night before I visited Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan, I was thumbing through the motel gift shop. There I found a “before-and-after” postcard of the rock formation called Miner’s Castle, showing how it looked prior to a rockslide on April 13, 2006, and how it looks now – that is, from back when it had two towers and how it looks with only one tower today.

I must say, it looks considerably less castle-like.

Geologically, then, it was a near-miss for me. I was only three-and-a-half years too late to see what was probably the most famous formation along the shore. But it got me interested in the fragility of the place, and I paid particular attention to the park signage during my visit.

Turns out that Pictured Rocks is surprisingly dynamic, in a downhill, erosive kind of way. Everything there is falling apart: In 1900 most of the Grand Portal, which had so impressed the first French visitors, collapsed; in 1940, part of the formation called the chapel fell down so it no longer formed an altar-like curve, and in 2000 an additional section of the Portal fell in – opening up a bigger gap but blocking access to the water beneath it.  Then in 2006 (somewhat off schedule, since everything else seems to fall at the change of a decade) we lost part of the castle.

This gives a “see-it-now” urgency to the park, and folks who knew it in the day periodically mourn the passing of some familiar formation.  The lament is almost always along the lines of “It will never be the same…” but of course that is the nature of the earth. Only at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, where gases explode through rock and lava flows build new shorelines, have I seen the restlessness of the planet more in evidence.

Nevertheless, my initial reaction to volcanoes is creative excitement, whereas my appreciation of erosion is more a kind of melancholy resignation. Makes no sense, of course, and I wonder where this prejudice comes from. It was erosion that gave us the Grand Canyon, to say nothing of this amazing lakeshore, so it’s hardly a negative.

But the slow relentlessness of erosion is suspect. It’s too much like time itself, gnawing away at us until we – or parts of us – collapse. If volcanoes are a kind of dramatic sudden-death scenario, at least they are relatively few and far between. Erosion is everywhere and inescapable, and even when we don’t see it suddenly shear off a rock tower, we know it’s at work in every wave, every breeze, every crystal of ice and falling drop of rain.

Romantics will tell you it is this transience that gives the world its beauty: The whole earth is a “see-it-now” kind of place, because the time is coming when you yourself will see nothing. Some religious folks, on the other hand, seem to believe in a place where there is no change and the two towers of Miner’s Castle still stand – though how time initially passed to create the eroded world is hard to understand.

I have no answers. I gaze at the castle ruins now, thinking "Well, that's gone." But at the same time I admire the clean, nearly white platform of rock that has been revealed beneath the tons of gray and yellow stone that time pushed away.