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One of Peter's favorite concepts has it that volcanic ages lead to ice ages. To express this in a metaphorical way, he conceived of a two-part project in which he would grow molds in a volcano and on an iceberg. For part one, he chose Mexico's Paricutin volcano. One of the newest volcanoes in the world (an important factor, since there would be few if any living organisms there because of heat and sterile soil), Paricutin burst out of a field in 1943? last erupted in 1952. After a ten-hour bus ride from Mexico City, Hutchinson arrived in a nearby village, where he hired a guide for the six-hour horseback ride and 1,400-ft. climb to the crater's edge. He found the volcano was just what he had hoped for. The ground was still hot, steam seeped from its crevices, and no plants grew. A couple of days later he returned, with a mule train carrying 500 loaves of Bimbo Wonder bread, which he crumbled along the steaming fault lines, then covered with plastic to create a "greenhouse environment." Six days later he returned, delighted to find that the bread had sprouted an effulgence of molds.
What he had succeeded in doing, Hutchinson says, was to juxtapose a microorganism against a macrocosmic landscape, to bring life to an environment that had been virtually sterile, in order to show that the old distinctions between living and dead matter are ambiguous, if not false. "Paricutín was similar to the earliest earth landscapes," he says. "Today, when volcanoes appear from the sea, they are first colonized by bacteria, molds and algae. The conditions of early history are continually duplicated." Next stop: an iceberg in Greenland.