In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

105 13 A Fresh Sandbox Humboldt County, California, 1986 A scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. —Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish Pushing aside the brambles at the edge of Canyon Creek, Gary Carver and Tom Stephens scrambled up the muddy incline to the edge of the gravel road, pausing at the top to catch their breath and reorient. It had been a couple of hours since Tom had parked the blue jeep some miles back at the gate and they had taken off on foot, following logging roads through private timberlands above Korbel, northeast of Eureka, California. Here the forest was second growth; most of the really big trees, the Douglas firs and redwoods, had long since been cut. But trees were not what interested Carver and Stephens. What they were seeking were exposures. If you’re a geologist looking for rocks in the backwoods of Humboldt County, California, where the rain falls steadily six months of the year and even the summers tend to be cool and foggy, and the soil is black and rich and overlaid with spongy humus, and the rhododendrons and huckleberry bushes form a dense understory taller than your head, an understory dwarfed by trees that, full grown, are among the tallest in the world, you either need some heavy equipment to trench down under the dirt, or you need to find spots where someone else has already done the work for you. Road cuts, for instance: places where a road grader’s blade has gouged out a hillside to build a road for log trucks to travel and, in that process, has exposed a neat slice of the Earth’s history. Gary and Tom had dug plenty of trenches in the pastures and woods above Humboldt Bay in the past decade. But you can’t dig trenches everywhere. Sometimes you can make more progress by simply getting out and looking for exposures. 106 The Next Tsunami Creek beds were another source of exposures. Over time, water sluicing down ravines carves away dirt and sand, exposing the harder rock beneath. From out of his daypack, Gary—long-legged and long-armed, with long hair and a short, scraggly beard and a red kerchief around his neck— now pulled out a well-worn Simpson Timber Company map and partially unfolded it, revealing a vast lacework of logging roads and natural features. Canyon Creek, for one, which he now traced with a finger, following the pair’s presumptive route from one road to the next, then along the creek for some distance and back up to the road, to the point where they now found themselves. Gary refolded the map and stuffed it back inside his pack, and he and Tom took off down the road, Gary’s neck craning forward as if on the scent, Tom’s compact athleticism and his hickory walking stick keeping pace with his companion’s long strides. It wasn’t really a walking stick per se: more like a long-handled geology pick, with a World War II-vintage trenching tool set atop a long wooden handle that Tom himself had carved by hand. Nice for catching one’s balance on scree slopes; ideal for gouging and scraping the soft, young rocks Tom habitually found himself scrutinizing. The two had been friends and geological co-conspirators since 1973, when Gary first arrived in Arcata to join the geology faculty at Humboldt State University. Tom was a graduating senior in the HSU geology department and was already working for the USGS, mapping creek basins in the surrounding redwood forests. Two hippie geologists with a mutual scorn for convention and a shared passion for steelhead fishing and getting lost in the woods in the name of science: theirs was a natural partnership. What they were seeking in those exposures was evidence of faults: displacement of land caused by the movement of tectonic plates. Young, active faults in particular. The search had begun serendipitously back in 1976, when Tom was mapping in the hills north of Trinidad Head just east of Big Lagoon, a two-mile-long teardrop of brackish water separated from the ocean by a slender sandbar. There in the brushy...

Share