A late starter...

When someone asks me how I got inspired to study geology I usually reference a field trip to the Mojave desert during my first intro class. I can point to a moment, still clear in my mind's eye, where the group was sitting around the campfire after dinner on Saturday night. We were drinking tea and hot chocolate (yeah, I know, but it was junior college and most of the students were underage), the professor was playing some Neil Young tunes on his guitar, and I looked over at him and said "I want his job." I still can't play guitar worth a damn, which is a good thing since it would only encourage me to sing, but I do have his job (or a reasonable facsimile). But if I'm honest the decision about geology had been made bit-by-bit, and in some ways it seems like a boulder accelerating downhill...

About a month after my 14th birthday I experienced my first big earthquake (San Fernando, M6.6). We actually lived in the North Long Beach area about 60 miles south of the epicenter, but the earthquake happened at 6 AM while I was lying in bed. I distinctly remember rolling over and putting a pillow over my head, sure that I was going to die... I read everything I could find about earthquakes over the next few months but my high school barely had science classes, much less earth science. At our school most of the young men were pushed toward shop classes, and most of the young women toward home economics or, if they really were ambitious, secretarial classes. Our valedictorian decided not to go to college.

I started at Cerritos College as an art major but dropped out after a year. In '78 my girlfriend's family invited me on their annual camping extravaganza to the eastern Sierra, my first camping experience at the age of 21. I loved it! I picked up books on identifying trees and plants, rocks and minerals, clouds and stars. In 1980 I enrolled at Saddleback College intending to major in environmental science, but the classes were more about issues and I was more and more interested in process.

Mount Saint Helens and the volcano alert issued at Mammoth Lakes got me to thinking about geology again. I took a class but the instructor (who on day 1 wore a yellow suit) seemed disinterested or distracted or both -- he canceled class three times in the first month -- so I got bored and dropped out.


The next semester I signed up for a survey class, introduction to Earth Science. It seemed like it would give me the kind of background I wanted for environmental science. On the third day Dr. Borella gave this stupid lecture -- one that everyone has either given or sat through (or both) at some point in their career: the one explaining what an atom is, how electron shells are organized, and how trading or sharing of valence electrons leads to chemical bonds between different atoms and voila! The silica tetrahedron and the water molecule! I know now from experience that most of my students have heard all of this stuff before, but to me that lecture was an introduction to how the whole world is put together. From that morning all I could think was, I need to know more about this stuff!

I spent the next few years slogging through remedial math classes, college algebra, inorganic chemistry, calculus and physics, periodically surfacing long enough to go on all of the geology field courses that Saddleback offered at the time. All in all, I spent 7 years finishing my first two years of college. Then I transferred and finished my last two years in just three years (is there a record for the longest time ever spent completing a BA with no time taken off to backpack through Europe or to climb a Himalaya?)...

Dr. Warren Hirt was the TA for my first class at Berkeley, Introduction to Mineralogy. At the end of lab one day, after everyone else had left, I was trying to figure out what optical interference figures were, how they worked, what information I could glean from them, why the hell I had quit my job to move 400 miles north when I was clearly too stupid to be there, and if my parents would let me crash on their couch for a while, when Warren came over to me and spent the next hour carefully explaining all of the key points of the lab and got me up to speed.

Dr. Bill Dietrich made geomorphology a dynamic, quantitative science by having me spend weeks doing slope/area measurements on first-order streams on an alluvial fan outside of Lovelock NV. He also pointed me in the direction of UC Santa Cruz and to Dr. Robert Anderson (now at CU Boulder), who shepherded, advised, pushed and dragged me through my thesis.

Peter Borella is the man. He inspired me from the beginning and has remained a great friend. I almost got his job, too -- I was hired to fill the position vacated by the infamous man in the banana suit, so I work with Peter now. I don't know how many butterflies in the past had to flap like mad to get me where I am today, but I wish I could thank them all. I'll settle for thanking Peter and Bob and Bill and Warren as representatives of the village it took to get me pointed in the right direction, to get me focused, and to get me moving...

United Breaks Guitars

A couple of years ago the odds caught up with me and my luggage was lost on my trip to Denver for the GSA conference. It was annoying but I understand it is all part of life's rich pageant.

What I did not comment on at the time was how frustrating it was to deal with the United Airlines bureaucracy. The DMV and the Post Office are rank amateurs compared to UA in terms of their ability to create in the individual that classic sense of existential dread associated with powerlessness when facing The Machine.

Most of this, of course, had to do with the fact that there is no person you can talk to, on the phone or face-to-face, that can actually help you -- the guy/gal at the luggage counter, the customer service rep in some scrap of the old British Empire -- they can look at their computer screen and tell you where the bag probably is, but their only superpowers consist of the ability to punch a key telling The System that your bag is out there somewhere, and to reassure you that they're doing the best that they can...

I'm not a yeller, and my sense of perspective makes it impossible for me to scream at these people, and thus the behemoth that is UA is successful at isolating itself behind a solid wall of smiling functionaries armed with reassuring platitudes about how important The Customer is to UA.

It took them just under two days to get my luggage to my hotel, and just for good measure my bag was missing for about four hours after I arrived back home at the end of the week.

I wrote a couple of letters to the corporation, expressing my disappointment with the lack of responsiveness of the system to one of their paying customers, but -- they never responded.

That's why this story made me smile. Dave Carroll was travelling with his band, Sons of Maxwell, when they actually witnessed a group of baggage handlers playing "hammer throw" with luggage, including what he recognized as his guitar case. After 8 months of being reassured that they were sorry this happened, that they know the Sons of Maxwell have a choice in airlines and UA is glad that they chose United, The Corporation told Dave to f**k himself (metaphorically of course).

Dave promised the last apparatchik to whom he spoke that she would be visited by three ghosts he would do a series of three music videos telling the story of his experience. This is the first (the second song is recorded and the video is in production), and it has been viewed almost 650,000 times since it was posted 3 days ago.



UA has, of course, responded by unleashing the only part of the Hive that actually deals with the public -- its PR flacks. They are making the rounds, reassuring everyone that The Company the whole United family takes this problem seriously.