In 1974, an older geologist asked me this,"Tell me a story, John?" We were standing in a wide railroad cut of the Schulkyll River in Limerick, Pennsylvania and we were looking at red rocks and rock joints. Jerry Szymanski had dashed up the rubble slope and was more or less hanging from the flat surface of the top of the outcropping. That question was his teacher's way of getting me to put together what we were seeing, right or wrong. His question was a European way of instruction. I started talking. He listened for a while and then asked me questions, getting me to to point out a thicker sandstone bed on one side of a chosen fault and the relative vertical position of that bed on the other side.
This field conference between us two, happened at 6 P.M., one May evening when the rest of our 30 member field team had gone back to hot showers at the hotel. Jerry had asked for someone to show him around, but there were no takers but me. I had heard him speak at tailgate meetings in upper New York State, where he found a flower structure in trench at a nuclear power plant. I wanted to meet the man. We went around to two other sites; inside the nuclear power plant to look at a little fault, to a quarry to follow a fault across the Pennsylvania farmland. Jerry's concentration was remarkable. He was thinking so intently, once, that he missed his step and fell pall-mall down one hill into my arms. Storytelling is important in geology; is illustrated with maps, well-chosen and well-arranged data and with geologic cross-sections.
In hobbies and careers in a while, endeavors become inter-related. Consider canoeing, fishing and geomorphology. Clean sand and gravel layers are boons to well field engineers and environmental geologists. The setting down of these deposits can be studied either intently or incidentally in boating or fishing trips on large rivers. Consider the Santiam River near Albany, Oregon and the Willamette River near Salem. The Santiam has a long wide gravel bar downstream of the crossing of Interstate 5. While fishing, I and a friend have taken breaks to pick up interesting rocks; brick red crumbling stones, white plagioclase-speckled andesitic basalt cobbles and small geodes. Our rock hunting is erring devoid of the real connection to the river, because the aquatic insect life, Mayflies cannot live without clean, cool tumbling water. The insects need the rocks, to adhere to is the egg stage, to hide as six legged crawling, darting insects from hungry trout and then to rise fitfully to the surface, shucking their molding skins to dry their new wings and fly off into the brush to mate. The Summer 2015 issue of Flyfishing & Tying Journal described how to fish the different parts of such stretches of these two rivers. The stream gradient is 20 to 30 feet per mile and canoeing is easy. This region is part of a two hundred mile plus "recreational boating highway". There are steelhead and salmon runs on the rivers and eagles and osprey nest nearby to fly along the river courses and to feed on the fish.
