Tour de farce - by Dr. Marty Leipzig, Sun 16 Aug 98 21:41
Howdy, campers. Some new "faces" in the crowd, I see.
Well, happy day.
As you may have noticed, I am back again after considerable
globe-hopping and adding to the already burgeoning larders of
the United States Postal Service (Richard? Katherine? Did you
get your packages?). I'd have been back sooner, but the server
here is flakier than Novosibirsk in February and my echo feed's
about as reliable as breadlines in Etreia. It finally seems to
be defarkled and I'm now using Doc's Place for my Fideaux Fix
(with a Canadian back-up). Now, if my ISP would just cooperate,
things will be just mallardiferous and tealful (i.e., ducky).
But I must relate a, well, strange tale that transpired on
my repatriative holiday here in the States. I won't go into
details of the preceeding surgical events, but suffice to say
we'll both be more than happy to never have to go through the
actual procedure, the followups and the general folderol and
brouhaha with international insurance companies again. The
upshot is that my wife was in recuperative mode and totally
uninterested in travelling, the kids were at the grandparents
being absolutely horribly spoiled; and as such, loathe to leave,
and I was at loose ends. So, after a trip of some 14K Km, what
better than to take a small side trip?
I had received a call from a collegue of mine who works at
the Idaho Geological Survey and he was telling me of the great
new area that's been added to the already monstrous Idaho
Primitive Area. The thing is, the last time it was mapped was
some 50 years ago by mining and economic mineral types for the
exploitation of the cuperiferous minerals in the region. It's a
most geologically remarkable locale: you've got everything from
the Cenozoic Challis Volcanics, to Pleistocene glaciation
geomorphology, Paleozoic clastics and carbonates, and the
oomstopper of a huge, exotic geochemistry pluton the emplaced
itself under (and cooked everything through the Early Tertiary
above) a region of mountainous terrane called the White Knobs.
He needed a hand in mapping the area for his proposal for
inclusion into the IPA (not India Pale Ale, but that does come
into play later in the story) and he asked me if I could spare a
week.
"Sure, why not?", I replied, after squaring it with the
powers-that-be and something close to but not nearly as exotic
as "Fred's Airlines".
I deplaned in Boise and was greeted by Mark (of the "one,
True expert" fame) and was rapidly trundled off in an aging
International Harvester Scout II to the wilds of the IPA; with a
brief stop at Sam's Liquor Emporium in the twee little burg of
Mackay, Idaho. After procuring our provisions (some 15 cases of
beer, a case each of bourbon and vodka, frozen orange juice and
a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos (what we were going to do with all
that food remains a mystery)), I was seated in Mark's aging
rustbucket along with his odd assortment of field dogs. Mark,
being a metamorphic petrologist by vocation and old-time
prospector by avocation, had with him the usual assortment of
geodogs: a dikeshund, labradorite retreiver and a shaggy little
cairn terrier ("all ore hounds", he quipped). He told me with
great humor that they excelled in sniffing out concentrations
of minerals such as poochblende, wooframite, roverchrosite and
(my favorite) fidocrase. These minerals all collectively make up
a pugmatite, you see. A vertiable mutter load.
Ahem.
Well, we travelled up a well unworn jeep trail and disembarked
into some of the most pristine scenery this side of Fra Mauro.
Being a temperate zone and well up altitudinally, Mark cautioned
me to watch for snakes up here. It was just beginning to get
seasonally warm up here and the dangerous diopsidewinder
could be lurking behind the flaggy shales that made up this
particular prominence. Advice well heeded.
Anyways.
Mark lamented that he was having trouble mapping the well eroded
and faulted carbonate terrane that stretched out before up. I
immediately told him to dictch that cheap Tate's compass for a
more de rigeur Brunton; noting that the former are notoriously
inaccurate: "For he who has a Tates is lost." I then looked at
the map he was building and immediately noticed that he had placed
the weathering, erosion and sinkhole development of the Redwall
limestone before the tectonic event that chopped the area up
into neat, subparallel, quasilinear blocks. "Mark", I said,
"You've got the karst before the horst". That settled, we spent
the day in glorious exulation in mapping, hiking and general
sight-seeing.
"Thanks, Marty.", Mark intoned. "Tell you what. Tonight, instead
of camping (and here I was all prepared to dress up like Oscar
Wilde and sing Noel Coward songs), why don't we drive down to
Mackay?" Seems the Mackay Cobalt-Blues (the hometown favorites, a
farm team for some Western-based baseball collective) were playing
the Ruby-Ridge Reds (their arch enemies) and he just knew that there
would be good seats, cold beer and probably a fight or two.
Actually having spent some time, epochs ago, in Mackay, and
having a warm spot in my heart (and a cheeseburger in my pocket,
but that's another story altogether) for the Colbalt-Blues, how
could I resist? I was enthusiastic, until I remembered that Mark
was an absolute fanatic for the Reds. In Mackay, admitting to
that was like ordering fricassied spotted owl in whooping crane
sauce at an Earth First! soiree.
Remembering that it was "just a game", I quickly agreed and we
went off trundling and jostling in a flurry of dust and empty
beer cans. We arrived at the ballpark, which, coincidentially
enough, was built in a natural ampitheatre carved out of the
Upper Cretaceous Sundance formation by the Snake River (now,
thanks to stream piracy and avulsion, some 2.5 km distant). What
was unusual about the site is not only were there the fine-
grained continental clastics of Cretaceous age there, but the
river had also carved into the pallisade (out back of the left
field bleachers) of the relatively high-grade metamorphic rocks
of the Stillwell complex (leave it to me to sneak in another
Geology 101 lecture...).
Fascinating.
We took our seats, set down our beers and watched the epic
struggle of grown men wearing ridiculously garish costumes chase
a equine epidermis sphere around a field floored with rocks that
contain the result of the last epicontinental seaway
encroachement over the North American craton.
(Sorry about that. I'll try and be good.)
The game was going badly for the hometown favorites, as they
were down 5 to 3 at the top of the seventh. The local crowd
suddenly, to a man, woman and child, produced bright blue
placards and began waving them around in a sequential manner
throughout the seats in the arena. Mark leapt down and began
scrabbling about furiously on the ground.
"What the hell are you looking for?", I asked.
"Everyone knows there's red shales in the Sundance!", Mark
exclaimed, and he victoriously found two slabs of very crimson
ferruginous highly dolomitized marly mudstone.
He sat back down and attempted to raise these slabs of rhodofied
rock in defiance of the sea of blue in which he currently
bobbed.
"What are you doing? Are you crazy?" I demanded.
"Awww, hell. I'm just trying to wave the shales."
It was then that it happened. An irate backer of the Mackay
team, seated out in the previously-mentioned left field seats
let fly and thwacked Mark upside the head with a rock.
Yep. It was then that the schist hit the fan.
*Gad* As a geologist, I lava good pun.
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