Exploring
Bought a book yesterday. It’s sure to keep me up nights. The Anatomy of a Paleozoic Basin: The Permian Basin, USA. I mean, we’re talking about a story that happens over the course of 540 million years. Mountains will be born. Washed away. Born again. Seas will rise. Seas will fall. Plants will bloom and die. Over and over and over. All of this will happen as land masses float around the globe and magnetic poles flop back and forth. I’ve hiked part of it, the El Capitan reef, walked through some of it, Carlsbad Caverns, and driven over lots of it, for instance, the Ozona Arch and others. In fact, it’s hard to drive in Texas without driving through the Permian Basin.
Why you might ask did you do this, buy this book. Curiosity. I’ve always liked geology because it’s hard to avoid it with all the road cuts we have in Texas. The earth is laid pretty bare, and it was impossible for me to avoid wondering how all those layers came to be. Plus, I edited drilling and completion programs for a lot of years, and we know where that goes. Then I went to Big Bend last year, walked the trails and drove the roads. I liked the scenery but needed to know it came about. Luckily, I now have the time for this sort of intellectual exploration. So, I am exploring.
Now someone will probably point out that the Permian Basin has nothing to do with Big Bend, and if they don’t, I will, because the later owes its brilliance to volcanoes. And that’s why have I books on that subject, including the trans-Pecos volcanic field and the Davis Mountains. But all of it’s just part of the story of earth, my home. And I like discovering how all this came to be and knowing I’m part of a long chain of humans going all the way back to that first humanoid who looked at the mountains and plains and thought of them as beautiful and wondered just how they came to be.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale