M. Dane Picard

Adding a Specialty

My colleague feels he needs to broaden his research, and has decided to add deep-sea coprolites to his specialty of continental coprolites. Though some paleontologists consider them dull, continental coprolites are a great little group.

Through the Dolomites and Apennines

Having spent the sweetest days of spring in a stuffy interior room with no windows teaching reluctant students about sedimentary rocks, I left on a Sunday in June to treat my numbed mind and infected sinuses to mountain air in the Italian Dolomites and Apennines. I first knew of the Abruzzi — the most mountainous part of the Apennine range — from reading Ignazio Sil-one’s Bread and Wine when I was 19. At the time I thought I would never get there, my days then being devoted to manning an officers’ mess at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. After reading Silone a geologist wants to see “the end of the world,” a village destroyed twice by floods and once by earthquakes. Or to walk in valleys “split, cracked and bereft of vegetation.” To a geologist, Silone’s Abruzzi resembles the carbonate terrains of western Ireland, the high glaciated mountain valleys in the Big Horn Dolomite of Wyoming, and the stark, rock-striped, shattered Paleozoic ranges of eastern Nevada.

Down the Durance in France

The river of my boyhood flowed north undammed, flooding in the spring over Mexican Town, soaking the bottom half of a sack of my mother’s beans and, checked in its flow over the floodplain, depositing silt between the swelling beans.

On the Beach at Elba

In June of 1987, disregarding a one-star rating in the Michelin guide to Italy and a pinched bank account, I took a car ferry from Piombino to Portoferraio, went to 20 different beaches around the island of Elba, and came away with 20 sacks of sand. To a geologist on the move in the spring, Elba is not a one-star tourist attraction but rather the mysterious remains of a spectacular mountain range, part of Tyrrhenia, a land that vanished beneath the sea.

On the Mountain

From the time I was about 4, the words “on the mountain” always had a special meaning for me.

Walking the Four Corners

At the outset of my second year as a professional petroleum geologist, my truck broke down and I walked 27 miles across the desert of the Four Corners area, the point where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet. All of my walk — thereafter I called it The Long Walk — was in Utah, northwest of Hatch’s Trading Post and east of Blanding, a town of several thousand people. I walked through the late evening and night, alone with the rabbits and coyotes and my thoughts.

The Sea at Portovenere

The sea at Portovenere swells and moves in green shadows below wave crests and pales to shell-white where it breaks free of its orbits to collide with boats. Crests break off and the water moves faster than the wave-form. Along the dock the renegade water rocks a small boat, but the boat’s only occupant, a gray cat — tipped black on its ears and down its spine and tail — rides the water, too weak to leave the boat. A female cat — similar enough to the boat cat in color and head shape to be its sister — sits by my feet in the shadow of a bench on the carbonate promontory.

Praying and Fasting over Great Salt Lake

Last spring when the Six County Commissioners’ Flood Task Force organized a day of prayer and fasting for lake-flooding relief, our little group didn’t show much interest at first. It took them two days to remember that we have many specialists on Great Salk Lake in our department — as it turns out, almost all of our geologists and all but one of the geophysicists.

Wind River and Riverton

It was the last third of a long field season. If anyone had said to me it would be the last summer I would run the surveying instruments, I wouldn’t have believed them. I assumed geologists would use plane tables forever. But the summer of ‘50 was the last time I solved a three-point problem. I put away the plane table and alidade for good. An era in petroleum exploration had ended in the Rocky Mountains.

Appointments and Reappointments

The most spirited faculty meeting of the season took place last Tuesday. Such events are not always recorded, for which we may be thankful. In this instance, however, the group agreed that we needed careful notes lest we forget a major decision or a pivotal detail. By acclamation and the chair’s suggestion, the job was mine.