The Fault
By: ffluffy
Dedicated to: Dad

When I stand at the road cut and stare at the fault I see more than just the wavy layers of sediment, the broken lines that were laid down flat but now twist back upon themselves, turn sharp and go nowhere, end before they start.  I can see back into my child hood, mineral collecting trips, fossil hunting expeditions, roadside geology books, pulling over and wandering around in the road to ‘get a better look’.  Growing up in the southwest made observing rocks easy.  There are no soil horizons because there is no soil; it never rains enough to break down the feldspar in the granite Santa Catalina Mountains into clay.  There are no trees growing on the bare slopes of the Santa Rita Mountains to block the synclines and anticlines from view.  The sonorant desert is naked in its geology, spread eagle for the world to see.

The San Andreas Fault exposes itself many times on its way north from LA County.  The destruction it has caused over the years is exhibited in the fault scarps that wind their way along the base of the San Gabriel Mountains.  There are valleys with such massive failure that rocks stick straight up into the sky next to rocks that hang themselves parallel with the ground.  Devils Punch Bowl is one place that you can drive to and stare down at a massive syncline of sedimentary and metamorphic rock.  Such extreme failure has occurred at this point of the fault that the elevation difference between the top and the bottom of the syncline is plus one thousand feet.  Then if you hike about three miles from the Devil’s Punch Bowl you come to the Devils Chair.  Another dissection of the fault made public.  Rocks going every which way, jumbled and tumbled and strewn about, ‘what happened here’?  If it was a jigsaw puzzle, you would be hard pressed to find a corner piece just to get started.

On the tour of the San Andreas Fault, a swamp turned grass land shows how just a little up lift is enough elevation change to kill the moss and lichens and make the liverworts give way to scrub oak and grass.  And that change occurred slowly, unobservable on a daily basis, except to the liverworts.

I can’t wait for the catastrophic movement.  Like the scarps we saw with the University of Arizona Geology Club at Loma Prieta: ten feet of vertical change in less than six horizontal inches.  It was so tall that the biggest guy on our field trip couldn’t reach the top.  What would happen if the earth moved like that with a person standing in the vicinity?  The immediate violence of it would mess with your inner child and your give you vertigo all at the same time. 

Psycho analyzing the Earth puts everything into perspective; life is short, geologic time is not.  This can be summarized with my brother’s favorite saying, “watch out for life;” more than likely we will all be watching the Earth.  I will never be able to drive past a road cut without counting the drill holes used to blast it into existence, and every mineral or fossil find I mentally dedicate to my dad who drove old station wagons down crazy four wheel drive roads just so that my brother and I could pick up trilobite fossils from the Cambrian period.