Assembling California

I quite enjoyed yesterday’s lunchtime reunion between writer John McPhee and UC Davis geologist Eldridge Moores, who is the main protagonist in McPhee’s account of California geologic history, Assembling California. We have a long plane ride ahead of us soon and, needing a long book to read, I may choose McPhee’s Annals of the Former World which is really five books in one, three of which I’ve read. But that was a long time ago, and I certainly could fancy rereading Assembling California. It’s a brillliant narrative that made me wish I could take my own journey across the length and breadth of California with a professional geologist near at hand to interpret the terrain outside.

Alas, professionally-led geologic field trips are not in my near future, but it would be fun to learn more about local geology. My formal geologic training is limited to one course in geology and another in geomorphology way back in college, so I have a lot to catch up on. Alt and Hyndman’s Roadside Geology of Northern and Central California is a good lay guidebook to the vicinity, but when one inevitably seeks more local detail, for the most part one has to jump the gulf into the professional literature. At least there’s a long tradition in geology of field trip guidebooks with milepost-by-milepost annotations.

There are certainly easier places to study geology than coastal California. It’s not without reason that many rock units around here are termed mlanges.