Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Inkwell welcomes Andrew Alden for a discussion of his new book,
_Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City_
<https://www.heydaybooks.com/catalog/deep-oakland/>. 

Andrew turned a fascination with landscapes and rocks into a degree
in Earth science and a career as an editor of geoscience papers,
starting with the US Geological Survey. After moving to Oakland just
two weeks before the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, his awareness
slowly changed. Once focused on remote, wild places and specialized 
topics, like most of the research geologists he worked with, he
found his interest kindled by the local geological richness of his
city, and he began to explore it systematically. His explorations
led to writing this book, which tells the braided stories of deep
geological Oakland and deep historical Oakland. Through his writing
Andrew raises awareness of what he calls the deep present: the
appreciation of the ancient underpinnings that shape the modern-day
surroundings of daily life. His website is
<https://oaklandgeology.com/>, started in 2007 and still in
progress. He has been on the WELL since 1991, and is a host of the
earthquakes, science, and space conferences.

Mary Mazzocco leads the conversation with Andrew. Mary has been an
Oakland resident for 35 years, and was the books page editor of the
"Contra Costa Times" before becoming a journalism educator in 2000.
She hikes and watches birds recreationally in what she and Andrew
call the Oakland Hills.
  

    
Andrew, in your public geology blog, you talk about how DEEP OAKLAND
evolved from an earlier manuscript that was aimed at what you call
“geologizers,” instead of a general audience. Can you talk a little
about that process? Is there something you had to drop from the
revised version that you wish you could have kept?

*Link to the blog:
https://oaklandgeology.com/2023/05/01/yay-its-book-week/
  

    
Well, I started out to put down in one place all the stuff I'd learned about
Oakland's geology. I was thinking about readers who are already fans of the
rocks and landforms of this city, which I found to be unexpectedly rich and
worthy of wider attention. That first effort, which I also gave the title
"Deep Oakland," is quite different from the book we're here to discuss. It
kind of marches through the subject in seven big chapters:

Geography and Topography
The Earth Machine (a mini-Geology 101)
The Diverse Rocks of Oakland
Geologizing in Oakland (how and where)
Seven Episodes from Oakland's Deep History
The Human Geology of Oakland
Life in the Deep Present

I was getting near the end of it, wrestling with the harder stuff, and
thought I'd better start shopping it around. Heyday Books bit the bait, then
they set their hook back on me: How about doing more with the human part and
not so much with the rocks part? I thought "all RIGHT!" and started over
from scratch. That took a couple more years, but it was fun work even though
the Covid pandemic struck and I couldn't visit the library. The hidden
blessing of that was that I avoided a lot of tempting rabbit holes of
historical research and was able to portray subjects with a broad brush
while remaining scrupulously accurate.

The two books, the first manuscript and the printed title, are completely
separate. Also, Heyday imposed a word count that forced me to, as writers
says, kill my darlings. I do think that readers who really get into DEEP
OAKLAND the book will be ready for the deep-dive manuscript if I want to try
publishing it. That's over the horizon for me at the moment.
  

    
I feel like “human geology” is a good way to describe the current
book, but I don’t know if I could easily define what that term
means. Help me out here!
  

    
There is one thing I wanted to keep in the book but had to cut. I discovered
something about the first set of streets that were laid out in the early
1850s, and I pasted it in the Oakland Wiki just to publish it somehow:

"The historical core of Oakland was defined by the three scoundrel founders
and the street plan they had surveyed by Julius Kellersberger in 1852. The
names of the streets, which must have chosen in consultation with the
founders, imply an attempt to strike a delicate political balance in the
uneasy times before the Civil War. The first pair of streets flanking
Broadway was named for George Washington, a Southerner, on the west and
Benjamin Franklin, a Northerner, on the east. Next came a pair named for
Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, the senators from South and North
respectively who brought California into the Union as part of the Compromise
of 1850. Third came streets named for Thomas Jefferson and William Henry
“Tippecanoe” Harrison. The names of successive outlying streets declined
in prestige to West Street on the one side and Oak Street on the other."
  

    
Ah, you slipped in while I was writing that.

"Human geology" is one of the backbones of DEEP OAKLAND the book. It's about
how the three waves of human inhabitants -- the Ohlones, the
Spanish/Mexicans, and the American -- perceived and used the landscape. To
the Ohlones it was a world, a homeland that they had groomed over the
centuries to sustain a lifestyle that in turn was carefully tuned to the
landscape that they maintained by the skilled use of fire. To the next wave
it was empty ranchland best suited to raise livestock and support a vaquero-
centered lifestyle of petit aristocracy. And to the Americans it was a
cabinet of resources just waiting to be turned into money. The rest of that
chapter is more detail about the quarries and mines, the water supply, the
immense work of building the harbor and airport, and so on. In the book, I
weaved all of that into each of the eleven chapters, which focus on specific
landscape features that define the city.
  

    
Fascinating tidbit about the politics of the street names!

It was surprising to learn how much mineral wealth our early
scoundrels extracted from the town, and how much all that excavation
shaped the environment. I’m thinking of the story behind the Leona
Heights neighborhood, which certainly would have looked a lot
different than it does now.
  

    
Andrew, I really enjoyed the book, the content as well as the writing. You
have a knack for alliteration, memorable phrases, the occasional allusion
-- "the very model of a modern Oakland suburb tract" -- and I admire
the terrific neologism "landslaughter."

I was also intrigued but not shocked at the stories of extraction that
shaped the city. After understanding the loss of the Ohlones' environment,
and in the end it may be more surprising how much beauty survived
rather than the neighborhoods that were lost or utterly altered. That
is, it coulda been worse!
  

    
This conversation is world-readable, i.e. can be read by anyone on
or off the WELL, the online community platform that is hosting the
two week discussion. Here's a short link for access:
<https://tinyurl.com/deep-oakland> The full link is
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/527/Andrew-Alden-Deep-Oakland-
How-Ge-page01.html>. 

If you're reading this conversation, and you're not a member of the
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well.com, and we'll post it here.

If you're not a member of the WELL, but you'd like to participate in
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This conversation will last for at least two weeks, through June 19.
In order to read the whole conversation, we encourage you to return
regularly and use the pager (dropdown at the top and the bottom of
the page).
  

    
Mary, I tried to reserve my contempt for the three founders of Oakland, who
really were scoundrels by any standard, then and now. The other exploiters
of Oakland's geological wealth (stone, soil, sulfur etc.) were typical
Americans of the time. It would've been easy to castigate them, considering
that their activities imposed costs on their descendants. I'm thinking of
the pyrite mines in Leona Heights and the quarry pits all over the hils,
which left acid drainage in the one case and ugly crumbling holes in the
other. But showering them with blame would imply that we are any better, and
only posterity can make that judgment.

I also tried to avoid any undue contrast with the Ohlones -- the Oaklanders
of prehistoric time -- who laid their own trip on the countryside by burning
it regularly. Instead, they were miners and traders just as the Mexican
ranchers and American capitalists were and are.

Scott, I laid the text with easter eggs of many sorts. I wanted the text to
be its own rich reward, and I'm pleased that it pleased you.
  

    
One reason for writing this book is that Oakland is a kind of full
course buffet for geologists. Can you talk a little bit about what
makes the city unusual, if not unique, in geological terms?
  

    
Oakland really is a geological smorgasbord, with a lot of variety inside its
boundaries, and yet it's well organized geographically too. When I first
plotted out the book, I realized that I could cover all of it under eleven
neat headings. The high hills, the flats and shore, the downtown, Piedmont,
the old mining district, the Hayward fault and so on -- they had clean
borderlines and distinct stories. Just seeing that as a writer, Oakland
lends itself to a book-length treatment.

Geologically, Oakland's rocks are examples of major California provinces:
the huge thick sedimentary sequence of the Central Valley, the enigmatic
scramble of the Franciscan Complex, the exotic oceanic rocks of the Coast
Range ophiolite. It has a long stretch of the active Hayward fault, "secret
shaper of the whole," running its length and presenting issues that are
common to every California city. And to my delight, Oakland also has
striking examples of ice-age landforms, created during geologically recent
times, hiding in plain sight.

When I gave a presentation to East Bay Nerd Nite a few years ago, I counted
up all the various rock types to be found here -- sandstone, shale,
conglomerate, etc -- I quickly rang up a couple dozen different names,
including some rare ones like peridotite, blueschist, porcelanite. I made
the claim, which no one has since disputed, that Oakland has more types of
rock than any other city in the United States. Certainly the usual
contenders, like New York (which is no slouch in that regard), don't measure
up to Oakland.

You throw in a few classic Geology 101 things like water gaps and drowned
valleys and offset streams -- AND pyrite mines that produce Appalachia-style
acid drainage, and Oakland constitutes almost a full textbook of geology.
  

    
How distinct is that from the rest of the Bay Area? That is, would San
Francisco, San Jose, or Fremont have provided as rich a geological meal?
  

    
Each of those cities covers a land area comparable to Oakland, and each has
plenty of geological interest. But only Oakland has the intimate and
pervasive relationship between its human history and its geological setting
that animates DEEP OAKLAND. Fremont: too young; San Jose: not *driven* the
way Oakland was; San Francisco: geologically simple. They share a lot with
Oakland, but I've lived in Oakland for 33 years and have achieved a degree
of authority here.
  

    
You can follow what Andrew says in <13> at a very coarse scale on
the Geologic Map of California:

<https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/gmc/>
  

    
Speaking of maps, getting a review copy without maps made me think
about how important visuals are to understanding a geographic place.


How did you think about creating visuals with your writing? (E.g.
alternating chert layers in Claremont Shale look like "a storm-swept
forest of golden bamboo.")
  

    
Nothing to add yet other than my praise for the writing and the beauty of the
book!
  

    
I am ashamed that I did not immediately associate geology with
lyrical prose!
  

    
Publishing a geology-centered book without maps is a challenge, for sure. My
blog posts are essentially driven by images, so it wasn't always easy for me
to rely on words alone, but I felt it was essential to try. After all, a
book on human history wouldn't illustrate everything. Another thing was that
I wrote DEEP OAKLAND for my fellow locals, and I counted on them to picture
what I was saying in their imaginations.

Heyday Books didn't propose an illustration program beyond the block
diagrams that introduce each chapter, and I didn't want the complication of
dealing with photos and diagrams. What that meant was that the prose had to
be crystal clear, based on clear ideas and thoughts.

I had fun with it too, with allusions to literature and song lyrics meant to
elicit the occasional chuckle of recognition. My model was Peter Grinspoon's
EARTH IN HUMAN HANDS, which is sprinkled with snatches of Grateful Dead
lyrics as well as deep thoughts well expressed.

Geology is widely considered a dry subject. I wanted to avoid any hint of
the conventional, default textbook treatment of a subject I find full of
juice, to speak of the planet's workings with the same voice I used to treat
the city's human development.
  

    
Correction: that's David Grinspoon. His brother Peter is the cannabis
authority, whereas David's expertise is Venus and planets in general.
  

    
Andy, our copy of _Deep Oakland_ keeps traveling around the house because
Joe is reading it and I'm trying to keep it close to hand for this
conversation. It was a quick and very interesting read for me.

I don't have a specific question right now, but I'm leafing through it and
finding paragraphs I marked as being of particular interest.

One huge takeaway for me was FINALLY appreciating the role of the Hayward
Fault as "secret shaper of the whole." Recently we went on a walk around
Lake Temescal on a water theme. You wrote about it:

"In repeated visits, I've watched the cracks at Lake Temescal lengthen and
open. Nearby is an underground chamber where a wire thirty meters long
stretches across the fault between two concrete piers. Records from this
creepmeter show that the fault silently moves about three millimeters a
year" (7).

Do other faults have creepmeters like this???
  

    
A few do, mainly the San Andreas. Creepmeters are expensive to install and
finicky to operate. Their data can be affected by the annual rainfall cycle,
as one example. Nowadays we get good data from space-based techniques that
rely on synoptic data that cover a lot of ground at once, based on GPS
receivers and side-scan satellite radar.

One of my big goals for the book is to get people to visit the fault now,
while it's sleeping. So I'm glad you're taking its lessons to the street!
  

    
I know I have probably walked on top of the creepmeter. Creepy!

The Oakland Zoo has a nice interpretive display for visualizing the
Hayward Fault's movement.
  

    
The San Andreas Fault had medium-large ruptures an average of 22
years apart in the same area of central California, which fed the
suspicion that there would be another one soon. Scientists installed
a lot of measuring devices in this region in the hope that they'd be
able to see more precisely how a fault rupture works. Unfortunately
for the experiment the next earthquake was late by several decades.
In the meantime smaller earthquakes provided data for some very
interesting modeling of earthquake processes.
  

    
Yes, a creepmeter at Parkfield was maintained there for many years by one
persistent scientist who kept scraping the funds together. It's a dusty
little ranching town much beloved by California geologists. The last time I
was down there was to see the amazing Parkfield Interventional EQ Fieldwork:

<https://allshookup.org/pieqf/>

The monitoring project you mention, <karish>, took advantage of a lucky
string of regular repeated earthquakes, but I blieved at the time and still
do that the coincidence was not important, although it was a good hook for
funding important research.
  

    
Yes, I'd been taught that there was an uncanny repetition at equal
intervals. Then I looked at the dates! There was a lot of variance.