Fish Ranch Geology

My foraging for rocks has produced some interesting musings and a blip.

I had a friend who loved rocks--big rocks, little rocks, colorful and plain rocks. She had beautiful big rocks in her garden and little bowls of smaller rocks around her house. People would bring her rocks and she once gave me a gift of an Indian fetish rock--a beautifully carved and polished rock with a little bouquet of feathers tied around it with a cord. She died in a car accident and at her memorial, held in her brother's back garden, people were invited to take a rock or two out of a bowl as keepsake from her.

Jewish people leave a small rock on top of the gravestone when they visit cemeteries and we did the same when we spread Oilman's sister's ashes on Mt Tamalpias, leaving small rocks we had brought with us among all the others on the ground.

Despite the association with death I find these actions very comforting. The
solidity and everlasting quality of stone can also be an everlasting memory of a departed soul.

Rocks make wonderful decorative statements in the garden. They can fit into small corners or make a big statement. They don't have to be watered and continue to change with the years of exposure, growing moss or lichen in cool damp locations or bleaching in the sun. I love collecting them as little memories of places I have been.

This morning I was driving up Fish Ranch Road with Ozzie on our way to our favorite hiking spot, and my eye was caught once again by the geologic formation in my blip. Blipfotog and rock gatherer came together to cause me to find a place to pull off the road, and clamber up to the foot of the wall for a close-up .(I also took a small rock.) Many times there has been a group of students gathered in this spot around their professor. I wish I'd joined them....

My own interpretation, formed mainly from knowledge common to anybody who lives in Earthquake Country, is that this was an area of sedimentary rock which was uplifted from horizontal to vertical by a massive earthquake. It is less than a mile from the Hayward Fault, so it isn't too difficult to imagine. It also doesn't seem to be too big a stretch to imagine what a quake of that magnitude would do to a mere manmade structure, such as the Memorial Stadium, which was just retrofitted at vast expense, despite the fact that it spans the Hayward Fault.

We're told to keep an"earthquake kit" a backpack with food, flashlight, emergency radio, etc., beside our bed, and our neighborhood has a cache containing emergency generators, and lists of everybody in the neighborhood, their medications, pets and location of gas mains. We're all encouraged to take classes in CPR, search and rescue, first aid and fire suppression. Looking at the Fish Ranch formation I can't help wondering, "what's the point?"