Walking Boots & Pleistocene Geology

Walking Boots & Pleistocene Geology
Biography of Frank Leverett

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i just finished this huge project which, bcause it's a book, i will be putting all over this site soon anyway, if not tomorrow. it was a biography of my first cousin, three times removed, a geologist who walked 100,000 miles in the course of his life, mapping the geological features of teh entire north central area.

his name was frank leverett, and he was a kind of hero in our family. for one thing, he was born before the civil war, but lived until world war two - that's not why we loved him, but that was the generation - that lived through the depression - that liked having him around keeping track of everyone and worrying about them. he was pretty stable himself, what with two jobs, one for the survey and one for the university of michigan - and he'd worked for the survey forty-three years, and michigan loved the way he was an extremely knowledgable old guy who would walk the pants off the young undergrads, taking them out to all the sites in the lower peninsula of michigan. when he was retired it was the depression, and he got insomnia, so he went back to work and published another dozen or so things, most of them probably just from memory alone.

his publications have lasted a long time. some, called monographs, were used over and over because of their thorough, accurate maps; an effort was made to save everything and make it accessible, because they were the standard for over a hundred years. in other words, his work is really in his maps and articles, and most of it has survived.

when you write a biography you get into someone's head and really live life through their eyes for a while. somewhere i think frank is watching me and approving of some things and probably not others. for one thing, i don't really know the geology and he'd probably wish he could just explain a thing or two to me. i had to explain how he handled the iowan drift controversy, and maybe i got it right, maybe not. but one thing i did was put all the articles out in one place, where a person with a kindle can click on them and just go and read them, or at least the abstracts. sometimes even the abraacts were over my head. i can just hear frank saying, i wish i could explain a thing or two.

overall i hope he doesn't mind my waving the flag for a while, and letting everyone know that he was a great guy. i think geologists already know. they know, and they already liked him. i'm not sure if that will make them buy the book thoughj Do people really like to read biographies? some do, i'm sure, but i'm not so sure how to find them. that's my next herculean task.

i'm really tired from this whole book project. it was exhausting pulling out all my stops trying to get this thing written. but now that it is, i'm kind of partying in my own mind. i've told a few people. i'm waiting for the paperback to come online before i start my advertising blitz, but once that happens, the world will know. you'll see it here too. i tell all my friends. out there somewhere, someone will read about frank.

the vertigo hasn't been so bad - but i had a spell of what is called pulsatile tinnitus, which is really bizarre, and has a wild story that goes with it. it's somewhat personal and i may have to build up my courage to tell the story.

made a fire for the girls tonight. everyone wants a fire, when they come way out here to the mountains, and they see big huge piles of sticks that we've collected, and whole mounds of pine straw. i too want a fire, since i realize that piles of sticks are fires waiting to happen anyway, and in an anxiety-prone household any way you can get the stress down is a good way. but for that very reason - anxiety - we have very few fires. we have to know that rain is coming. well now is the season - rain is coming almost all the time - so it's time to get on the piles and burn some of it. given the chance, i did. i spent the night bringing sticks to the fire and throwing them on. it was a joy, and very therapeutic.

pulsatile tinnitus is when you hear your own heart, and feel thumping that is actually caused by your own heart getting too close to your eardrums. We are not programmed to understand sounds and thumping as coming from inside us, so we don't. that can be a problem, late at night. but that's all i'll say. we just had to work it out and eventually i figured out what was going on.

a long steady monsoon we're having - lots of rain, and hopefully more coming. i got lots of weeds pulled and got cow poop put under dirt so it will make real good soil that i can then use to build up rocky hillsides. i'll eventually be able to grow about anything. right now my specialties are potatoes, onions, greenthread, plum trees, and sunflowers. some are growing better than others. at night, it's cool. the rain has been so steady that the ground is saturated, and doesn't really trap the sun. the cows come through and put deep cylindrical holes in the earth, and leave me poop for fertilizer. i have to watch not to step in it, as i go collecting sticks, and filling a bucket with water to put out the fire. but the reward for my hard work is carrying that campfire smell around, especially at night, when a nice smell of campfire makes all the difference in the world.

i had another experience of dizziness this morning - right here at my own chair, and went back to bed, did the epley maneuver, took a pill, and took a nap.

i could say that dizziness is extremely unpleasant, but it's not. the world just spins slightly and you can't focus on anything. the unpleasant aspect is that even being able to walk to the bed can be difficult. That and knowing that if i were driving on a highway, it could be fatal. that part of it and the disruption of one's life is unpleasant. the dizziness itself is just dizziness. i don't know the cause. i don't know whether the epley maneuver actually helped, because soon after i took the pill, i fell asleep. it seemed to help.

in the epley maneuver you simply lay down on the bed, stick your head over the edge (lower than your main body - you also have pillows under your back) and turn your head to either side. it supposedly works for 95% of vertigo sufferers. this is my new world.

i was planning on taking kids to alamo on a supply run, but that plan got shelved and my wife did it instead. it's been raining a lot here and one danger now of going an hour down the hill is that you might get stranded down there - this happened to several people at the same time yesterday. we had set out for the airport at about two and were unable to make it - flight canceled, trip rescheduled, girls in tears and very angry. but there was nothing anyone could do - highway washed out, only one road out of the mountains.

i woke up after a short nap with the house quiet, my wife gone to alamo. in silence i worked on a few of my own things. i'm leaving my hearing aids out for the moment, silence being much more pleasant, and enjoying the soft continuing rain. in some places it's 120, scorching, with fires; here, it's been raining for about a week, with scattered flooding. people are grateful for the rain - it's been scorched-earth dry here for about a year - but the land doesn't soak up rain well here, and any constant rain like what we've had, sometimes doesn't go away very quickly.