I had a nice birthday today, with many nice greetings and wishes from family and friends, including those on FB. It was also a regular workday, but I did manage to get in a hike out at Santa Susana, and the day was gorgeous if a bit windy. The wind knows how much I love it and wanted to help me celebrate : "Happy Birthday, Adam! from The Wind".
This was mostly a geology hike, just because of my "Forbidden Archaeology" book which I am still working on. Though it is dry reading, it is incredibly fascinating, and it has me thinking about the age of things when I go on my hikes. At Aliso, for instance, I wonder about the age of the creek bed.
At Santa Susana, geologists say that the sandstone formations that make up the foundation of the mountains are 80 million years old, and that those giant boulders - made of compressed sand and weighing megatons - were once underwater. So the last few times I have gone there, since I started the book, I've been looking for fossils or fossil outlines in the boulders. Just stuff like the outline of a long-gone shell or plant.
There are places where you are pretty sure you are seeing such an outline, but nothing conclusive. I need an archaeologist to come with me so I will know what I am looking at. I did see some pieces of boulders that were broken open, and on the inside faces of these, you see small pebbles of various colors that are embedded in the sandstone. I touched those pebbles and you cannot budge them. What I wonder is how long they have been embedded? Many if not most of the giant boulders appear to be made up only of sandstone, with no visible embedded pebbles.
Anyhow, I am All Geologied Out because of this book (an observation I believe I've made before), and so when I touch those pebbles in the boulder, I wonder "how long have they been there"?, and the potential amount of time blows my mind. It just blows me off the map, really, to think that something could be sitting there in one place for any great length of time. I mean, at Santa Susana there are old horse troughs that are still in place that have been there for over a hundred years. That alone blows my mind, just because developers have changed so much of the landscape in Los Angeles since 1940 or so, and I am grateful and I guess a bit surprised that they have never gotten their hands on Santa Su. Hopefully the Indian history there will prevent them from ever trying.
But back to the pebbles in the sandstone.
Okay, you geologists. You are telling me that the sandstone boulders at Santa Susana are 80 million years old. I will take your word for it. If that is true, then how long have those pebbles been enmeshed inside the boulders?
What it looks like, is if the sandstone which makes up the boulder was at one point soft in consistency, like bread dough. And the pebbles look like raisins in the dough, spread out at random but more-or-less evenly spaced intervals, just as in a loaf of raisin bread.
If the sandstone was in malleable form at one point, like a dough, before being compressed by massive pressure, were the pebbles then trapped inside some of the formations while they hardened?
If so, have those pebbles been cemented inside those boulders for millions of years?
If that is the case, then I just blew my mind even more. Partly because I can reach out and touch the pebbles that I saw today, but even more because I am amazed by the prospect that something like the pebble boulder can sit wide out in the open in this modern age of history that we live in.
I have read, in some book or another (perhaps one of Dr. Farrell's) that the concept of "history", of the idea of "keeping track of things in chronological order", was only undertaken because, in the overall goings-on of human beings, there was always a structure of "winning" and "losing". Conquest and surrender. Fighting.
And at some point, somebody decided that it would be a good idea to start writing things down.
For a long time before that, nothing was written down. There was no writing. There was no concept of why yesterday was important, or at least why it was important enough to catalog.
The exploration of that idea will have to wait for another day, however.
It is the idea that something has been "sitting there" not just through our lifetimes but for eons.
Grim came over tonight to show me the James Comey interview, which he taped. You have probably seen it, and you know that we have a situation here in America that is untenable. Comey helped to elect Trump with his ill-timed last minute announcement about the Hillary Clinton email probe, but I think he is redeeming himself by writing his book and speaking out on national television against this charlatan.
On the FOIA front, I am gonna start preparing to make Privacy Act requests to the CIA, for deceased persons who were involved in 1989. People like Howard Schaller. One of the provisions of the Privacy Act is that records of deceased people are no longer protected by any of the FOIA regulations. Unfortunately, any classified records would still be protected and would probably generate another Glomar response if a person like Howard was inquired about. But I am gonna try anyway.
I won't start with Howard, though. I am gonna start with my Dad. I figure that, to keep things as secret as they have been for all this time, that somebody would've had to have spoken to my parents at some point. Mom and Dad always denied any knowledge of 1989, and I tend to believe them, but......
I am gonna start Privacy Act requests on deceased people anyway, just to see what comes back.
I've gotta do something. I just turned 58. This thing happened 29 years ago. That's half my life.
So I've gotta do something.
I will keep you posted of course. See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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