FINALIST for the 2021 Oregon Book Award. Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, the essays in Ruby McConnell’s Ground Truth: A Geological Survey of a Life cover the vast terrain of this region – from volcanoes to city parks, the eroding shorelines along the Oregon coast, badlands, lush forests, and city parks. Combining her background as a registered geologist, McConnell’s essays also weave in personal landscapes composed of grief, loss, and optimism for the future of our environment. "The Pacific Northwest that you see today is the result of forty years of radical changes in the culture and economics of what was once a resource-extraction and agriculture-driven region. They are changes so fundamental in nature and scope...that, for those of us from this place, will always be marked by the cataclysmic eruptions of Mt. St. Helens on May 18, 1980." —Ruby McConnell In this collection of 17 essays, geologist Ruby McConnell opens her part natural history, part memoir-in-essays about the Pacific Northwest with the cataclysmic eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May of 1980. She was two years old. "Everything that I have stood direct witness to since, everything I know about this place, happened after we watched the mountain crumble... I was born to a region digging out." In poignant and wide-ranging essays that include the wondrous annual return of salmon, "the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest people," to working at an elementary school evaluating soil and wondering how many kids have cancer, Ground Truth is an extended eulogy to a rapidly changing land, population and society awakening to the realities of logging, climate change, land-use and pollution. The book illuminates the central role of landscapes in our ideas of home and self despite the growing disconnect between modern lifestyle and the environment. McConnell's timely and significant work reveals how the landscapes we inhabit can also help us better understand ourselves.
ISBN-13: 9781732610323
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Overcup Press
Publication Date: 04-14-2020
Pages: 212
Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)
Ruby McConnell is a writer, geologist, and adventuress whose work focuses on nature, the environment, and the relationship between landscape and the human experience. Her experiences as a researcher, activist, and explorer in the wildlands of the western United States led her write A Woman’s Guide to the Wild- the definitive outdoor guide for anyone who identifies as, or loves, women (or just wants to learn how to read a map) and its companion, A Girl’s Guide to the Wild (spring 2019). Ruby believes that positive outdoor experiences are the key to healthy living and protecting the environment and is committed to breaking down barriers that prevent all kinds of people from being outside. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Grain Literary Journal, Oregon Humanities Magazine, and Mother Earth News and was awarded an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in 2016. She is almost always in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, but you can find her online at www.rubymcconnell.com and @RubyGoneWild.
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A lot in life comes down to the story that we tell ourselves. So much of how we are in the world and the choices we make are rooted in the things we imagine to be true, our first impressions, superficial perceptions and assumptions. Most of the time the story is wrong.
Geology is a lot like life.
Geology is always a science of imagination, but the study of geology, particularly in the early years of one's education can be a faith-based experience. It requires one to picture forces like heat and pressure greater than our bodies and technology are able to withstand, often happening over time periods that exceed our lifespans, all of humanity, or even the current configuration of the continents. The study of the earth's materials, how they are laid down and subsequently disrupted, deformed, and refashioned almost always occurs at scales either too large or too small to be grasped in their entirety by the human psyche. Much of what you study as a geologist is non-surficial. It lies beneath the surface, at some great depth far beyond the reach of excavators or drills and what is exposed at the surface is often obscured by surface materials and human development. A lot of geology is about taking what is seen on the surface and telling yourself a story about it.
In the fertile far west, nearly everything is covered with dense forest and deep layers of soil and sediment that obscures direct observation of even the most surficial rocks and processes limiting one's understanding to textbook pictures and what little can be seen from cliff walls and road cuts. This obfuscation creates a gap in understanding that can only be filled with field work and experience, the essential component of any geologic education. It is a tenant of the science so important that it spurred the common adage, 'He who sees the most rocks wins.
To be considered a true geologist then, one must see rocks. For that, most university programs have a simple solution- field camp; a two to ten-week intensive field course surveying as many of the rocks and field techniques your program could cram in. It is designed to be the culmination of one's studies.
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Table of Contents
Land Acknowledgment xi
Sunday, May 18, 1980 1
Accreted Terranes 13
At the Counting Window 23
Sweet Milk, The House in Morning 29
The View from Council Crest 35
What Lies Beneath 43
Wastelands 53
Housekeeping the Columbia River Gorge 63
No Men, No Gun 78
Castles Made of Sand 89
Out of the Woods 102
Five Cents a Bunny 117
What the Ocean Takes 126
Scablands-Love and the Missoula Floods 132
The Necessity of Totality 145
Field Notes from the Digital Forest 153
It's all Going to Fade 168
Acknowledgments 183
Selected Bibliography 186
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