You mentioned in your first volume of Time Travel that bringing the technical down to where people could better understand it was one of your interests.
I have a bibliography of over 200 publications, and I’d say that 75% of them are for the layman rather than for the professional. Even this last one that I handed you, see, it semi-professional. That’s a publication to needle geologists to go out and do something that needs to be done. I propose an outrageous hypothesis which I fully expect to be shot down, but I do it because that’s the way to get things done these days. If you’re brash enough, people will take notice just to shoot you down.
Sort of like your Columbia River work and I remember the outrageous hypothesis of the cataclysms in the Columbia.
I have another one that got a lot of attention. Was the case of the counter-clockwise river? The Nehalem you know starts out and flows east and then northeast and then north and then northwest and then west and then southwest and then south and it comes back within 12 miles of its headwater! So I proposed some outrageous hypothesis to explain that.
With your interests about bringing it down to the layman level geology, can you attribute any of that to your experience at Crater Lake?
Oh very definitely! You see, my teaching had been mostly as a teaching assistant at Berkeley, and I taught in several classes for three years. One class we had 1,000 students in Wheeler Auditorium. “Norman Ethan Allen Hines/ upon the screen in Wheeler shines/lantern slides of various kinds/to amuse the feebler minds/among his class of clinging vines.” We had seven teaching assistants for that class and we each met seven times a week, so 50 sessions of lab in that class. Well, that was just one of the classes they had down there. We had field trips there of 1,000 students, 30 busses. This gave me a lot of background in interpreting things to people who knew very little about geology. So, when I came to Crater Lake I had a real background, and I enjoyed giving the talks and making the diagrams. Dr. Hodge at Oregon, too, was very great at doing chalk work with colored chalk on the board. And I even was able to take two courses from William Morris Davis.
Oh, you were?
He was there in Oregon for a summer teaching two courses, and I took one for credit and audited the other and was very careful with colored pencil to copy down all of his colored diagrams. He too was a great teacher!
