The Creek Journal: 02/01/2011

New Flowers and Old Trash

Spent a good deal of the day tearing off the last of the metal roof from the old trailer house and gathering up scraps of metal and trash from around the place. Then, surrounded by nastiness, we found quince blooming 30 feet or so north of the trailer. (again, pretty sorry photos, but I had only my phone with me)

Five petals and small dark green leaves. The bush sprang up dozens of shoots to a height of ten or so feet.

The pond is down 0.5 inches.

Tearing off a Roof

Here's what things looked like yesterday when I was out at The Creek trying to tear off the metal roof of the double-wide we are demolishing. We will salvage the metal (for small beer money), as well as make more available room in the large waste canisters we will rent next week when we tear down the entire structure and have it hauled off.

That's what we're calling Mr. Rollins' Hog Shop at the far end of the structure. Hopefully, we'll be able to separate it from the double-wide that is to be broken down next Monday. The small yellow handle barely visible at the far end left side of the trailer house is the friendly/devilish pick ax that seemed to work best for ripping metal from the roof. Primitive, blunt-force downloaded upon a trailer house roof will damage quickly the flimsy construction of the home. Between blows of the pick ax, the cool rippling sound of the creek and the call of our neighborhood hawk reminded me why I was up there.

The level of the pond has fallen back to the original marker on the measuring rod I placed there in the shallows a week or so ago. It had risen an inch in the mean time.

Geology in Lavender and Green

Here's a brief geological note from Harlin:
"When I looked at the picture of Vaughn's house from across the creek, I noticed the rocks made a line all the way down to the creek. Then I looked at that map I found:

http://www.geo.utexas.edu/courses/420k/PDF_files/Marble_Falls_geo_map.pdf

Attached [below] is a little piece of the map and a little piece of the Google Earth aerial view. It seems I read that some geological formations can be traced on aerial maps, and there does look like there might be a correlation between the edge of the Marble Falls limestone and the rock bluff behind Vaughn's house."

In the photo above (left), our little oval-shaped pond is featured in green, south of where where the upper yellow line bends. That same angle is represented in the second image (right), and the same angle is shown about where the blue creek makes its eastward bend. These lines (yellow in the left image and black in the right image) represent a fault line that appears to be somewhat responsible for the location of the creek.
The other important piece of information here is that the lavender shaded area west of that bend (and including most of our little property) represents the Marble Falls Limestone formation. The green shaded area (including the bluff just east of the creek) represents the Smithwick Formation. The MF Limestone is the lower formation. We read in one source, "At the top [of the Marble Falls limestone] the formation is sharply limited and the Smithwick shale succeeds it with perfect accordance in dip. The formation is named for the typical exposures at Marble Falls, Burnet County" [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/books/landscapes/publications/txu-oclc-301083/txu-oclc-301083-08.html]

(The black and white road on the geologic map above is CR 342-C.)

Here are the layers of the top portion of the Marble Falls Limestone:

In Feet.
Top, black shale.
Thin-bedded black shale	20
Fine-grained dark-gray limestone	15
Thin-bedded and massive black limestone	30
Brownish-gray subcrystalline to crystalline limestone	30
Thin-bedded dark-gray or black fossiliferous limestone with Productus and crinoids	4
Fine-grained crystalline gray limestone	4
Fine grained gray limestone with molluscan fossils	20
Dense black or dark-gray limestone	2
Light and dark gray mottled limestone with chert nodules	5
Mottled gray limestones with crinoid stems 26 inches long	5
Limestone conglomerate	1
Gray limestone without chert	2
Gray cherty limestone	8
Black limestone with cherty layers	8
Black evenly bedded limestone with cherty layers	9
Massive gray crystalline limestone	8
Gray cherty limestone	25
Gray crystalline limestone	6
Fault.
Irregular-bedded gray limestone	17
Black shaly limestone with chert layers and lenses	22
Massive gray limestone, with crinoid stems	60
Fault.
Dark cherty limestone	7
Dove-colored limestone with black bands and lenses	40
Conglomerate	20
Ellenburger limestone.	___
	368

According to the USGS, the Smithwick Formation is dated as:

"Phanerozoic | Paleozoic | Carboniferous Pennsylvanian-Middle [Atoka]

Comment: (fr. Llano Sheet, Geol. Atlas of Texas, 1981) In type locality east of Marble Falls, claystone, siltst., and ss. Clayst. predom. laminated or burrowed, carbonaceous; illite with less than 15 percent quartz and muscovite silt; ss mostly contains rock frags. (sublitharenite of Folk) and minor but stratigraphically important sandy ls.-pebble conglomerate derived from the Marble Falls Limestone; sole marks and a wide variety of sedimentary structures present in sandstone; plant material abundant in ss and clayst.; fossils includesome plants, locally abdt. trilobites, brachiopods, and cephalopods, thickness about 300 ft. In Mason County, Smithwick consists of black shale with ls. beds in lower part, which is laterally gradational to Marble Falls Ls., lower boundary climbs stratigraphically westward."

http://tin.er.usgs.gov/geology/state/sgmc-unit.php?unit=TXPAsw;0

Regarding the Smithwick formation, we read:

"The Smithwick shale, named from the old town of Smithwick, in Burnet County, consists of soft, very dark or nearly black carbonaceous shale in which are included a number of sandstone lentils. Being soft and easily disintegrated, the formation is not sufficiently well exposed for accurate measurement of its thickness. It is, moreover, overlapped by the Cretaceous strata. Probably the thickness of the beds exposed in Burnet County does not exceed 400 feet. The base of the formation is everywhere well defined, the change from the underlying limestone being abrupt. The formation comprises the latest Paleozoic rocks of the region, and the period of erosion indicated by the beveling of its beds corresponds to the great interval between Paleozoic and Cretaceous sedimentation. The formation is confined to the southeastern part of the Burnet quadrangle and to a small area on Riley Mountain in the Llano quadrangle."

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/books/landscapes/publications/txu-oclc-301083/txu-oclc-301083-08.html

The Marble Falls Limestone and this portion of the Smithwick Formation are both of lower Pennsylvanian age. In case you were wondering, the Pennsylvanian Epoch of the Carboniferous Period ranges from 318 to 299 million years old. During this time, the first reptiles evolved.

[more to come]

Friends and Flags

I found a Texas flag amid the trailer-house detritus, tied it to a fine pipe with electric wire, and set it in a hole for all to admire. So now that one insignificant flag flies over the place, we need our friends to each make their own flag. When the friend comes to the Creek for a morning or a day, she or he brings the flag, raises it high, and all will know who is there. So get creating your flag, friends. Jimmy Hendrix said something about flags in one of my favorite of his songs ("If 6 Was 9"):
(Yeah)
(Sing a song, brother)
If the sun refused to shine,
I don't mind, I don't mind.
(Yeah)
If the mountains fell in the sea,
Let it be, it ain't me.
Got my own world to live through
And I ain't gonna copy you.

Now, if 6 turned up to be 9,
I don't mind, I don't mind.
If all the hippies cut off their hair,
I don't care, I don't care.
Did, 'cos I got my own world to live through
And I ain't gonna copy you.

White-collar conservatives flashing down the street
Pointing their plastic finger at me.
They're hoping soon my kind will drop and die,
But I'm gonna wave my freak flag high . . . HIGH!

Hah, hah
Falling mountains just don't fall on me
Point on mister Buisnessman,
You can't dress like me.
Nobody know what I'm talking about
I've got my own life to live
I'm the one that's gonna have to die
When it's time for me to die
So let me live my life the way I want to.

Yeah . . .
Sing on brother,
Play on brother . . .

So I'm thinking about what sort of freak flag I'll design . . .

We had a beautiful day with Hope and Tony, then Harlin and Rita, then Susan. Harlin and I climbed the bluff across the creek. When they all left, Carol and I finished watering vines and trees, cleaning the yard area, and smoothing out the road.

Here's a view from up on the bluff above the creek.

And a beautiful boulder up on the same bluff.

And three or more stones from the stonefield (thank you, Harlin):

Road repairs with pick and hoe.

On a completely different subject (really?), I thought I'd say this about our experience of suffering: to witness others' suffering and to engage with it by touching their sadness and by going skin-to-skin with their pining, we heighten our awareness of life among human beings. And this may not change what we do with our days, but it turns up the color of our days. Like taking a black and white movie and slowly turning the knob on the set that shows us now the same movie but in colors.

The Cost of Electricity

Dropped by PEC yesterday to pay the four hundred ninety-one dollars to have somebody drive out and tie big wires from the transformer pole to the southwest corner of Mr. Rollins' Hog Shop where David Dragon installed the meter box and other stuff. Total cost of David's bit: another three hundred something dollars. This is the price of me not getting the exercise I need from hauling six gallons of pond water at a time up the hillside to the new orchard and blackberry vines.

Richard and I digging the first holes for fruit trees.