Into the Great Wide Open
East to West and Back Again: The Doug and Julie Story
Standing on the rocky Rodeo Beach just outside San Francisco, Julie Cox peeks out from beneath her wide-brimmed sun hat, appraising a sandstone outcrop. Beside her, Doug Dvoracek crawls on his hands and knees. He alternates between inspecting pieces of chert stones and helping Jesse bury me with them. Everyone plays as if we are on a family beach trip: some of us brave the piercing Pacific and others nap or frolic while Doug and Julie act as figurative parents, taking photos and laughing with us.
Our arrival to the West Coast aptly coincides with IFP’s halfway mark. Four weeks ago we slushed through Sapelo Island’s salt marsh, and today we are nearly 3000 miles across the country, studying ophiolites in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. Every year, Doug and Julie save a spot on the itinerary for several days in San Francisco. Positioned near the margin of the North American plate, the city is a hotbed for geologic activity. All along Rodeo Beach, for instance, we see evidence of plate tectonics. The average person looks at this chert and sees little more than colorful rocks, but when the two geologists look at the same land, they recognize microcrystalline silica that only forms on the ocean floor, which is evidence of a major tectonic collision.
Essentially, the Earth, from crust through mantle and into the core, is not a rigid, unchanging body. Physical processes move and interact within it, shaping the climates, landforms, and habitats of the outermost crust. If you imagine the Earth as a cracked hardboiled egg, then the cracks represent plate boundaries beneath the Earth’s surface. Several tectonic plates are constantly in motion, crashing into one another, sliding passed, and pulling apart. About 180 million years ago, as the North American plate travelled westward, it subducted, or moved on top of, a section of oceanic crust called the Farallon plate, pushing it downward. One result of the subduction was a major uplift of oceanic material that accreted onto the content, sometimes in the form of chert beaches. Another was the creation of the San Andreas Fault, which generates the earthquakes for which California is famous.
“I was always fascinated by the natural physical properties of the Earth and how it is always changing,” Julie said in the San Fran campground, the night before her departure. That captivation paired with the desire to dirty her hands, to physically experience the concepts described in textbooks, brought her to the early conclusion that geology was her calling. She took her first college geology class knowing that this was what she wanted to study for the rest of her life.
Doug, on the other hand, required some dabbling before he arrived at the same conclusion. He went through high school without much interest in the sciences and entered college thinking he might major in music or social studies. His first geology class was an accident, but the subject held the same allure for him as it did for Julie. He loved it.
Their shared passion for geology brought each to IFP, back when the program was strictly for geology students. Doug recalls it like this: he was a PhD candidate instructing the course and she was a grad student applying to be a teaching assistant. The pool for TAs was competitive that year so Doug suggested a coin flip. Having had a little crush on Julie, he flipped already knowing who would win. Julie got the job and that was that. And here they are, 23 years later, married and leading yet another IFP excursion from one side of the country to the next, through 20 national parks and monuments dispersed across 13 states. Doug and Julie are IFP veterans.
Julie stares incredulously when I ask why she keeps coming back. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t?” she says. They love it. They love seeing the students get excited about the landscapes we see and the geology underlying it. They love exposing young people to the natural wonders hiding in their own backyard, to experience the landscape morph step-by-step, dipping and erupting and flattening on a gradient ranging from Southeastern greens to Texas yellows to the reds of the Southwest and on.
“It is so critical to know your country, to see it and to understand the land-use issues,” Julie said. Because IFP isn’t about sightseeing, it’s a remarkable learning experience that exposes you to different disciplinary and cultural perspectives. Take San Francisco for example. Portions of San Francisco are built on fragile, unconsolidated silt and clay, held stable only by aquifers lying beneath the surface. Unfortunately, water is in such high demand for urban and agricultural development that they are depleted of groundwater, forcing the silt and clay to compress, resulting in subsidence, or sinking of land.
That’s a problem requiring input from geology, anthropology, and ecology in order to produce a viable solution. Through case studies like the above, our IFP instructors stress the multi dimensions of a given issue, leading us to the conclusion that no single land-use problem can be resolved without the consideration of all variables, and the collaboration of experts in each field. And in the nature of IFP we get to physically go to these places, see evidence of geological processes in the rocks, and experience what life is like for the people, flora and fauna living there. IFP is learning and applying concepts to very real and immediate issues.
“Doug look!” Julie points toward a black mass protruding out of the Pacific Ocean. Doug turns, and the two marvel at the billowing Pillow Basalt, solidified lava from an underwater volcanic eruption. Doug has just returned from a two week break from IFP and it’s Julie’s last few days, so they are taking every opportunity to enthuse about rocks.
“It’s great,” Doug said, “Instead of one person wanting to talk about what they see on the outcrop and the other one not caring, we can have a conversation about it. It’s not romantic, but it’s another connection between us.”
I asked if the two of them have a favorite memory together. Doug told me how they married in their backyard underneath a giant pear tree, how their old black dog Sputnik followed them down the aisle and back 12 years ago. He talks about their first camping trip outside of IFP, how they drove a truck from Athens to North Carolina without working breaks. Julie remembers when they rented a van, threw their dogs in the back and drove to California. They made a pact not to shower for those sixteen days. The way they tell it, the defining Doug and Julie moment exists across many moments, from that first IFP trip in 1992 through every IFP since.
Doug steers while Julie sits shotgun, navigating. The road rolls out before them, open wide and without limit. It could be any road, red-desert highways cutting through Arizona or mountain-flanked curves winding a thousand miles up. It doesn’t matter where. They’re having a great time, music blasting, windows open, going from one camp to the next, on and on.
