The Pinnacle (The hometown newspaper for San Benito County--Hollister, Morgan Hill, San Juan area, California. Publish date: Fri., July 9, 2004). URL: http://www.pinnaclenews.com.

TAXES FOR USEFUL THINGS

by Mark Paxton, "Naturally"

When I consider my federal income taxes, I prefer not to dwell on $1,000 toilet seats and federal make-work programs to teach Plymouth Rock hens in South Dakota how to read Esperanto.

Instead, I like to think that our small, involuntary contribution to the ship of state goes to something more worthwhile, like the United States Geological Survey. The USGS is refreshingly unbureaucratic. Call the office in Menlo Park and a real person is likely to answer. In less than a minute, your question is almost certainly going to be the central point of a discussion with an earth scientist.

The USGS offices are along a quiet stretch of Middlefield Road, surrounded with broad lawns and institutional-looking landscaping. I've never been inside, the occasional open house nothwithstanding. But the low-key atmosphere of the USGS center in Menlo Park belies serious work.

If, like me, you read maps with the same ardor that many of us read novels, you know USGS. The topographical map series that details the geography of this great nation is without equal. At the largest scale, USGS topo maps indicate individual structures as small, black squares.

I recall one occasion when we peered at a map of a small quadrangle of the central Sierra, wondering at the unfamiliar symbols. We hiked to a pass just above 10,000 feet, pausing beside two small lakes so stuffed with brook trout that fishing for the quickly came to feel more like swatting flies than stalking wild game.

We were following a trade route that the Paiute and Awanhee peoples used to exchange goods for more than 1,000 years. Not far past the two alpine lakes, a valley opened, and a ghost town appeared. The swale, at almost 11,000 feet, was just experiencing spring. It was early September, and snow still dotted the north-facing slopes. Flowers carpeted the ground, covered in plants only a few inches high. It was here that our maps indicated some mystery with those unknown symbols. The scratches on our map denoted mine shafts and adits -- tunnels driven into hillsides.

Here, far above the treeline, people once scratched at the earth in search of precious metals. No interpretive signs smeared the landscape. No one shared it with us. The vista was ours. Small cabins, built of notched and hand-hewn timbers, dotted the place. Shafts filled with snowmelt pocked the landscape, unfenced and unexplained.

Was it gold? Silver? What drove men to peck at the summit of the Sierra? The town bore no name, no explanatory text. We would have missed it, but for the magical map. The map had not determined our route -- we were out for a walk. But it promised something at the end of the rainbow.

For those of us in San Benito and Santa Clara Counties, the USGS offers more than the promise of adventure revealed through maps.

The USGS is not the sole province of cartographers. Earth scientists are examining Terra Incognita -- the unknown land that lies beneath us. That's of particular importance in our home turf. We sit atop an unstable pudding of earth

It was USGS scientists from the Menlo Park lab that first advanced the idea that the earth was composed of a mosaic of floating islands. Plate tectonics was the name, and the notion of immutable geography was forever sundered. The USGS has a quiet presence in our area. As seismically active as it is, it would be impossible to overlook southern Santa Clara and San Benito Counties.

There's a trailer stuffed with equipment at Hollister Hills State Park, astride the San Andreas Fault. Simple meters monitor the creep of the earth along a number of lesser faults. As a boy, my good friend John Busch was charged with reporting changes on a creep meter at the edge of the family dairy farm to the USGS.

USGS scientists produced data that stopped construction of a nuclear power plant near Point Reyes in Marin County -- a Pacific Gas and Electric scheme that might have had catastrophic consequences, given that it was located directly over a previously-unknown fault.

USGS scientists also revealed that the ancient volcano that encompasses the Mammoth Mountain resort area might awaken within our lifetimes with the next in a series of colossal eruptions. The chamber of commerce did not greet the news enthusiastically, to say the least.

But USGS responded with a color-coded series of alert levels, and the public's right to know found common ground with the business community's need to quell unfounded fears.

It's the kind of consumer-friendly science that the USGS consistently delivers, even while the rest of us come not to expect it from federal agencies.

Feel a tremor? Punch up your Web browsers and search for USGS Menlo Park. A few clicks away, and you'll find where the quake was, how big it was, how deep it was, what fault it was on, as well as a list of all recent activity in the area. The quake mapping is world-wide, so if you want to know what's going in in Java, it's right there.

The Menlo Park office turns 50 this year. It's a birthday that I choose to celebrate with the notion that that's where my taxes are spent.
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Mark Paxton lives in Hollister and works in Morgan Hill. His e-mail address is paxtonm@hollinet.com.

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