Dear friends,
For those of you just joining us, this is the weekly journal/newsletter in which I:
incoherently describe what it’s like to live the Wicked Delicate documentary filmmaker life, ostensibly with the idea that others might learn from my mistakes
make various self-promotional remarks, thinly veiled as nature writing & self-deprecation
lodge unnecessary complaints about minor nuisances in contemporary culture
make a surprising number of typos and grammatical errors, a regrettable situation which I suggest we all overlook or chalk up to the fact that these are more like stream-of-consciousness letters than any sort of professional publication
work through some things I’m thinking about, since writing has always been my way of finding my way forward when I’m a bit lost
Anyway, it’s very easy to unsubscribe, and you should never feel bad about this gentle “no thank you.” Filmmakers are quite accustomed to rejection! I’ll speak about rejection more next week, but today I would like to say a few words about croutons.
More specifically, I would like to show you a picture of some croutons we received on a salad this weekend. My family and I were en route north for a night of camping. Stopping for lunch at a clam shack on Route 1, we made the bold choice of adding a salad to our otherwise very deep fried order, and were delighted to receive a small packet of croutons tossed in. Each crouton was smaller than a die, but beyond this I am powerless to express the size and charm of these little buddies. Even a picture doesn’t do them justice:
Many geologists, when snapping a picture of some rock, add a rock hammer or Swiss Army knife to the scene for scale. Having left home without my rock hammer, I plunked my Swiss Army tool on the picnic table to give some sense of the crouton size.
It was at this moment at the picnic table that I was plunged into a feeling of great regret for having failed to film someone before he died. I’m talking about a man named Sam Bowring, who I met during a fellowship I had at MIT ten years ago. Sam was a geologist, and at the time of our meeting he held the record for having found the oldest rock specimen on the planet Earth. He found it up in Canada. I don’t know if the record holds and it doesn’t interest me greatly to look it up.
I sought out Sam because I was trying to wade into a different era of filmmaking for myself, one where I tangled with difficult-to-imagine, difficult-to-film things like geologic time. But Sam probably agreed to meet with me because my resumé at that stage was fairly activist in nature, and for the first half hour Sam just had a good rant about the ways of the modern world, as if we were co-conspirators already in some grand project to make the world care about things that matter. I nodded politely but didn’t quite rise to the occasion. It was rocks I was after.
Eventually we got back into all things geology. He showed me pictures (including the Swiss Army knife for scale!), he brought out some rocks, he let me sit in on his incomprehensible meetings with graduate students where they talked about new ways of dating old rocks. There were echoes of things I’d heard before, zircon crystals and half-lives of decay. I loved it. He invited me to join a field trip with his undergraduates, a daylong tromp along Route 2 to western Massachusetts, and I asked him if I might invite my mother to join as well. Sam readily agreed, and the following week my mother and I were joining an early morning motorcade of MIT Earth and Planetary Sciences vans out of Cambridge and into the wilds.
Or sort of wilds. The first stop was a road cut. Turns out geologists love road cuts; public infrastructure money has been spent blasting hillocks apart to make roads straighter, in the process yielding fresh rock faces for inspecting stratigraphy. Everybody wins! (I’m sure not everybody wins ecologically, but for now we are in the world of the rock hound!) Out came the hand lenses and the rock hammers. Whack, crack, split. My mother and I wondered, whose rocks are these? But this was the wrong mind set. From what time are these, that was more the question. How did they get here. What do they tell us about the ancient unseen worlds.
The day passed in a sort of dream. Mom brought pumpkin chocolate chip cake to contribute to the geology picnic, Sam held forth in increasingly difficult terrain about the glaciers, the terranes, the intrusions, you name it. And in his easy navigation of geologic timescales, I suddenly found a strange comfort. I do not know hot to put it into words, but from that moment on, all the way through to today, most all I will read at night are geology books.
As you perhaps have experienced, nighttime can be a great opportunity for anxiety about this or that. Geology helps me fight back. I cannot say precisely why. It’s not some insipid notion that “in the grand scheme of things, we do not matter,” it’s nothing like that at all. But in reading about rocks, over and over, over and over, for ten years now, I often find the same strange calm that came over me that day with Sam.
I should note that Sam was not really a calming presence in the traditional sense. He had a wry sense of humor and didn’t mind giving his students a ribbing for asking stupid questions. But there was something about the way he held it all in his mind, even as he walked with confidence across difficult rocky terrain, that clicked for me — maybe this is what minds and bodies are for, I thought. We can walk and interpret and love the real world underneath our feet (and underneath our rock hammers!), even as we time-travel through unfathomable geologic eons in our minds and imaginations. We can inhabit the physical world, but in a sense travel beyond it, even at a road cut outside of Fitchburg.
I didn’t stay in touch with Sam after I left MIT, and I never captured his ideas on film. Years later, when filming with a Maine geologist, I brought up Sam, and the geologist told me that he’d died suddenly of a brain tumor.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F234782db-285e-411f-b920-3741ad223b79_3024x4032.heic)
Back on Route 1, we did not open the croutons, and the kids wanted milk shakes. We had to talk to our younger son about the precariousness of ordering a cherry milkshake, lest they use real frozen cherries and don’t grind them up enough, and then what if cherry bits get lodged in the straw? Anyway you get the picture, life swept us up in its trivialities. Although, come to think of it, there’s no real telling what’s trivial and what’s not, is there, there’s no universal scale for what’s important. Maybe cherry milk shakes are important. Maybe it was not important to film with Sam, and more important to just remember him now and again when I’m out in the world, let him stay with us that way, ten years later, twenty years later. That’s more the way of the rocks, and probably what Sam would have wanted anyway — a kind of time travel.