Along the Way: Rocks tell the story

If Richard Conway has rocks in his head, it’s only because he has them in his heart.

So when this brilliant retired professor tells you the Tucson Mountains were — once upon a geologic time — smack dab on top of the Catalinas, you don’t wait for a punch line.

You can take it to the memory bank.

When he says ancient oceans flowed where we’re living, right here in Southern Arizona, he knows what he’s talking about.

And when he comes right out and says Elephant Head is igneous rock ... well, maybe you’d like to raise your hand and debate him. I thought Igneous was some guy’s first name.

For 35 years a professor of geology in the Seattle area, Conway, who lives in Arivaca, spoke last week at the Green Valley Forum.

He left no stone unturned in a lecture as fascinating as it was scholarly.

Ordinary people might look upon some of our landforms and see large piles of rocks. Conway sees history.

Lots and lots of history.

For example, if you scratch your head at the thought of the Tucson Mountains, west of the city, once resting on top of the Catalinas, several miles away to the north, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

This hunk of Earth we live on in Southern Arizona was once just across the state line, so to speak, from South America and Africa. Antarctica was hardly more than a stone’s throw away.

We were joined to those now-faraway places as part of Pangea, a super-continent that existed about 250 million years ago before the continents separated into their present configuration.

And before that, there were other super-continents.

It’s like we’re on a very slow-moving merry-go-round of faulting, tilting, sliding, stretching, etc.

There are amazing facts — “indisputable,” Conway says — in these things called big plates, little plates, colliding plates, home plates and dinner plates. OK, I just threw in the last two.

“We live in a flash of geologic time,” Conway said. “And we have no idea what’s to come.”

In rocks, he finds clues to vanished landscape and the history of ancient places. He picks up a stone or sees a formation and reads the secrets of how lands came to be.

Conway has this singular and unerring faculty to say the final thing about rocks, beyond which there is nothing left to be said.

Discussing that stuff about faulting, tilting and sliding, he talked about mountains and ranges as “stretch marks.” The Catalinas, he noted, were formed from stretching.

Some of the events Conway described take billions of years. Others—volcanoes, for instance —happen in one big explosion.

Arivaca Lake, one of his favorite locations, “is an incredibly peaceful place,” he said. “In a boat, you think of all the peacefulness — not of the violent history that formed it.”

Geologic time, he said “doesn’t tell time, but rather a sequence of events.”

Proving his passion is as great as his perspective, Conway said geology “is my joy ... I’ve spent a lifetime studying rocks. It began when I was nine years old.”

He calls the Southern Arizona landscape “fabulous,” and told his audience:

“If a geologist is not close to rocks, there’s a huge emptiness that has to be dealt with.”

A man who shines an amazing light in a craggy land, Richard Conway will never be far from rocks as long as he’s our neighbor in this part of the state.

Former Tucson Citizen columnist Corky Simpson was the first inductee into the Arizona Associated Press Sports Editors Hall of Fame. He writes a Friday commentary for the Green Valley News.