Memory Lane

Street Smart Naturalist · Jul 3, 2025 · 6m · transcript

We recently spent some time in Boston, where Marjorie and I lived between 1996 and 1998. It was a trying time then. We had moved from Moab, Utah, a geological paradise, to a place where the sum total of my geological knowledge was Plymouth Rock. For the first many months I had no connections to the place, to the natural world that inspired and grounded me, as it had done in Utah.

But then one day I was on the Harvard campus looking at Harvard Hall, built in 1766. At its base was a rock that Bostonians and New Yorkers call brownstone, oddly in reference to its color, which seemed more reddish…