Dear Marion,

Your letter about the past was very impressive to me.
Thank you I hope I'm not being presumptuous when I write
that I consider us in essential agreement
concerning our experience of the past,
as distinct from the perception of literature,
music and the visual arts as the experience of ultimate immediacy.
I must be cautious not to argue for the sake of argument,
not to find disagreements where there are none.

I was introducted to paleontology and geology by George and Anna
Stose, husband and wife geologists who frequented our mountains 
during the summers when I was growing up. They would stay at
the house of William and Mary Buchanan, - now the Buchanan Inn
at Green Cove.
http://www.thebuchananinn.com/history.php
The Buchanans were devoted and enthusiastic patients of my
father's. I'm not certain whether it was some minor medical
problem or pure curiosity on the part of the Stoses that
blossomed into a friendship between the families which extended
over several years. They stopped by at the Medical Center
each summer of their field work in Konnarock.  It was I on
whom the Stoses lavished most of their attention.
They invited me to accompany them on various of their field trips;
and I remember vividly Mr. Stose's acknowledgement that the deep
cuts in the side of the mountains required for the tracks of the
lumber railroads served as indispensable windows into the surface
of the earth.  I also remember his explanation that our two
principal mountains, Mount Rogers and White Top, were extinct
volcanoes; I remember and his description of the metavolcanic
outcroppings of metamorphous rocks which dot the landscape,
as well as his instructions about searching for fossils in the
sedimentary shale of the valleys. One one of my trips north,
I stopped to visit the Stoses, then fully retired, in their home
in Arlington or Alexandria VA, I can't remember which. I also
can't remember whether or not I spent the night. 

From the Internet, I glean the following:

_     The, 1920's and 30's saw the emergence of
_     a young geologist who was to become a legendary
_     figure in Appalachian geology.  George W. Stose,
_     a "hands on" geologist molded in the style of
_     19th century field scientists, would earn his
_     reputation at the U.S. Geological Survey by his
_     legendary field mapping abilities. Stose gained
_     a special interest in the South Mountain
_     metavolcanics, probably as a result of his
_     association with Florence Bascom who was employed
_     by the survey during the summers.  Bascom gained
_     esteemed scientific recognition for her founding
_     of the geology department at Bryn Mawr, but also
_     did geological mapping in the summer season.
_     Perhaps it was no coincidence that Stose
_     eventually married Anna Jonas, a top protege of
_     Bascom at Bryn Mawr.
_     
_     About 1930, George Stose began a geological
_     field survey of Adams County in a cooperative
_     venture with the Pennsylvania Geological Survey.
_     The result of this effort was the publication
_     entitled "The Geology and Mineral Resources of
_     Adams County, Pennsylvania" in 1932.  Stose was
_     able to report two more occurrences of piemontite
_     which he found near the village of Wenksville
_     during some earlier mapping assignments.  The two
_     locations, about a mile apart, produced the richest
_     and most abundant occurrences thus far.  This now
_     brought the piemontite location count to five sites,
_     and no further scheelite than the few original
_     Williams specimens.  In spite of the number of
_     locations, the piemontite remained a rare commodity
_     in Pennsylvania mineral collections, because the
_     locality descriptions provided by the early
_     researchers remained vague.

All this in the context of the consideration of my encounter
with the past, implicit in the Stoses' account of the volcanic
origin of my mountains. Of course I believed them, but I never
spent a single sleepless night over the possibility that an
eruption of White Top might turn Konnarock into a latter-day
Pompeii. The volcano scenario was an element in my conceptual
world, appropriately susceptible to reservations and doubt.
But real and compelling and immediate were the bees paying their
visits to the golden rod by the wayside, the towering cumulus
clouds sailing across the blue sky, the wild cherry, locust and
maple trees swaying in the breezes of summer, and the two wise
and kindly grandparent substitutes who were more concerned about
rocks than about anything else in the world, and who treated
our family as if it were a rare mineral formation that they
had unexpectly discovered in the backwoods landscape.

Margaret is packing. I've cancelled next weeks' patients, and
as of 2:30 p.m. we're preparing to set out to go back to Konnarock
tomorrow morning - by car. Margrit seems to be quite ill. She's
continuing to vomit, is at least mildly disoriented, states that
she couldn't meet today's reservation, will come on the same flight
tomorrow, but doesn't know when flight departs, and can't remember
what I told her earlier in the conversation. We expect to arrive
Tuesday evening.

Jochen