I’m driving east on the Lincoln Highway, old US-30 in western Nebraska, 10 miles west of Kimball.  Interstate 80 is only a few miles south, but I avoid high speed roadways whenever possible.  I’m cruising at 50 mph in a 65 zone.  The highway is essentially deserted, just the nearby BNSF railroad tracks, an occasional freight train, and a couple of ranchers casually passing me in their pickups.  It’s a sunny spring morning on the high plains.  There’s smoke in the air from Canadian wildfires, but the wind has been forecast to change direction, clearing the skies for better visibility.  I’m on a birding trip, trying to identify avians on their way north during the short spring migration.

I find Bob Dylan on my Apple Music app and select Highway 61 Revisited, one of my favorite road trip albums.  The first tune, Like A Rolling Stone, evokes fond memories of my college days and long-ago journeys on the open road enjoying the freedom of movement, of space and time in remote places.  The tune is apparently about a former girlfriend, a spurned lover, a vendetta of sorts to get even, a road trip about sadness and anger along the highway of life. 

My mind wanders as the song progresses, about my geologic past, my retirement experiences, my advanced age, lots of things.  My mental meanderings shift to thoughts of creativity.  A fascinating word.  Creativity.  I ponder Dylan for a moment, then other song writers I admire, artists, performers, designers, writers, academics, scientists.  Dylan has been an extremely creative artist, a poet and musician with a good sense of timing.  Like a Rolling Stone was his big break from acoustic folk guitar to electric rock.  The song topped the music charts for weeks and garnered Dylan a place in music history. 

So, what is creativity anyway? Is it something we are born with (genes), something we can acquire with proper training, or both?  Do we all have the ability for creative genius?  The Cambridge dictionary defines creativity as the ability to use original and unusual ideas to produce tangible results.  Wikipedia says it’s the use of imaginative or original ideas in the production of artistic or other work.  Social scientists have created numerous creativity models and theories.  Studies of creativity are important to the business community, to psychologists, cognitive scientists, educators, doctors, and others.  We may soon ask the question:  Will Artificial Intelligence generate creativity?  Lots of food for thought.

To be inventive, one must have tools to reach a goal: curiosity and a desire to think deeply about a subject or problem.  In other words, to think outside the box and have the drive to produce results.  Enthusiasm.  Creativity is a very personal process too.  We create for ourselves as much as for others in order to feel good.  Individuals often work with others to achieve creative results. 

Leigh Medeiros, a screenwriter and story analyst (ghmedeiros.com) says we are born to create, to make something out of nothing.  Everything we do, all our thoughts and actions, she says, bear results.  Unfortunately, there are malevolent intentions too.  History is full of examples of creative genius to do violence, to gain power, to kill or destroy.  There may be other problems with creativity.  People can have a miserable time creating.  A fun time is not guaranteed.  Others will never be happy with their result.  I’m thinking of Ayn Rand’s ideal man, Howard Roark, in the Fountainhead, an idealist who battles against conformity, an intransigent architect unable to compromise his standards of creativity.  But what about the mass of humanity, the millions and millions that live day to day, on the edge, scrounging for the basics in life?  There may be a lot of missed creativity.  Life is unfair.

I’m off the road now, at a campsite, but still thinking about creativity and the creative potential in geology.  I’m pondering the skills I developed, my strengths and weaknesses, and my career.  Geology is an excellent playing field for inventive and innovative ideas.  The idea comes first of course, maybe a lengthy thought process or just a sudden brain burp.  Geologists work in a large, often hidden playing field.  Rocks may be covered by vegetation, obscured by recent weathering, or just buried.  Geologic phenomena can be tricky and deceptive, an exercise involving four-dimensional space.  Scientists apply the scientific method to test hypotheses to tell a story based on available data and their interpretations.  This requires academic training, experience, reliance on the work of others, and a fascination for ideas.  I’ve often wondered how inventive I was during my career.  How successful was I at generating unique ideas and creative stories? One experience comes to mind.

Sometime during the 1990s, I was observing some rock outcroppings with two colleagues, fellow geologists and friends whom I had worked with for several years.  We had just walked through nearly 7,000 feet of gently-dipping sedimentary rocks deposited by meandering rivers over 10 million years of time during the Cretaceous Period.  We called these ancient rocks the Shineberger beds, honoring a nearby creek.  According to radioactive isotope data, we were traversing 85-million-year old strata.  We had been slowly walking uphill through the entire sequence, finally reaching the very top of the beds.  We looked around.  This was remote Montana country, a region of spectacular mountains, rushing water, panoramas of breathtaking beauty. 

Our goal was to describe the geologic history of the Shineberger beds, to tell the hidden story of poorly exposed shales, sandstones, and conglomerates laid down when the Pacific plate was colliding head on with North America.  We had done our homework, reading the few previous regional studies, and hashing over numerous ideas about their origin.  We had already gathered information about their maximum age, some of the changes in the rivers that created them, their fossils, and evidence of distant volcanic activity.  We were far to the east of long-eroded Cretaceous mountain ranges, ancient summits uplifted by that continental collision, ranges much older than today’s lofty peaks.  As we inched our way uphill, we hammered rock ledges, examining fragments, looking for clues that might reveal more Shineberger secrets, a fitting conclusion to their story.  Until now the pebbles and cobbles were comprised of well-rounded and polished quartz and chert, a few granites and some volcanic rocks, all resistant pebbles derived from 300-million-year old Paleozoic sedimentary and igneous rocks eroded from those extinct western mountains in what is now Idaho. 

We approached a resistant ledge of conglomerate, gazed down at the rocky knob and instantly saw new, previously unrecognized pebbles, thumb-sized clasts of limestone from a geologic formation that resembled a rock unit now exposed less than a mile away.  These pebbles contained distinctive fossil fragments, tiny fresh water snails that lived in shallow limy lakes along the western margin of a vast intracontinental sea a mere 150 million years ago.  Later, the limestones were buried deeply.  Limestone pebbles are relatively soft and don’t survive long distances when carried downstream.  They were clearly eroded from an uplifted highland containing beds of the soft limestone, a mountain range very close to where we were now standing, its remnants in that outcropping less than a mile away.  We looked excitedly at the limestone pebbles again, then at each other.  It was one of those rare electric moments, a significant discovery.  The uppermost Shineberger beds were telling us that the ancestral mountains far to the west were migrating eastward, younger thrusted uplifts of fossiliferous limestones punching up through the crust, exposed to the elements of erosion. 

We found more outcroppings and more limestone pebbles supporting a story of thrust-faulted mountains in modern-day Montana.  We included the pebble data along with our other information about the Shineberger beds in a scientific report.  Preparing that report was a creative experience for us, an opportunity to tell a story about a snapshot of the geologic past, a tiny frame of space-time during the Cretaceous.