I have traveled many sections of the 1-80 corridor my entire life. John McPhee's project to understand the geology of the US and the world based on the roadcuts of i-80 was brilliant. After 600 pages of reading a very dense geography text laced with lots of extras I felt like I had gone to a foreign country for several weeks. The language (jargon) didn't make total sense but I felt like I was beginning to get the gist of it.

What a task! 655 pages of batholiths, orogenies sedimentary metamorphic ophiolites that explain the geology one experiences traveling Highway 80 from east coast to west. Interesting? Yes, but too much work. Luckily I had shoulder surgery and was confined to chair. Nevertheless, every morning for a couple of hours I trudged through. This was harder than school.
I gave it four stars because it is so comprehensive and well researched. The best parts for me were the descriptions of the author's field trips with the prominent geologists and their histories. Particularly interesting was the history of David Love. His family settled in the heart of Wyoming and experienced the building of the nation. Love knew the rocks of the Rockies better than anyone and his tale was fascinating. Second to Love was the description of California and the reason for "Gold being in them thar Hills". Between these historical accounts were the rocks. Maybe I want to change my rating to three stars.

A trip across I-80, a long wade through the minutia of various academic squabbles, a pleasant foray into the history of gold mining, homesteading, and the movement of trillions of tons of rock.

I would highly recommend some of the books within this book, specifically: Basin and Range and Rising from the Plains. The others lost themselves a bit in the tectonic movements and chemistry experiments. Or at least they lost me. Could also be that I'm partial to the arid west.

But still worth the slog for anyone who needs to escape from the anthropocene into the refuge of geological time.

You have to really, really, really want to learn about geology. It took a while to get through - but it did take him 20 years to write the 5 books compiled here. Book 3 was the most interesting to me, probably because it had enough human storyline to chop up the geology to keep me engaged for longer periods at a time (book 4 would be second). I was reading it when we had the earthquake here in NJ which was helpful in my understanding why I could feel it so strongly considering how far I live from the epicenter (it's the type of rock here in NJ).

Sometimes you wonder: if you‘d read a certain book earlier/at a certain point in your life, would it have sent you on an entirely different path (career, relationship, country of residence)? If I‘d read this book in college, I‘d have switched majors and become a geologist. Its an astounding five-volume exploration, along US I-80, of the geological forces that have formed (and are forming) our planet. The best natural science book I‘ve come across.

This is an amazing book about geology, geologists, plate tectonics, America, and time. It is comprised of four books previously published: Basin and Range (which I reviewed before and still stand by the review), In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California. A final essay about the "basement" of North America is attached as a coda to finish the book. While reading the book, the sense of geologic time overwhelmed me and I couldn't help thinking how arbitrary and pathetic human endeavors are in light of the fact that humans participate in such a minute section of the earth's history. This sentiment courses its way throughout the book, at times subtly and at other times rather eloquently such as the following from In Suspect Terrain:

"If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away. Yucatans and Floridas would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies. At the end of the program, man shows up - his ticket in his hand. Almost at once, he conceives of private property, dimension stone, and life insurance. When a Mt. St. Helens assaults his sensibilities with an ash cloud eleven miles high, he writes a letter to the New York Times recommending that the mountain be bombed."

If there is a saving grace for humans or any kind of redemption for humans, it is that there are humans such as the geologists in this book who can fathom the earth, its composition and history, and the role humans have played on it, while at the same time admitting errors in their thought and humbly accepting that better explanations might still be in the offing (geologically speaking).

This was originally published at The Scrying Orb

“The world which we inhabit is composed of materials not of the earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present but of the earth which. . .had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea while our present land was yet beneath the water of the ocean. Here are three distinct successive periods of existence, and each of these is, in our measurement of time, a thing of indefinite duration. . .the result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”
– James Hutton, 1726-1797

I like to think of the world in other eras. The alien sweep of Pangaea. The frigid silence of glaciers blanketing the earth. Dinosaurs trudging through the the mud. Deserts that were swamps, mountains that were oceans. The incomprehensibility of deep time and the eons where no life stirred on earth. Or the sheer cataclysm of the great extinctions that wiped out most of cambrian life and later, the dinosaurs and their ilk. It evokes a sense of crushing awe. There’s a comfort in human insignificance, a giddiness to the unbelievably small time we’ve existed in earth’s history.

And, as John McPhee elucidates in this behemoth, there’s a poetry in geology absent in other sciences, save perhaps astrology. Metaphor is absolutely required.

Annals of the Former World is not just one book — it’s a collection of five books. Each book selects a different part of the US to focus on, generally tied to Interstate-80. I’m only about halfway through. I plan to expound upon the first two and a half books and write of the remainder at a later date.



Basin and Range

Basin and Range takes place in Nevada — the contiguous mountain ranges and intermediate basins that make up most of the state. At one point, western Nevada was the coastline of America, and it’s the prime suspect for where the country will tear in half in the distant future, first creating a facsimile of the Red Sea and later becoming an ocean in its own right. This is the future of the Red Sea and the past of the Atlantic Ocean, which began as a rent between conjoined North America and Africa.

McPhee’s journey takes him along I-80 through towns like Battle Mountain and Lovelock and Winnemucca. I’ve driven this road myself, from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, and it was fascinating to see the history, both human and geological, detailed for this region, which I mostly found to be dusty towns whose primary feature was impoverishment. Having a real-life experience of the land is extremely helpful, but even then I can typically only grasp the macro-level of the geology that McPhee is describing. The book is written for any audience and the history, the big picture descriptions of past and future oceans and mountains, the basins and ranges thrust up and down throughout the earth are clear. The smaller scale descriptions of sandstone and quartz and which era they came from are a bit muddy for me. I can start glazing over when there is too much discussion of the finer points of sediment deposits.

In between descriptions of the journey, the text is peppered with history lessons on how geology grew as a science — the great revolutions of geologists rejecting the notion of biblical time (4-6 thousand year old earth) and the Great Flood, which people took as outright fact through much of western history. Later, the theory of plate tectonics. Or the many missteps in between. In addition, McPhee works as a biographer to the geologists he invites on his journeys. Basin and Range features a man named Deffeyes, who is characterized a bit like an obsessed mad scientist, with poofy hair protruding from the sides of his hat. Deffeyes is outfitted with a deep understanding of the actual basin and range and a plan to strike rich by excavating old silver mines that birthed small towns in Nevada and later ruined them when the silver ran out… but only for their 18-19th century technology, not for today’s.



In Suspect Terrain

The subsequent book is significantly weaker, at least from the perspective that I value. It takes place in Pennsylvania and parts of New York or New Jersey — states I’ve spent very little time in and thus areas that I can’t visualize from my own memories. There’s a lot of minutia and not a lot of history. McPhee’s companion for this portion of the trip just isn’t as interesting or eccentric as the ones in the preceding or following texts. Her big thing is that she is a skeptic — the theory of plate tectonics revolutionized the science, but geologists start using it as the answer to everything, which clearly cannot be the case.

I’ll be honest and say I’ve already forgotten large swathes of In Suspect Terrain.



Rising from the Plains

I am only halfway through book three and it’s already my favorite thus far. It chronicles Wyoming, a place I’ve never visited but would like to. The Rocky Mountains used to be submerged in earth (sand, dirt, mud, rock), and before that they were at the bottom of the sea. There’s marine life buried in the rock, as well as tiny jaws and teeth to three toed horses, the first tiny predecessors to our modern day mounts. McPhee builds on the descriptive prose of the first two books and I can follow the lay of the land and its intricacies with far greater acuity. Or maybe I just got better at reading.

Interspersed with the geology is the history of a family. McPhee’s companion for this trip is David Love. His mother was a Wellesley graduate who became a school teacher in distant Wyoming in 1905, still the wild west, with students who had to travel sixty miles through devastating cold to reach the schoolhouse. She was an excellent writer and her captivating journals are excerpted throughout. Her husband and David’s father was a Wyoming cowboy, who spend at least one seven year stretch sleeping without a roof over his head, and was a miraculously successful homesteader in turn-of-the-century Wyoming, a land which is very cold much of year, reaches fifty below zero in winter, and has winds so powerful and unrelenting that houses with closed doors and windows fill with snow through cracks in the walls and keyholes.

The local and family history and how it entwines with the geology is masterful and I look forward to charging onward, both through millions of years of geological time and the infant history of inhospitable Wyoming.

If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.

The second half of this review, on the next 2.5 books can be read here.

I've read all of McPhee's "Annals of the Former World" books -- this is #5, and I don't recall giving any of the others my "A+" rating in my old booklogs. He really does write well, and picked top-notch geologists for his Cook's Tour of North American geology. I likely read at least parts of this book when it was serialized in the NYer, back when they ran really long articles in the magazine. This one won a Pulitzer, and gets an average rating of 4.35 from GR readers. With almost 300 reviews posted, you can see what your GR friends thought of the book. Recommended reading, and I might reread it myself.

Stunning

I started reading this series awhile back in 2020. I had read other books by the author, but it had been awhile. I was starting to read on the geology shelf and figured reading from a popularizer might be an easy place to start. It was not. This was a tough series that made clear my lack of knowledge of geology and this series never feels like an intro.

To finish the series I checked out this full volume to read the last short book. And then the introduction to this book - which really was an intro. And explains much of what the author had been trying to do with the series.

Have I really read this book? It is hard to say - it seems like there may have been many changes and hopefully improvements to the the smaller books it contains. Perhaps I'll take a shot at reading this straight through - after I do something to learn and retain knowledge about geology.

"Geologists, in their all but closed conversation, inhabit scenes that no one ever saw, scenes of global sweep, gone and gone again, including seas, mountains, rivers, forests, and archipelagoes of aching beauty rising in volcanic violence to settle down quietly and then forever disappear—almost disappear.”

“If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”

My first review will be in Annals and then I will review the rest in the individual books. I may be cheating by doing it this way, but in this reread I have a lot I want to talk about and there are restrictions on characters in these reviews and I am running up against them. I found that out with Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where I tried to not only immortalize her words, but talk about how they made me feel and think and ran out of room. So, I am rereading the whole canon, Annals of the Former World, but reviewing each book separately, which they are technically separate books, so technically not cheating by claiming each one separately. And I feel that I am writing the way Mr. McPhee writes, in grand sentences, and with grand ideas, and with caveats and humor, and must apologize for the copycatting.

I also think that talking, reading, and thinking about geology does this to me. Mr. McPhee is credited with opening a huge new interest in geology in us laypeople. I have to credit it more emphatically to Annie Dillard, who has 2 examples of “big picture” geology and deep time, one like a lyrical waking dream, and the other an artist’s interpretation of time: “Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back." I have never been the same, always attuned to the geopoetry of this way of looking at the world, and seeing the links between Dillard and McPhee in my worldview.

An example of what it does goes like this: I read a sentence such as “There was glaciation in the Southern Hemisphere at the time.” And my mind is blown, why in the Ice Ages was there so little glaciation in the Southern Hemisphere? Antarctica is obviously a fertile field for glaciers, how have I never though of this? Why was there in this period he is talking about? McPhee drops information like this often, and sometimes answers the question I have, sometimes not, this being a throw away sentence, so I have to pause and start googling. What a world we live in, to have this information at our fingertips, literally. This is the type of thinking that makes kids into scientists, so I am first, thrilled I can have that innocence of wonder and awe, and secondly, that also makes poets, and that is why this is such a source of joy for me.

”The poles of the earth have wandered. The equator has apparently moved. The continents, perched on their plates, are thought to have been carried so very far and to be going in so many directions that it seems an act of almost pure hubris to assert that some landmark of our world is fixed at 73 degrees 57 minutes and 53 seconds west longitude and 40 degrees 51 minutes and 14 seconds north latitude—a temporary description, at any rate, as if for a boat on the sea.”
This opening is so similar to Annie Dillard’s style that I was hooked from the minute I picked up the 734 page book. I don’t think he is copying her, he just has that sense of what hooks a reader and how to plant a thought that all of us wanderers and armchair wanderers muse about from time to time; where is this place we have been set down? There is a new interactive map (https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-...) that will demonstrate where whatever place you are interested in has been in the past 20 million, 75 million, 400 million, etc. years you are interested in, and it is like McPhee got that in his head from his travels over 20 years with geologists.

” You are in central Nevada, about four hundred miles east of San Francisco, and after you have climbed these mountains you look out upon (as it appears in present theory) open sea. You drop swiftly to the coast, and then move on across moderately profound water full of pelagic squid, water that is quietly accumulating the sediments which—ages in the future—will become the roof rock of the rising Sierra. Tall volcanoes are standing in the sea. Then, at roughly the point where the Sierran foothills will end and the Great Valley will begin—at Auburn, California—you move beyond the shelf and over deep ocean. There are probably some islands out there somewhere, but fundamentally you are crossing above ocean crustal floor that reaches to the China Sea. Below you there is no hint of North America, no hint of the valley or the hills where Sacramento and San Francisco will be.”

These passages are one of the main hooks for me, as I travelled across the country several times, only a few by I80 but it is not necessary for the idea, the inspiration. McPhee places the geology in my sense of place and on the land instead of a theoretical or obscure science. I love long distance driving, I love being so close to the land and looking up at the sky; I feel as close to flying on the ground as you can be, and McPhee’s descriptions do nearly the same thing. Land and mountains seem so sure, so permanent, but we know they are not. They become sand. And after that, they sink and are piled upon by sediment to become rock again, and then sand again. So the basic building block of our planet is a grain of sand.

Annie Dillard does an thought experiment of looking at a bird, and trying to visualize it becoming defeathered and de-evolved into a lizard and then back again; my favorite is while in a talus filed, or a sand dune field under mountains, to visualize them building up into mountains and then dissolving again in time; and that is why geology is the “music of the earth,” per Hans Cloos. Or as the author describes why he chose I80, it “avoids melodrama, avoids the Grand Canyons, the Jackson Holes, the geologic operas of the country, but it would surely be a sound experience of the big picture, of the history, the construction, the components of the continent. And in all likelihood it would display in its roadcuts rock from every epoch and era.”

”Slowly disassemble the Rocky Mountains and carry the material in small fragments to the Mississippi Delta. The delta builds down. It presses ever deeper on the mantle. Its depth at the moment exceeds twenty-five thousand feet. The heat and the pressure are so great down there that the silt is turning into siltstone, the sand into sandstone, the mud into shale. The Gulf of Mexico was a good example of a geosyncline, with a large part of the Rocky Mountains sitting in it as more than twenty-five thousand feet of silt, sand, and mud, siltstone, sandstone, and shale.”

I hiked in the Mount Evans Wilderness recently, along a creek that was carving out the basement rock of the fourteener, and came across a rock outcrop that had an alcove below and a hanging garden above, and it was a wall of the trail, essentially and again, was drawn into a meditation of the mountain crumbling into these giant rocks who live with us for a while and then crumble into smaller stones, and then sand. It is a way of seeing I love. At the same time, beneath my feet, the sand and dirt I walk upon is putting pressure on the detritus of the mountains below us, and rock is being born. McPhee is a translator of sorts, as he says and then alchemizes it: “Geologists, in their all but closed conversation, inhabit scenes that no one ever saw, scenes of global sweep, gone and gone again, including seas, mountains, rivers, forests, and archipelagoes of aching beauty rising in volcanic violence to settle down quietly and then forever disappear—almost disappear.”

This book is one of my favorite of the series, and contains the narrative description of what McPhee coined as “deep time.” He writes about the history of geology in an alive, engaging way I wish all historians could try; and as he describes James Hutton, the Scottish father of modern geology, Hutton “had no way of knowing that there were seventy million years just in the line that separated the two kinds of rock, and many millions more in the story of each formation—but he sensed something like it, sensed the awesome truth, and as he stood there staring at the riverbank he was seeing it for all humankind.” If you don’t get chills from that visual, I am sorry. To see something, to sense it, based on your eyes and mind, for all of humankind is a holy moment.

“It was at some moment in the Pleistocene that humanity crossed what the geologist-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the Threshold of Reflection, when something in people “turned back on itself and so to speak took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed. But in depth, a great revolution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and representations; and simultaneously consciousness was capable of perceiving itself in the concentrated simplicity of its faculties. And all this happened for the first time.”

Annie Dillard wrote in 1974 and then in 1990 in more depth, about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, so I was delighted he is in Basin and Range. Teilhard was a paleontologist, priest and philosopher and my main mantra in life is attributed to him: : "Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within." When I read about the Threshold of Reflection, I wished I was there. In my mind, it links to the immortalized footsteps found in Tanzania where Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints, as Dillard writes in For the Time Being:

“They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago—More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked: it was a rainy day.
We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. “A remote ancestor,” Leakey said, “experienced a moment of doubt.” Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupting, or they took a last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did.”

Perhaps they became conscious of themselves as conscious beings in that moment, meaning, perhaps, we were all there. McPhee writes, “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” Why yes, yes it did, and it still does, maybe always.
Some deep time analogies:

”Geologists will sometimes use the calendar year as a unit to represent the time scale, and in such terms the Precambrian runs from New Year’s Day until well after Halloween. Dinosaurs appear in the middle of December and are gone the day after Christmas. The last ice sheet melts on December 31st at one minute before midnight, and the Roman Empire lasts five seconds.”

“With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.”

“The human consciousness may have begun to leap and boil some sunny day in the Pleistocene, but the race by and large has retained the essence of its animal sense of time. People think in five generations—two ahead, two behind—with heavy concentration on the one in the middle. Possibly that is tragic, and possibly there is no choice. The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it.”

Going into the deep time meditation a little differently, about the spans of time in either direction, I loved these imageries:

“There is no younger rock in the United States than the travertine that is forming in Thermopolis, Wyoming. A 2.7-billion-year-old outcrop of the core of the continent is at the head of Wind River Canyon, twenty miles away.”

“And in the deep shadow below the Cambrian were seven years for everyone in all subsequent time. There were four billion years back there—since the earliest beginnings of the world.”

“In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.”

“On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information. Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways:

“Mammalian species last, typically, two million years. We’ve about used up ours. Every time Leakey finds something older, I say, ‘Oh! We’re overdue.’ We will be handing the dominant-species-on-earth position to some other group. We’ll have to be clever not to.”

“If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”

John McPhee's gift for presenting potentially dry, complex information with fascinatingly readable creativity has led this former technical writer to become an enthusiastic admirer. I read this book, which is actually a merging of three independently produced but intimately related volumes on the geology of the North American continent, on my Kindle and have to admit it was probably too big to tackle in that form. I found myself lost more than once. Also, this is the first of McPhee's books this amateur geologist that proved too technically overwhelming for full comprehension. Still, McPhee's prose frequently runs to poetry:

"Like all writing, writing about geology is a masochistic, mind-fracturing, self-enslaved labor--a description that intensifies when the medium is rock."

"Old-timers used to say that a Wyoming wind gauge was an anvil on a length of chain....He was putting up a ridgepole when the wind was blowing. He looked up and saw the chipmunks blowing over his head. By and by, along came some sheep, dead. At last one was flying over who was not quite gone. He turned around and said, "Baa"--and then he was in Montana."

McPhee is wonderful and I am a devoted fan of his work, but for me, in this anthology, he has proven to be a little too wonderful for full enjoyment.