I read John McPhee’s Basin and Range, and really liked it. He’s just a ridiculously great writer. Big chunks of the book tie in with a road trip he takes with a geologist named Deffeyes. They stop a lot and look at rocks.
Deffeyes said, “Let’s Richter the situation,” and he got out and crossed the road. With his hammer, he chipped at the rock, puzzled the cut. He scraped the rock and dropped acid on the scrapings. Tilted by the western breeze, the snow was dipping sixty degrees east. The bedding planes were dipping twenty degrees east; and the stripes of Deffeyes’ knitted cap were dipping fifty degrees north. The cap had a big tassel, and with his gray-wisped hair coming out from under in a curly mélange he looked like an exaggerated efl. He said he thought he knew what had cause “that big goober” in the rock, and it was almost certainly not a manifestation of some major tectonic event – merely local violence, a cashier shot in a grab raid, an item for an inside page.
There’s a lot of neat historical parallels, like how geology’s growing understanding of deep time put humanity in our place, just like over in biology, natural selection was having a similar effect. It’s 300 pages about rocks, y’all. This is one book of a four-part series collected in Annals of the Former World and I’m very, very tempted.
Filed under: John McPhee.
Mark Larson 