Interstate 80 to the Archean
Not enough is written in these latter-day, degenerate days about rocks. To
those who have eyes to see, a single Appalachian road-cut tells a story of
revolutions, progress, inversions, eruptions, decay, corruption, invasions and
reversals of fortune as compressed and event-filled as Tacitus, in which all of
human history would fit between two stripes of stone, and is pretty to look at
besides. Fortunately, John McPhee has those eyes, and can write a paragraph
about the rocks almost as pretty as the road-cut itself. Annals of the
Former World collects McPhee's writings on the geology of North America,
written at intervals over the last twenty years, strung together along
I-80, the great highway running from New Jersey to San Francisco.
There's more too it than just rocks, of course, though rocks are,
deservedly, at the center of the book, and form some of the most interesting
characters. There is copper mining in Cypress, growing up in Brooklyn slums,
man-made hydrology as a geological force in California, the hydraulic despotism
of the Mormons, a Wyoming schoolmarm (Phi Beta Kappa, Wellesley College),
The labels of geological time-periods sound like a convention of Armenians
and Yugoslavs;