ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD
By John McPhee
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 696 pages, $35
Several years ago, while driving from Chicago to California, my wife and I stopped in Monument Valley, in southwestern Utah, only to be overwhelmed by the buttes and escarpments that tower against the silence of the empty Western sky. Standing there, amid rocks older than imagination, I found myself thinking about the agelessness of it-what, if I were religious, I might call the unaltered face of God. Framed by all that space and quietude, the Earth itself seemed ancient, immutable, like a window into both past and future, through which one might glimpse the limitless depths of time.
The irony, of course, is that such a landscape, as author and New Yorker staff writer John McPhee explains in “Annals of the Former World,” is as ephemeral as our own brief flashes of existence, its apparent constancy nothing more than an illusion of the human mind. ” `People look upon the natural world as if all motions of the past had set the stage for us and were now frozen,’ McPhee quotes geologist Eldridge Moores as saying. ” `To imagine that the turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need. . . . (But) the time we’re in is just as active as the past. The time between events is long only with respect to a human lifetime.’ “
“Annals of the Former World” is, in some sense, its own literary Monument Valley, a work of such scope and seeming inevitability that it feels as predetermined as a mountain range. Twenty years in the making, the book collects, and at times updates, four earlier McPhee titles–“Basin and Range,” “In Suspect Terrain,” “Rising From the Plains” and “Assembling California”–while adding an epilogue, “Crossing the Craton,” to present a geologic history of North America from the ground, as it were, down. From the beginning of his investigations 20 years ago, McPhee used a simple geographical framework, traveling across the U.S. along Interstate Highway 80, or roughly the 40th parallel. Lest this seem arbitrary, he points out that the interstate highway system, with its roadcuts and exposures, represents a geologic narrative of revelatory force. “Geologists,” McPhee writes, “are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane.” As for his own intentions, he freely admits their generalist nature: “I wish to make no attempt to speak for all geology or to sweep in every fact that came along. I want to choose some things that interested me and through them to suggest the general history of the continent by describing events and landscapes that geologists see written in rocks.”
There’s something seemingly contradictory about such a statement, coming as it does at the beginning of a nearly 700-page study of the evolution of the Earth. Yet the more deeply we dig into “Annals of the Former World,” the more accurate the description becomes. Even the most experienced geologists acknowledge the power of suggestion, of serendipity, in what they do; theirs is a science of conjecture, where the current defining paradigm, plate tectonics, is barely 30 years old and physical evidence is often hard to find. In the 1940s, McPhee notes, “a professor at Delft had written a book called The Pulse of the Earth, in which he asserted with mild cynicism that where gaps exist among the facts of geology the space between is often filled with things `geopoetical.’ ” In that sense, “Annals of the Former World” is nothing so much as an essay in geopoetry, less a record of geology per se than of the slow, steady stratification of information in McPhee’s mind.
Nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to the progression of McPhee’s thinking, which, because the component parts of “Annals of the Former World” originally appeared over a period of years, we have the opportunity to witness firsthand.
In “Basin and Range,” for instance, first published in 1981, he discusses plate tectonics with the vigor of a convert, using it to explain everything from the origins of the Atlantic Ocean to the evolution of the Appalachian range. Two years later, “In Suspect Terrain” reveals some holes in the theory, introducing the idea of “exotic terranes,” or microplates, to cover the gaps. By 1986, “Rising From the Plains” amplifies the notion of plate tectonics again with the concept of hot spots, fixed volcanic structures (Hawaii is a classic example) over which the larger plates have–and, in many cases, continue to be–moved. Finally, “Assembling California” brings all of this together by tracing the development of the West Coast, a region, McPhee suggests, that began to assume its current form 250 million years ago when the first of three exotic terranes “thrust itself almost to Utah” and that is now being shaped by plate tectonics, as the Pacific and North American plates grind against each other along the San Andreas Fault. Even his treatment of the Midwest, a region long thought to possess “a degree of tectonic activity about as lively as the setting in of rigor mortis,” shifts across the years of his research, as advances in petrology and geochemistry have yielded evidence of an enormous subterranean rift in the craton, or “basement of the continent” extending from Iowa into Canada. The result is a volume that, like its topic, contains layer upon layer of information, or, as McPhee himself describes it, “journeys, set pieces, flashbacks, biographical sketches, and histories of the human and lithic kind.”
For all McPhee’s geologic erudition, it’s in this last substratum, the interplay of human and lithic history, that “Annals of the Former World” may end up being most profound. That’s because McPhee has constructed each of the book’s five main sections around a single geologist who functions as a guide to the ideas and theories, as well as to the textures of the Earth. Besides Eldridge Moores, who takes McPhee through California, they are Kenneth Deffeyes, a professor at Princeton University; Anita Harris, of the U.S. Geological Survey; David Love, also of the Geological Survey; and Randy Van Schmus, who teaches at the University of Kansas. Partly, the decision is journalistic, because without some element of human interest, there’s no edge of drama to draw us through the book. More essential, however, is the way that, by recounting the activities of these geologists, McPhee creates a context in which what he calls “deep time” begins to make sense. It’s one thing, after all, for him to write about the Precambrian period (the nearly 3 1/2 billion years of Earth history that predate the geologic time scale), or to describe the ebb and flow of seas and continents as if they were pieces in some evolutionary game. But it’s far more vivid to see Harris prove the point by identifying fossilized coral and sea lily stems in the limestone outcrops of New Jersey’s Delaware Water Gap–which now stands some 80 miles inland–while remarking that ” `(t)he sea lilies grew in clear, shallow water a little offshore. . . . It was a coast like Fiji’s, or the Philippines’, or Guatemala’s. The coral and the thick shells tell you the water was warm.”
What makes a moment like this so important is the way it enables McPhee to humanize geology, framing it within the eyes of an individual not so different from ourselves. That, in turn, diffuses the odd combination of terror and indifference most people feel when asked to think about something that happened a billion, or even a million, years ago. It’s an issue geologists have long since come to terms with. ” `A million years,’ ” one tells McPhee, ” `is a short time–the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet’s time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.’ ” For the rest of us, though, such an extended timeline can’t help but stir up existential nightmares, inasmuch as, faced with that, all of human existence is reduced to barely a second on the geologic clock. Still, as we listen to Moores and Harris–or Deffeyes, Love and Van Schmus–a fascinating transformation takes place: The burden of time starts to feel like a liberation, and our ephemerality falls away beneath the immensity of which we are, however briefly, part. ” `If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years,’ ” another geologist believes, ” `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.”
If this makes “Annals of the Former World” seem like a spiritual undertaking, it isn’t. But McPhee’s magnificent study provokes in us an abiding appreciation of how everything is connected, down to the smallest, most ancient fossil still embedded in the earth. It’s not just that the coasts of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula reflect each other in “a simple geometry that seemed to have been made with a jigsaw,” it’s a matter of seeing the Earth as evolving, which opens up a new perspective on our relationship with the world. ” `The lesson,’ ” Deffeyes explains, ” `is that the whole thing . . . is alive. The earth is moving.’ ” Or, as Love says about his Wyoming boyhood: ” `If there was one thing we learned, it was that you don’t fight nature. You live with it. And you make the accommodations–because nature does not accommodate.’ “
