Romancing The Stones

By John Skow

Exactly two decades ago as the knees stiffen, but a gnat's eyeblink in geologic time, a writer for the New Yorker hit on a notion for a Talk of the Town piece, one of those short, graceful, somewhat owlish essays that in those days were told with a royally editorial "we." John McPhee's excellent idea was to collar a geologist friend, visit the rock walls of a recent highway cut not far from Manhattan and relate what the newly naked stone told the geologist.

The project might have occupied part of a Saturday afternoon. Instead, as the author relates in the preamble to his spectacularly orogenous and deeply benthic volume Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 696 pages; $35), it required most of the next 20 years. It morphed from one road cut to a nation of them across the continental trail of Interstate 80, and from one bemused geologist to dozens. Readers had stamina then, and over the years the New Yorker printed McPhee's emerging rock opera as a succession of four-parters: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, Assembling California. Farrar, Straus published the same material as books, and the oddity was that in the magazine, attenuated among the Jag and Audi ads, these journeyings seemed dark, intriguing and geologically long, but in book form the same field reports were sunlit, brilliant and short.

McPhee, whom this reviewer has known for 40 years, is the most methodical of intuitive writers, or the most intuitive of methodicals. Intuition tells him to bang a gong from time to time, and he does: "The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone." Full stop. Paragraph break. While this astonishment reverberates, he goes on methodically to discuss orogeny, which is mountain building (benthic refers to the ocean bottom). He was an English major who had written about gold mining in Alaska without, as he admits, knowing how the gold got there to be mined. Neither did the miners. But he pestered geologists for an explanation, and had the good luck to apply his high-RAM mind to their answers at a time when geology was in flux.

The view of how mountains were built and seabeds stretched and rifted, and how continents oozed out of place and out of shape, was itself shifting, upthrusting, subducting. Plate tectonics, the giddy new geology, said that continents floated on some 20 crustal plates, 60 miles thick, kept in motion by ... yeah, well, we'll figure that out later. But in the 1960s and '70s more geologists than not had signed on to the theory. Most agreed, for instance, that India had rammed into Tibet at high speed (and is still ramming), heaving up former ocean floor to create the Himalayas.

Every few pages, McPhee takes out his English major's rock hammer and prizes out a sample of whizbang geology lingo: plutons, grabens, horsts, gabbro, incompetent rock, punk rock, catsteps. Slickensides, if you please. Too much gong banging would become grandiose noise, however, and too much info simply another second-year geology text. McPhee, who is beguiled by his geologists and can make you see why, has a good feel for when to ease off into anecdotes. He goes after the rock wonks with butterfly net and magnifying glass.

In narration he offers Anita Harris, sherlocking through the Delaware Water Gap. She studied geology to escape her hometown, Brooklyn, N.Y. She thinks plate-tectonic theory, though correct in many respects, has had considerable bosh swept under it. He offers David Love, a legendary Wyoming geologist, and along with the orogeny of that highly geological state come marvelous yarns about Love's father John, who rode with Butch Cassidy and Sundance, and mother, Wellesley-educated Ethel Waxham, who arrived in Rawlins, Wyo., on a two-horse stagecoach in 1905, subdued a sheep ranch in the Wind River Basin and wrote an epic diary.

McPhee isn't Grisham, and his amazing rock book, an exploration that ranks with the Journals of Lewis and Clark, can't be read in four hours. In the final section, Crossing the Craton, not published before, and written to suture a Chicago-to-Cheyenne, Wyo., gap in the Annals, we reach the deeply buried basement of the continent. There is an abyssal rift here under western Iowa, unseen. Splitting went on briefly, for 22 million years. It stopped, 1.086 billion years ago, probably because the West African and South American cratons collided with archaic North America. The reader marks the page, closes this book of wonders, and falls asleep in deep time.