Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  The basins filled immediately with water, and life came into the lakes. “Late-Miocene fossils are the earliest we have wherever we have found fossils in those lakebeds,” Deffeyes said. “So Basin and Range faulting can be dated to the late Miocene—about eight million years ago.” Gradually, as the rain shadow lengthened, the lakes “turned chemical”—became saline or alkaline (bitter)—and eventually they dried up. There are basalt flows in the Basin and Range that are also post-Miocene—lavas that poured out on the surface well after the block faulting had begun, like the Watchungs of New Jersey. There are ruins of cinder cones—evidence of fairly recent local action—and, in the basins and on the ranges, widespread falls of light ash from volcanoes beyond the province. You see, too, the stream deltas, shoreline terraces, and wave-cut cliffs of big lakes that came into the Great Basin after Pleistocene glaciation began. The change in world climate that made ice in the north temporarily preempted the rain shadow and dropped into the Great Basin torrents from the sky. In a region where evaporation had greatly exceeded precipitation, the reverse was now the case, and the big lakes in time connected the basins and made islands of the ranges—Lake Manlius (its bed is now, in part, Death Valley); Lake Lahontan, near Reno (its bed is now, in part, the Humboldt and Carson sinks); and Lake Bonneville. Lake Bonneville grew until it was the size of Lake Erie. Then it grew some more. At Red Rock Pass, in Idaho, it spilled over the brim of the Great Basin and into the Snake River Plain. By now it was as large as Lake Michigan. It was not a glacial lake, just a sort of side effect of the distant glaciation, and it sat there for thousands of years with limestone terraces forming and waves cutting benches at the shoreline. Eventually, it began to drop, in stages, pausing wherever evaporation and precipitation were in temporary equilibrium, and more benches were cut and more terraces were made, and then as the rain shadow took over again, the water shrank back past Erie size and kept on shrinking and turning more and more chemical and getting smaller and shallower and shallower and smaller and near the end of its days became the Great Salt Lake.

  The Great Salt Lake reached out to our right and disappeared in snow. In a sense, there was no beach. The basin flatness just ran to the lake and kept on going, wet. The angle formed at the shoreline appeared to be about 179.9 degrees. There were dark shapes of islands, firmaments in the swirling snow—elongate, north-south-trending islands, the engulfed summits of buried ranges. “Chemically, this is one of the toughest environments in the world,” Deffeyes said. “You swing from the saltiest to the most dilute waters on the planet in a matter of hours. Some of the most primitive things living are all that can take that. The brine is nearly saturated with sodium chloride. For a short period each year, so much water comes down out of the Wasatch that large parts of the lake surface are relatively fresh. Any creature living there gets an osmotic shock that amounts to hundreds of pounds per square inch. No higher plants can take that, no higher animals—no multicelled organisms. Few bacteria. Few algae. Brine shrimp, which do live there, die by the millions from the shock.”

  I have seen the salt lake incredibly beautiful in winter dusk under snow-streamer curtains of cloud moving fast through the sky, with the wall of the Wasatch a deep rose and the lake islands rising from what seemed to be rippled slate. All of that was now implied by the mysterious shapes in the foreshortening snow. I didn’t mind the snow. One June day, moreover, with Karen Kleinspehn—on her way west for summer field work—I stopped in the Wasatch for a picnic of fruit and cheese beside a clear Pyrenean stream rushing white over cobbles of quartzite and sandstone through a green upland meadow—cattle in the meadow, cottonwoods along the banks of this clear, fresh, suggestively confident, vitally ignorant river, talking so profusely on its way to its fate, which was to move among paradisal mountain landscapes until, through a terminal canyon, the Great Basin drew it in. No outlet. Three such rivers feed the Great Salt Lake. It does indeed consume them. Descending, we ourselves went through a canyon so narrow that the Union Pacific Railroad was in the median of the interstate and on into an even steeper canyon laid out as if for skiing in a hypnotizing rhythm of christiania turns under high walls of rose-brick Nugget sandstone and brittle shattered marine limestone covered with scrub oaks. “Good God, we are dropping out of the sky,” said Kleinspehn, hands on the wheel, plunging through the big sheer roadcuts, one of which suddenly opened to distance, presented the Basin and Range.

  “‘This is the place.’”

  “You can imagine how he felt.”

  In the foreground was the alabaster city, with its expensive neighborhoods strung out along the Wasatch Fault, getting ready to jump fifteen feet. In the distance were the Oquirrhs, the Stansburys, the lake. Sunday afternoon and the Mormons were out on the flats by the water in folding chairs at collapsible tables, end to end like refectory tables, twenty people down to dinner, with acres of beach-flat all to themselves and seagulls around them like sacred cows. To go swimming, we had to walk first—several hundred yards straight out, until the water was ankle-deep. Then we lay down on our backs and floated. I have never been able to float. When I took the Red Cross tests, age nine to fifteen, my feet went down and I hung in the water with my chin wrenched up like something off Owl Creek Bridge. I kicked, slyly kicked to push my mouth above the surface and breathe. I could not truly float. Now I tried a backstroke and, like some sort of hydrofoil, went a couple of thousand feet on out over the lake. Only my heels, rump, and shoulder blades seemed to be wet. I rolled over and crawled. I could all but crawl on my hands and knees. And this was June, at the south end—the least salty season, the least salty place in the whole of the Great Salt Lake.

  Rolling up on one side, and propped on an elbow, I could see the Promontory Mountains across the water to the north, an apparent island but actually a peninsula, reaching southward into the lake. In 1869, a golden spike was carried into the Promontories and driven into a tie there to symbolize the completion of the first railroad to cross the North American continent—exactly one century before the first footprint on the moon, a span of time during which Salt Lake City and Reno would move apart by one human stride. In that time, also, the railroad twice became dissatisfied with the local arrangements of its roadbed—losing affection for the way of the golden spike (over the mountains) and building a causeway and wooden trestle across the lake itself, barely touching the Promontory peninsula at its southern tip. In the late nineteen-fifties, the trestle section was replaced by rock. The causeway traverses the lake like a solid breakwater, dividing it into halves. The principal rivers that flow into the Great Salt Lake all feed the southern half. The water on the north side of the causeway is generally a foot or two lower and considerably saltier than the water on the other side. Evaporate one cupful of Great Salt Lake North and you have upward of a third of a cup of salt. Evaporate a cupful of Great Salt Lake South and you have about a quarter of a cup of salt, or—nonetheless—eight times as much as from a cup of the ocean. As the lake drew at our bodies, trying to pull fresh water through our skins, it closed our pores tight and our lips swelled and became slightly numb. The water stung savagely at the slightest scratch and felt bitter as strep in the back of the throat.

  We filled a bag with eggstones from the bottom, with oolites, the Salt Lake sand. It was by no means ordinary sand—not the small, smoothed-off ruins of mountains, carried down and dumped by rivers. It was sand that had formed in the lake. Just as raindrops are created around motes of dust, oolites form around bits of rock so tiny that in wave-tossed water they will stir up and move. They move, and settle, move, and settle. And while they are up in the water calcium carbonate forms around them in layer after layer, building something like a pearl. Slice one in half with a diamond saw and you reveal a perfect bull’s-eye, or, as its namer obviously imagined it, a stone egg, white and yolk—an oolite. Underwater on the Bahama Banks are sweeping oolitic dunes. When a geologist finds oolites embedded in rock—in, say, some Cambrian outcrop in the Lehigh Valley—the Bahamas come to mind, and the Gre
at Salt Lake, and, by inference, a shallow, lime-rich Cambrian sea. Our sample bag was like a ten-pound sack of sugar. I rolled over on my back, set it on my stomach, and, floating a little lower, kicked in to shore.

  On the firm flat beach of the Great Salt Lake were many hundreds of thousands of brine flies—broad dark patches of them hopping and buzzing a steady collective electrical hum. A sacred gull made short bursts through the brine flies, its bill clapping. Three years before gulls ate crickets and saved the Mormons, Kit Carson shot gulls to feed the starving emigrants. Gulls, though, and brine flies are natural survivors. Now, at the end of spring runoff, dead creatures were everywhere. Osmotic shock had killed shrimp outnumbering the flies. Corpses, a couple of centimetres each, lay in hydrogen-sulphide decaying stink. Interlayered with the oolites on the bottom of the lake was a kind of galantine of brine shrimp, the greasy black muck of trillions dead.

  Salt crystals clung like snow to our hair, and were spread on our faces like powder. In man-made ponds near the shore, the sun was making Morton’s salt. Spaced along the beach were water towers, courtesy of the State of Utah. You pulled a rope and took a shower.

  And now in the autumn snow, Deffeyes and I could see shoreline terraces of Lake Bonneville a thousand feet above us on mountain slopes. That a lake so deep had been brought down to a present average depth of thirteen feet was food for melancholia. Still shrinking, it had long since become the world’s second-deadest body of water. In a couple of hundred years, it could match the Dead Sea.

  “Mother of God, that’s nice,” said Deffeyes suddenly, braking down the pickup on the shoulder of the road. The tip of the nose of the Stansbury Mountains had been sliced off by the interstate to reveal a sheer and massive section of handsome blue rock, thinly bedded, evenly bedded, forty metres high. Its parallel planes were tilting, dipping, gently to the east, with the exception of some confused and crumpled material that suggested a snowball splatted against glass, or a broken-down doorway in an otherwise undamaged wall. 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 elf. He said he thought he knew what had caused “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. The cut was mainly limestone, which had collected as lime mud in an Ordovician sea. The goober was dolomite.

  Limestone is calcium carbonate. Dolomite is calcium carbonate with magnesium added. Together they are known as the carbonate rocks. Deffeyes was taught in college that while it seemed obvious to infer that magnesium precipitating out of water changes limestone into dolomite there was no way to check this out empirically because dolomite was forming nowhere in the world. Deffeyes found that impossible to believe. Deffeyes was already a uniformitarian—a geologist who believes that the present is the key to the past, that if you want to understand how a rock is formed you go watch it forming now. Watch basalt flows at Kilauea. Watch the festooned cross-beddings of future sandstones being sketched by the currents of Hatteras. Watch a flooding river blanket the tracks of a bear. Surely, somewhere, he thought, limestone must be changing into dolomite now. Not long after graduate school, he and two others went to Bonaire, in the Netherlands Antilles, where they found a lagoon that was concentrating under the sun and “making a juice very rich in magnesium.” The juice was flowing through the limestone below and changing it into dolomite. They presented the news in Science. When the rock of this big Utah roadcut had been the limy bottom of the Ordovician sea, the water had been so shallow that the lime mud had occasionally been above the surface and had dried out and cracked into chips, and then the water rose and the chips became embedded in more lime mud, and the process happened again and again so that the limestone now is a self-containing breccia studded with imprisoned chips—an accident so lovely to the eye you want to slice the rock and frame it.

  In age, the blue stone approached five hundred million years. Captain Howard Stansbury, USA, whose name would rest upon the mountains of which the rock was a component, was approaching fifty when he came into the Great Basin in 1849. He had been making lighthouses in Florida. The government preferred that he survey the salt lake. With sixteen mules, a water keg, and some India-rubber bags, he circumambulated the lake, and then some. People told him not to try it. He ran out of water but not of luck. And he came back with a story of having seen—far out on the westward flats—scattered books, clothing, trunks, tools, chains, yokes, dead oxen, and abandoned wagons. The Donner party went around the nose of the Stansburys in late August, 1846, rock on their left, lake marshes on their right. This huge blue roadcut, in its supranatural way, would have frightened them to death. They must have filed along just about where Deffeyes had parked the pickup, on the outside shoulder of the interstate. Deffeyes and I went back across the road, waiting first for a three-unit seven-axle tractor-trailer to pass. Deffeyes described it as “a freaking train.”

  Stansbury Mountains, Skull Valley … The Donner party found good grass in Skull Valley, and good water, and a note by a post at a spring. It had been torn to shreds by birds. The emigrants pieced it together. “Two days—two nights—hard driving—cross desert—reach water.” They went out of Skull Valley over the Cedar Mountains into Ripple Valley and over Grayback Mountain to the Great Salt Lake Desert. Grayback Mountain was basalt, like the Watchungs of New Jersey. The New Jersey basalt flowed about two hundred million years ago. The Grayback Mountain basalt flowed thirty-eight million years ago. Well into this century, it was possible to find among the dark-gray outcrops of Grayback Mountain pieces of wagons and of oxhorn, discarded earthenware jugs. The snow suddenly gone now, and in cold sunshine, Deffeyes and I passed Grayback Mountain and then had the Great Salt Lake Desert before us—the dry bed of Bonneville—broader than the periphery of vision. The interstate runs close to but not parallel to the wagon trail, which trends a little more northwesterly. The wagon trail aims directly at Pilot Peak of the Pilot Range, which we could see clearly, upward of fifty miles away—a pyramidal summit with cloud coming off it in the wind like a banner unfurling. Across the dry lakebed, the emigrants homed on Pilot Peak, standing in what is now Nevada, above ten thousand feet. Along the fault scarp, at the base of Pilot Peak, are cold springs. When the emigrants arrived at the springs, their tongues were bloody and black.

  “Imagine those poor sons of bitches out here with their animals, getting thirsty,” Deffeyes said. “It’s a wonder they didn’t string the guy that invented this route up by his thumbs.”

  The flats for the most part were alkaline, a leather-colored mud superficially dry. Dig down two inches and it was damp and greasy. Come a little rain and an ox could go in to its knees. The emigrants made no intended stops on the Great Salt Lake Desert. They drove day and night for the Pilot Range. In the day, they saw mirages—towers and towns and shimmering lakes. Sometimes the lakes were real—playa lakes, temporary waters after a storm. Under a wind, playa lakes move like puddles of mercury in motion on a floor—two or three hundred square miles of water on the move, here today, there tomorrow, gone before long like a mirage, leaving wagons mired in unimagined mud. Very few emigrants chose to cross the Bonneville flats, although the route was promoted as a shortcut—“a nigher route”—rejoining the main migration four basins into Nevada. It was the invention of Lansford Hastings and was known as the Hastings Cutoff. Hastings wrote the helpful note in Skull Valley. His route was geologically unfavorable, but this escaped his knowledge and notice. His preoccupations were with politics. He wished to become President of California. He saw California�
�for the moment undefendably Mexican—as a new nation, under God, conceived at liberty and dedicated to the proposition that anything can be accomplished through promotion: President Lansford Hastings, in residence in a western White House. His strategy for achieving high office was to create a new shortcut on the way west, to promote both the route and the destination through recruiting and pamphleteering, to attract emigrants by the thousands year after year, and as their counsellor and deliverer to use them as constituent soldiers in the promised heaven. He camped beside the trail farther east. He attracted the Donners. He attracted Reeds, Kesebergs, Murphys, McCutchens, drew them southward away from the main trek and into the detentive scrub oak made fertile by the limestones of the Wasatch. The Donners were straight off the craton—solid and trusting, from Springfield, Illinois. Weeks were used hacking a path through the scrub oaks, which were living barbed wire. Equipment was abandoned on the Bonneville flats to lighten up loads in the race against thirst. Even in miles, the nigher route proved longer than the one it was shortcutting, on the way to a sierra that was named for snow.

  Deffeyes and I passed graffiti on the Bonneville flats. There being nothing to carve in and no medium substantial enough for sprayed paint, the graffitists had lugged cobbles out onto the hard mud—stones as big as grapefruit, ballast from the interstate—and in large dotted letters had written their names: ROSS, DAWN, DON, JUDY, MARK, MOON, ERIC, fifty or sixty miles of names. YARD SALE. Eric’s lithography was in basalt and dolomite, pieces of Grayback Mountain, apparently, pieces of the Stansburys. His name, if it sits there a century or so, will eventually explode. Salt will work into the stones along the grain boundaries. When this happens, water evaporates out of the salt, and salt crystals keep collecting and expanding until they explode the rock. In Death Valley are thousands of little heaps of crumbs that were once granite boulders. Salt exploded them. Salt gets into fence posts and explodes them at the base.