Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  Deffeyes, meanwhile, had joined Shell before the excitement developed. Growing up in oil fields, he had grown to like them, to admire the skill and independence of the crews, the competent manner in which they lived with danger. “Like a bullfighter, you are careful. So danger is not an overwhelming risk. But it is always there. And you can be crushed, burned, asphyxiated, destroyed by an explosion. A crew on a rig floor runs pipe in the hole with swift precision, and any piece of equipment can take your hand off just as fast.” As a small boy, he often went into oil fields with his father, whose assignments changed many times—Oklahoma City, Hutchinson, Great Bend, Midland, Hobbs, Casper. As a teen-ager, Deffeyes played the French horn in the Casper Civic Symphony. He debated on the high-school team. He became—as he has remained—a forensic marvel, the final syllables of his participles and gerunds ringing like Buddha’s gongs. In the way that others collected stamps, he collected rocks. For counsel, he took his specimens to the geologists in town, of whom there were plenty, including Paul Walton, who in 1948 had suggested to J. Paul Getty that he go to Kuwait. High-school summers, Deffeyes worked as an assistant shooter with seismic crews and as a roustabout maintaining wells. When he finished graduate school and moved on to Houston with Shell, he was ignorant not only of the imminent revolution in geologic theory but also of the approaching atrophy in successful exploration for oil. M. King Hubbert, an outstanding geological geophysicist, was with Shell at the time, and Deffeyes had only settled in when Hubbert happened to predict (with amazing accuracy) the approaching date when more oil would be coming out of American ground than geologists would be discovering. He predicted the energy crisis that would inevitably follow. When Deffeyes saw Hubbert’s evanescing figures, he saw disappearing with them what had looked to be his most productive years. He resigned from Shell to go into teaching and was soon on the faculty at Oregon State, where he set himself up as a chemical oceanographer, because the ocean was where things were happening. The university had bought from the government a small ship left over from the Second World War and had converted it for oceanographic research. “Working for an oil company had suddenly become like working for a railroad—a dying industry. Now in this new field new equipment was being improvised, and the problems were the same as they were in the oil fields when I was a kid. In the ocean, we used bottom-hole pressure gauges and other oil-field equipment. I could feel the same sort of excitement I had felt years before in the oil fields, and with the same sorts of people—roustabouts and roughnecks—in the crew.”

  Unfortunately, Deffeyes had a signal defect as an oceanographer. He got terribly seasick. His enthusiasm grew moist, and he began to contrive to remain ashore. Then in October, 1965, J. Tuzo Wilson, of the University of Toronto, and Fred Vine, of Cambridge, published a paper in which they defined an oddly isolated piece of mid-ocean ridge off the coasts of Oregon and Washington. It was the spreading center of what would eventually become known as the Juan de Fuca Plate, one of the smallest of all the crustal plates in the world. The volcanoes of the Cascades—Mt. Hood, Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Glacier Peak—were lined up behind its trench. “Continental drift is one hypothesis I’ll get seasick for,” Deffeyes decided, and he signed up for a week’s use of the ship. He had no program in mind. To ask for a suggestion, he picked up a telephone and called Harry Hess. Instantly, Hess said, “Go to the ridge and dredge some rock from the axial valley. It better not be old.” Hess’s hypothesis that new seafloor forms at ocean rises had scarcely been tested. This was before the Eltanin profile, and before the voyages of the Glomar Challenger. Hess’s immediate response to Deffeyes was to suggest a test that could have shelved his hypothesis then and there.

  Deffeyes went out to dredge the rock, but first he had to find the ridge, so he made a long pass with his echo sounder tracing the profile of the bottom. The ridge-axis rock, when he dredged it up, was extremely young. But what in the end interested Deffeyes at least as much was the benthic profile that had been traced by the stylus of the sounder. The profile of the spreading center in the ocean bottom off Oregon seemed remarkably familiar to someone who had done his thesis field work in Nevada. It appeared to be, in miniature, a cross section of the Basin and Range. The new crust, spreading out, had broken into fault blocks and had become a microcosm of the Basin and Range, because both were expressions of the same cause. It was a microcosm, too, of the Triassic lowlands of the East two hundred and ten million years ago—Triassic Connecticut, Triassic New Jerse—with their border faults and basalt flows, their basins and ranges, gradually extending, pulling apart, to open the Atlantic. The Red Sea of today was what the Atlantic and its two sides had looked like about twenty million years after the Atlantic began to open. The Red Sea today was what the Basin and Range would probably look like at some time in the future.

  In December, 1972, the astronaut Harrison Schmitt, riding in Apollo 17, looked down at the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden—at a simple geometry that seemed to have been made with a jigsaw barely separating Africa and the Arabian peninsula. He told the people at Mission Control, “I didn’t grow up with the idea of drifting continents and seafloor spreading. But I tell you, when you look at the way pieces of the northeastern portion of the African continent seem to fit together, separated by a narrow gulf, you could make a believer out of anybody.” Schmitt was one of the eighty per cent who were changing their minds about the new global theory. In addition to his astronaut’s training, he had a Ph.D. in geology, and he would bring back from the moon a hundred kilos of rock.

  Twenty miles out of Winnemucca, and the interstate is dropping south toward the Humboldt Range. A coyote runs along beside the road. It is out of its element, tongue out, outclassed, under minimum speed. Deffeyes says that most ranges in the Basin and Range had one or two silver deposits in them, if any, but the Humboldts had five. We have also entered the bottomlands of the former Lake Lahontan. The hot-springs map shows more activity in this part of the province. Extension of the earth’s crust has been somewhat more pronounced here, Deffeyes explains, and hence there are more ore deposits. He feels that when a seaway opens up, the spreading center will be somewhere nearby. Or possibly back in Utah, in the bed of Lake Bonneville. “But this one has better connections.”

  “Connections?”

  “Death Valley. Walker Lake. Carson Sink.” An Exxon map of the western United States is spread open on the seat between us. He runs his finger from Death Valley to Carson Sink and on northward to cross the interstate at Lovelock. “The ocean will open here,” he repeats. “Or in the Bonneville basin. I think here.”

  A few miles off the road is the site of a planned community dating from the nineteen-sixties. It was to have wide streets and a fountained square, but construction was delayed and then indefinitely postponed. Ghostless ghost town, it had been named Neptune City.

  With the river on our right, we round the nose of the Humboldt Range, as did the Donner party and roughly a hundred and sixty-five thousand other people, in a seventeen-year period, heading in their wagons toward Humboldt Sink, Carson Sink, and the terror of days without water. But first, as we do now, they came into broad green flats abundantly fertile with grass, knee-high grass, a fill for the oxen, the last gesture of the river before it vanished into the air. The emigrants called this place the Big Meadows of the Humboldt, and something like two hundred and fifty wagons would be resting here at any given time.

  “There was a sea here in the Triassic,” Deffeyes remarks. “At least until the Sonomia terrane came in and sutured on. The sea was full of pelagic squid, and was not abyssal, but it was deep enough so the bottom received no sunlight, and bottom life was not dominant.”

  “How do you know it was not dominant?”

  “Because I have looked at the siltstones and the ammonites in them, and that is what I see there.”

  Visions of oceans before and behind us in time, we roll on into Lovelock. SLOW—DUST HAZARD. Lovelock, Nevada 89419. There are cumulus snow clouds overhead and big bays of blue in the
cold sky, with snow coming down in curtains over the Trinity Range, snow pluming upward over the valley like smoke from a runaway fire. Lovelock was a station of the Overland Stage. It became known throughout Nevada as “a good town with a bad water supply.” An editor of the Lovelock Review-Miner wrote in 1915, “There is little use in trying to induce people to locate here until the water question is settled … . Maybe the water does not kill anyone, but it certainly drives people away.” In 1917, Lovelock was incorporated as a third-class city, and one of its first acts was to enforce a ban on houses of prostitution within twelve hundred feet of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Another was a curfew. Another ordered all city lights turned off when there was enough moon.

  JAX CASINO LIBERAL SLOTS

  TWO STIFFS SELLING GAS AND MOTEL

  WATER SUPPLY FROM PRIVATE WELL

  LOVELOCK SEED COMPANY

  GRAINS AND FEED

  Here in the Big Meadows of the Humboldt, the principal employer is the co-op seed mill on the edge of town, which sends alfalfa all over the world.

  On the sidewalks are men in Stetsons, men in three-piece suits, men in windbreakers, tall gaunt overalled men with beards. There are women in Stetsons, boots, and jeans. A thin young man climbs out of a pickup that is painted in glossy swirls of yellow and purple, and has a roll bar, balloon tires, headphones, and seventeen lights.

  There are terraces of Lake Lahontan above the ballfield of the Lovelock Mustangs. Cattle graze beside the field. The Ten Commandments are carved in a large piece of metamorphosed granite outside the county courthouse.

  NO. 10:

  THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR’S WIFE,

  NOR HIS MANSERVANT, NOR HIS MAIDSERVANT,

  NOR HIS CATTLE

  BRAZEN ONAGER—BAR—BUD—PIZZA

  WHOO-O-A MOTEL

  “Lovelock was a person’s name,” Deffeyes cautions.

  LOVELOCK MERCANTILE

  The name is fading on the cornice of Lovelock Mercantile. It was built in 1905, expanded in 1907, is the bus stop now, liquor store, clothing store, grocery store, real-estate office, bakery, Western Union office—all in one room. There is a sign on one of the columns that hold up the room:

  WE CANNOT ACCEPT

  GOVERNMENT MEAL TICKETS

  Across the valley is a huge whitewash “L” on a rock above the fault scar of the Humboldt Range.

  We go into Sturgeon’s Log Cabin restaurant and sit down for coffee against a backdrop of rolling cherries, watermelons, and bells. A mountain lion in a glass case. Six feet to the tip of the tail. Shot by Daniel (Bill) Milich, in the Tobin Range.

  I hand Deffeyes the Exxon map and ask him to sketch in for me the opening of the new seaway, the spreading center as he sees it coming. “Of course, all the valleys in the Great Basin are to a greater or lesser extent competing,” he says. “But I’d put it where I said—right here.” With a pencil he begins to rough in a double line, a swath, about fifteen miles wide. He sketches it through the axis of Death Valley and up into Nevada, and then north by northwest through Basalt and Coaldale before bending due north through Walker Lake, Fallon, and Lovelock. “The spreading center would connect with a transform fault coming in from Cape Mendocino,” he adds, and he sketches such a line from the California coast to a point a little north of Lovelock. He is sketching the creation of a crustal plate, and he seems confident of that edge, for the Mendocino transform fault—the Mendocino trend—is in place now, ready to go. He is less certain about the southern edge of the new plate, because he has two choices. The Garlock Fault runs east-west just above Los Angeles, and that could become a side of the new plate; or the spreading center could continue south through the Mojave Desert and the Salton Sea to meet the Pacific Plate in the Gulf of California. “The Mojave sits in there with discontinued basin-and-range faulting,” Deffeyes says, almost to himself, a substitute for whistling, as he sketches in the alternative lines. “There has to be a transform fault at the south end of the live, expanding rift. The sea has got to get through somewhere.”

  Now he places his hands on the map so that they frame the Garlock and Mendocino faults and hold between them a large piece of California—from Bakersfield to Redding, roughly, and including San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno—not to mention the whole of the High Sierra, Reno, and ten million acres of Nevada. “You create a California Plate,” he says. “And the only question is: Is it this size, or the larger one? How much goes out to sea?” British Columbia is to his left and Mexico is to his right, beside his coffee cup on the oak Formica. The coast is against his belly. He moves his hands as if to pull all of central California out to sea. “Does this much go?” he says. “Or do the Mojave and Baja go with it?” A train of flatcars pounds through town carrying aircraft engines.

  My mind has drifted outside the building. I am wondering what these people in this dry basin—a mile above sea level—would think if they knew what Deffeyes was doing, if they were confronted with the news that an ocean may open in their town. I will soon find out.

  “What?”

  “Are you stoned?”

  “The way I see it, I won’t be here, so the hell with it.”

  “It’s a little doubtful. It could be, but it’s a little doubtful.”

  “If it happens real quick, I guess a couple of people will die, but if it’s like most other things they’ll find out about it hundreds of years before and move people out of here. The whole world will probably go to hell before that happens anyway.”

  “You mean salt water, crests, troughs, big splash, and all that? Don’t sweat it. You’re safe here—as long as Pluto’s out there.”

  “We got a boat.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard in a couple of years. When I go bye-bye to the place below, why, that water will be there to cool me. I hope it’s Saturday night. I won’t have to take an extra bath.”

  “It may be a good thing, there’s so many politicians; but they may get an extra boat. I used to be a miner. Oh, I’ve been all over. But now they’ve got machines and all the miners have died.”

  “The entire history of Nevada is one of plant life, animal life, and human life adapting to very difficult conditions. People here are the most individualistic you can find. As district attorney, I see examples of it every day. They want to live free from government interference. They don’t fit into a structured way of life. This area was settled by people who shun progress. Their way of life would be totally unattractive to most, but they chose it. They have chosen conditions that would be considered intolerable elsewhere. So they would adapt, easily, to the strangest of situations.”

  “I’ve been here thirty-three years, almost half of that as mayor. I can’t quite imagine the sea coming in—although most of us know that this was all underwater at one time. I know there’s quite a fault that runs to the east of us here. It may not be active. But it leaves a mark on your mind.”

  “Everybody’s entitled to an opinion. Everybody’s entitled to ask a question. If I didn’t think your question was valid, I wouldn’t have to answer you. I’d hope the fishing was good. I wouldn’t mind having some beach-front property. If it was absolutely certified that it was going to happen, we should take steps to keep people out of the area. But as chief of police I’m not going to be alarmed.”

  “It’ll be a change to have water here instead of desert. By God, we could use it. I say that as fire chief. We get seventy fire calls a year, which ain’t much, but then we have to go a hundred miles to put out those damned ranch fires. We can’t save much, but we can at least put out the heat. I got a ten-thousand-gallon tank there, which is really something for a place with no water. I guess I won’t still be here to see the ocean come, and I’m glad of it, because I can’t swim.”

  Meanwhile, Deffeyes, in Sturgeon’s Log Cabin, applies the last refining strokes to his sketchings on the map. “The Salton Sea and Death Valley are below sea level now, and the ocean would be there if it were not for pieces of this and that between,” he says. �
��We are extending the continental crust here. It is exactly analogous to the East African Rift, the Red Sea, the Atlantic. California will be an island. It is just a matter of time.”