Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  We moved along slowly from one block to another. A young woman crossed the street in front of us, pushing a baby carriage. “She’s wearing a wig, I promise you,” Anita said. “Her head may be shaved.” Singling out another woman among the heterogeneous people of the neighborhood, she said, “Look. See that woman with the turban? She has her hair covered on purpose. They’re Chassidic Jews. Their hair is shaved off or concealed so they will not be attractive to passing men.” There was a passing man with long curls hanging down either side of his head—in compliance with a dictum of the Pentateuch. “Just to be in the streets here is like stepping into the Middle Ages,” Anita said. “Fortunately, my parents were not religious. I would have thought these people would have moved out of here long ago. Chassidic Jews are not all poor, I promise you. Their houses may not look like much, but you should see them inside. They’re diamond cutters. They handle money. And they’re still here. People are wrong. They are wrong in what they have told me.”

  We went out of the noon sun into deep shade under the Williamsburg Bridge, whose immense stone piers and vaulting arches seemed Egyptian. She had played handball under there when she was a girl. “There were no tennis courts in this part of the world, let me tell you.” When the boys went off to swim in the river, she went back to Berry Street. “Me? In the river? Not me. The boys swam nude.”

  In the worst parts of summer, when the air was heavy and the streets were soft, Anita went up onto the bridge, climbing to a high point over the river, where there was always a breeze. Seven, eight years old, she sat on the pedestrian walk, with her feet dangling, and looked down into the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The Second World War was in full momentum. U.S.S. Missouri, U.S.S. Bennington, U.S.S. Kearsarge—she saw keels going down and watched battleships and carriers grow. It was a remarkable form of entertainment, but static. Increasingly, she wondered what lay beyond the bridge. One day, she got up the courage to walk all the way across. She set foot on Manhattan and immediately retreated. “I wanted to go up Delancey Street, but I was too scared.”

  Next time, she went up Delancey Street three blocks before she turned around and hurried home. In this manner, through time, she expanded her horizons. In the main, she just looked, but sometimes she had a little money and went into Manhattan stores. About the only money she ever had she earned returning bottles for neighbors, who gave her a percentage of the deposit. Her idea of exceptional affluence was a family that could afford fresh flowers. Her mother was a secretary whose income covered a great deal less than the family’s needs. Her father was a trucker (“with a scar on his face that would make you think twice”), and his back had been broken in an accident. He would spend three years in traction, earning nothing. Gradually, Anita’s expeditions on foot into Manhattan increased in length until she was covering, round trip, as much as twelve miles. Her line of maximum advance was somewhere in Central Park. “That’s as far as I ever got. I was too scared.” Going up the Bowery and through the East Village, she had no more sense of the geology than did the men who were lying in the doorways. When she looked up at the Empire State Building, she was unaware that it owed its elevation to the formation that outcropped in Central Park; and when she saw the outcrops there, she did not wonder why, in the moist atmosphere of the American East, those great bare shelves of sparkling rock were not covered with soil and vegetation. In Wyoming, wind might have stripped them bare, but Wyoming is miles high and drier than the oceans of the moon. Here in the East, a river could wash rock clean, but this rock was on the high ground of an island, far above flood and tide. She never thought to wonder why the rock was scratched and grooved, and elsewhere polished like the foyer of a bank. She didn’t know from geology.

  In Brooklyn College, from age fifteen onward, she read physics, mineralogy, structural geology, igneous and metamorphic petrology. She took extra courses to the extent permitted. To attend the college she had to pay six dollars a semester, and she meant to get everything out of the investment she could. There were also lab fees and breakage fees. Breakage fees, in geology, were not a great problem. Among undergraduate colleges in the United States, this one was relatively small, about the size of Harvard, which it resembled, with its brick-and-white-trim sedate Colonial buildings, its symmetrical courtyards and enclosed lawns; and like Harvard it stood on outwash. Brooklyn College is in south Flatbush, seaward of the terminal moraine. When Anita was there, in the middle nineteen-fifties, there were so many leftists present that the college was known as the Little Red Schoolhouse. She did not know from politics, either. She was in a world of roof pendants and discordant batholiths, elastic collisions and neutron scatteration, and she branched out into mineral deposits, field mapping, geophysics, and historical geology, adding such things to the skills she had established earlier in accounting, bookkeeping, typing, and shorthand. It had been assumed in her family that she would be a secretary, like her mother.

  Now when she goes up Fifth Avenue—as she did with me that summer day—she addresses Fifth Avenue as the axis of the trough of a syncline. She knows what is underfoot. She is aware of the structure of the island. The structure of Manhattan is one of those paradoxes in spatial relations which give geologists especial delight and are about as intelligible to everyone else as punch lines delivered in Latin. There is a passage in the oeuvre of William F. Buckley, Jr., in which he remarks that no writer in the history of the world has ever successfully made clear to the layman the principles of celestial navigation. Then Buckley announces that celestial navigation is dead simple, and that he will pause in the development of his present narrative to redress forever the failure of the literary class to elucidate this abecedarian technology. There and then—and with intrepid, awesome courage—he begins his explication; and before he is through, the oceans are in orbit, their barren shoals are bright with shipwrecked stars. With that preamble, I wish to announce that I am about to make perfectly clear how Fifth Avenue, which runs along the high middle of a loaf of rock that lies between two rivers, runs also up the center of the trough of a syncline. When rock is compressed and folded, the folds are anticlines and synclines. They are much like the components of the letter S. Roll an S forward on its nose and you have to the left a syncline and to the right an anticline. Each is a part of the other. Such configurations in rock compose the structure of a region, but will not necessarily shape the surface of the land. Erosion is the principal agent that shapes the surface of the land; and erosion—particularly when it packs the violence of a moving glacier—can cut through structure as it pleases. A carrot sliced the long way and set flat side up is composed of a synclinal fold. Manhattan, embarrassingly referred to as the Big Apple, might at least instructively be called the Big Carrot. River to river, erosion has worn down the sides, and given the island its superficial camber. Fifth Avenue, up on the high ground, is running up the center of a synclinal trough.

  On the upper West Side that afternoon, Anita drew her rock hammer and relieved Manhattan of some dolomite marble, which she took from an outcrop for its relevance to her research in conodonts. She found the marble “overcooked.” She said, “To get that kind of temperature, you have to go down thirty or forty thousand feet, or have molten rock nearby, or have a high thermal gradient, which can vary from place to place on earth by a factor of four. This marble is so cooked it is almost volatilized. This—you better believe—is hot rock.” At Seventy-second Street and West End Avenue, she stopped to admire a small apartment building whose façade, in mottled greens and black, was elegant with serpentine. On Sixty-eighth Street between Fifth and Madison, she was impressed by a house of gabbro, as anyone would be who had spent a childhood emplaced like a fossil in Triassic sand. It was a house of great wealth, the house of gabbro. Up the block was a house of granite, even grander than the gabbro, and beyond that was a limestone mansion so airily patrician one feared it might dissolve in rain. Anita dropped acid on it and watched it foam.

  Jack Epstein, Anita’s northern-Appalachian geologist, went to Brooklyn Colle
ge, too, and subsequently enrolled in the master’s program at the University of Wyoming. Anita tried to follow, in 1957, but the geology department in Laramie offered no fellowships for first-year graduate students. (“I needed money. I didn’t have a pot to cook in.”) She looked into places like Princeton, with geology departments outstanding in the world, but they were even less receptive than Wyoming. In those days, Princeton would not have admitted a woman had she been a direct descendant of Sir Charles Lyell offering as tuition her weight in gems. Anita applied to ten schools in all. The best offer came from Indiana University, in Bloomington, where her professors were soon much aware of her as an extremely bright and aggressive student with the disconcerting habit of shaking her head while they talked, as if to say no, no, no, no, you cratonic schnook, you don’t know from nothing. Something of the sort was not always far from her thoughts. (“I am not a very orthodox geologist. I do buy some dogma, if I think it’s common sense.”)

  Bloomington stood upon Salem limestone, which, in the terminology of the building trade, makes beautiful “dimension stone,” and is cut to be the cladding of cities. It formed from lime mud in the Meramecian age of middle Mississippian time—between 348 and 340 million years before the present—when Bloomington was at the bottom of a shallow arm of the transgressing ocean, an epicratonic sea. “You people in New York may have your Empire State Building,” a professor pointed out to Anita. “But out here we have the hole in the ground it came from.”

  Anita and Jack Epstein were married in 1958, and, with their newly acquired master’s degrees, went to work for the United States Geological Survey. Within the profession, the Survey had particular prestige. A geologist who sought field experience was likely to obtain it in such quantity and variety nowhere else. Anita and Jack Epstein looked upon geology as “an extremely applied science” and shared a conviction that field experience was indispensable in any geological career—no less essential to a modern professor than it ever was to a pick-and-shovel prospector. (“People should go out and get experience and not just turn around and teach what they’ve been taught.”) In their first year in the Survey—to an extent beyond anything they could ever have guessed—they would get what they sought.

  Because geology is sometimes intuitive even to the point of being subjective, the sort of field experience one happens to acquire may tend to influence one’s posture with regard to deep questions in the science. Geologists who grow up with young rocks are likely to subscribe strongly to the doctrine of uniformitarianism, whereby the present is seen to be the key to the past. They discern a river sandbar in a wall of young rock; they see a sandbar in a living river; and they know that each is in the process of becoming the other, cyclically through time. Whatever is also was, and ever again shall be. Geologists who grow up with very old rock tend to be impressed by the fact that it has been around since before the earliest development of life, and to imagine a progression in which the recycling of the earth’s materials is a subplot in a dramatic story that begins with dark scums in motion on an otherwise featureless globe and evolves through various continental configurations toward the scenery of the earth today. They refer to the earliest part of that story as “scum tectonics.” The rock cycle—with its crumbling mountains being carried to the sea to form there the rock of mountains to be —is the essence of the uniformitarian principle, which was first articulated by James Hutton, of Edinburgh, at the end of the eighteenth century. Hutton, with his depths of time—his vision of great crustal changes occurring slowly through unguessable numbers of years—opened the way to Darwin (time is the first requirement of evolution) and also placed emphasis on repetitive processes and a sense that change is largely gradual. In contemporary dress, these concepts are still at odds in geology. Some geologists seem to look upon the rock record as a frieze of catastrophes interspersed with gaps, while others prefer to regard everything from rockslides and volcanic eruptions to rifted continents and plate collisions as dramatic passages in a quietly unfolding story. If you grow up in Brooklyn, you are free to form your prejudices where you may.

  Anita Epstein’s sense of the dynamics of the earth underwent considerable adjustment one night in 1959, when she and her husband were on summer field assignment in southwestern Montana. They were there to do geologic mapping and studies in structure and stratigraphy in the Madison Range and the Gallatin Range, where Montana is wrapped around a corner of Yellowstone Park. They lived in a U.S.G.S. house trailer in a grove of aspens on the Blarneystone Ranch, a lovely piece of terrain whose absent owner was Emmett J. Culligan, the softener of water. Since joining the Survey, they had worked in Pennsylvania, mapping quadrangles in the region of the Delaware Water Gap, and had spent the winter at headquarters in Washington, and now they were being given a chance to see some geology in a part of the United States where it is particularly visible—in Anita’s words, “where it all hangs out.”

  The ranch was close by Hebgen Lake, which owed itself to a dam in the valley of the Madison River. The valley ran along the line of a fault that was thought to be inactive until that night. The air was crisp. The moon was full. The day before, a fire watcher in a tower in the Gallatins had become aware of an unnerving silence. The birds were gone, he realized. Birds of every sort had made a wholesale departure from his mountain. It would be noted by others that bears had taken off as well, while bears that remained walked preoccupied in circles. The Epsteins had no knowledge of these signs and would not have known what to make of them if they had. They were unaware then that Chinese geologists routinely watch wildlife for intimations of earthquakes. They were also unaware that David Love, of the Survey’s office in Laramie, had published an abstract only weeks before called “Quaternary Faulting in and near Yellowstone Park,” in which he expressed disagreement with the conventional wisdom that seismic activity on a grand scale was a thing of the past in that region. He said he thought a major shock was not unlikely. Anita was shuffling cards, 11:37 P.M., when the lantern above her began to swing, crockery fell from cabinets, and water leaped out of a basin. Jack tried to catch the swinging lantern and “it beaned him on the head.” The floor of the trailer was moving in a way that reminded her of the Fun House at Coney Island. They ran outside. “Trees were toppling over. The solid earth was like a glop of jelly,” she would recall later. In the moonlight, she saw soil moving like ocean waves, and for all her professed terror she was collected enough to notice that the waves were not propagating well and were cracking at their crests. She remembers something like thirty seconds of “tremendous explosive noise,” an “amplified tornado.” She was close to the epicenter of a shock that was felt three hundred and fifty miles away and markedly affected water wells in Hawaii and Alaska. East and west from where she stood ran an eighteen-mile rip in the surface of the earth. The fault ran straight through Culligan’s ranch house, and had split its levels, raising the back twelve feet. The tornado sound had been made by eighty million tons of Precambrian mountainside, whose planes of schistosity had happened to be inclined toward the Madison River, with the result that half the mountain came falling down in one of the largest rapid landslides produced by an earthquake in North America in historical time. People were camped under it and near it. Among the dead were some who died of the air blast, after flapping like flags as they clung to trees. Automobiles rolled overland like tumbleweed. They were inundated as the river pooled up against the rockslide, and they are still at the bottom of Earthquake Lake, as it is called—a hundred and eighty feet deep.

  The fault offset the water table, and the consequent release of artesian pressure sent grotesque fountains of water, sand, and gravel spurting into the air. Yet the dam at Hebgen Lake held—possibly because the lake’s entire basin subsided, in places as much as twenty-two feet. Seiche waves crossed its receding surface. A seiche is a freshwater tsunami, an oscillation in a bathtub. The surface of Hebgen Lake was aslosh with them for twelve hours, but the first three or four were the large ones. Entering lakeside bungalows, they drown
ed people in their beds.

  When a volcano lets fly or an earthquake brings down a mountainside, people look upon the event with surprise and report it to each other as news. People, in their whole history, have seen comparatively few such events; and only in the past couple of hundred years have they begun to sense the patterns the events represent. Human time, regarded in the perspective of geologic time, is much too thin to be discerned—the mark invisible at the end of a ruler. If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away. Yucatans and Floridas would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies. At the end of the program, man shows up—his ticket in his hand. Almost at once, he conceives of private property, dimension stone, and life insurance. When a Mt. St. Helens assaults his sensibilities with an ash cloud eleven miles high, he writes a letter to the New York Times recommending that the mountain be bombed.

  As the night returned to quiet and the ground ceased to move, Anita recovered whatever composure she had lost, picked up her deck of cards, and said to herself, “That’s the way it goes, folks. The earth’s a very shaky mobile thing, and that’s how it works. Apparently, the mountains around here are still going up.” Later, she would say, “We were taught all wrong. We were taught that changes on the face of the earth come in a slow steady march. But that isn’t what happens. The slow steady march of geologic time is punctuated with catastrophes. And what we see in the geologic record are the catastrophes. Look at a graded sandstone and see the bedding go from fine to coarse. That’s a storm. That’s one storm—when the water came up and laid the coarse material down over the fine. In the rock record, the tranquillity of time is not well represented. Instead, you have the catastrophes. In the Southwest, they live from one catastrophe to another, from one flash flood to the next. The evolution of the world does not happen a grain at a time. It happens in the hundred-year storm, the hundred-year flood. Those things do it all. That earthquake made a catastrophist of me.”