Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  Moving on west, another day, we crossed the Laramie Plains on I-80 through a world of what to me were surprising lakes. They were not glacial lakes or man-made lakes or—as in Florida—sinkhole lakes filling bowls of dissolved limestone. For the most part, they had no outlets, and were therefore bitter lakes—some alkaline, some saline, some altogether dry. Of Knadler Lake, about a mile long, Love said, “That’s bitter water—sodium sulphate. It would physic you something awful.” A herd of twenty antelopes galloped up the shore of Knadler Lake. Most of the lakes of the world are the resting places of rivers, where rivers seek their way through landscapes that have been roughed up and otherwise left chaotic by moving ice. Ice had never covered the Laramie Plains. What, then, had dug out these lakes?

  Love’s response to that question was “What do you suppose?”

  We had seen—a mile or two away—a hole in the ground eleven miles long, four miles wide, and deeper than the Yellow Sea. There were some puddles in it, but it did not happen to intersect any kind of aquifer, and basically it was dry. With a talent for understatement, the people of Laramie call it the Big Hollow. Geologists call it a deflation basin, a wind-scoured basin, or—more succinctly—a blowout. The wind at the Big Hollow, after finding its way into some weak Cretaceous shales, had in short order dug out four million acrefeet and blown it all away. Wind not only makes such basins but maintains them—usually within frameworks of resistant rock. On the Laramie Plains, the resistant rock is heavy quartzite gravel—Precambrian pieces of the Snowy Range which were brought to the plains as the beds of Pleistocene rivers. Wet or dry, all the lakes we passed had been excavated by the wind. It was a bright cloudless morning with a spring breeze. Spheres of tumbleweed, tumbling east, came at us on the interstate at high speed, like gymfuls of bouncing basketballs dribbled by the dexterous wind. “It’s a Russian thistle,” Love said. “It’s one of nature’s marvels. As it tumbles, seeds are exploded out.”

  Across the green plains, the Medicine Bow Mountains and the Snowy Range stood high, sharp, and clear, each so unlike the other that they gave the impression of actually being two ranges: in the middle distance, the flat-crested Medicine Bows, dark with balsam, spruce, and pine; and, in the far high background, the white and treeless Snowy Range. That the one was in fact directly on top of the other was a nomenclatural Tower of Babel that contained in its central paradox the narrative of the Rockies: the burial of the ranges, the subsequent uplifting of the entire region, the exhumation of the mountains. As if to emphasize all that, people had not only named this single mountain range as if it were two but also bestowed upon the highest summit of the Snowy Range the name Medicine Bow Peak. It was up there making its point, at twelve thousand thirteen feet.

  We passed a stone ranch house a century old, and a set of faded ruts in the rangeland that were older than the house. This was the Overland Trail, abandoned in 1868 after seven dismal years. “A nasty route,” Love remarked. “Steep grades. Many rocks. Poor water. Poor grass. It was three days across the Laramie Plains at ten miles a day. It was often muddy and boggy. A disaster.”

  When, in the orogeny, the Medicine Bow Mountains were shoved a few miles east, the rock in front of them folded. The anticlines among the folds formed traps for migrating fluids. All about us were pump jacks bobbing for oil.

  Boulder beds in the roadcuts represented, as Love put it, “the deroofing of the Medicine Bow Mountains in the first pulsation of the Laramide Revolution.” The beds were of Paleocene age. In a knife-edge ridge a few miles farther on, the interstate had exposed the same conglomerates tilted forty-five degrees as mountain building continued. And soon after that came a flat-lying Eocene deposit. “So you have a time frame for the orogeny,” Love said, and this was when he added, “It didn’t take very long for those mountains to come up, to be deroofed, and to be thrust eastward. Then the motion stopped. That happened in maybe ten million years, and to a geologist that’s really fast.”

  Near Arlington, an anomalous piece of landscape reached straight out from the mountains like a causeway heading north. It was capped with stream gravel, brought off the mountains by furious rivers rushing through the tundras of Pleistocene time. The gravel had resisted subsequent erosion, while lighter stuff was washed away on either side. Geologists call such things pediments, and Love remarked that the one before us was “the most striking pediment in this region.” In my mind’s eye I could see the braided rivers coming off the Alaska Range, thickly spreading gravels, perhaps to preserve beneath them the scenes of former worlds. Where I-80 cut through the Arlington pediment, the Pleistocene gravel rested on Eocene sandstones, on red and green claystones; and they in turn covered conglomerates that came from the mountains when the mountains were new. One could read upward from one world to another: the boulders falling from rising mountains, the quiet landscapes after the violence stopped—all preserved in a perplexing memento from the climate of an age of ice.

  In a cut eight miles farther on, that early conglomerate was in contact with Cretaceous rock bent upward even more steeply as the Laramide Orogeny lifted the mountains. Picking through the evidence in the conglomerate was like sorting out debris from an explosion. One after another, I chose a cobble from the roadcut, handed it to Love, and asked him what it was. A Paleozoic quartzitic sandstone, for example—probably Mississippian. Grains rounded. No biotite. In fact, no mica of any kind. A Cretaceous sandstone. That would be from nearby, not from the mountains. A Paleozoic or Precambrian chert. Some Hanna formation sandstone, Paleocene in age—the matrix of the conglomerate. Some Precambrian quartzite from the Snowy Range, two billion years old. Some bull quartz from a vein in the Precambrian. And one he didn’t know.

  While the orogeny was making mountains, it was also making basins, for which it is less noted, even where the basins are a good deal deeper than Mt. Everest is high. As we crossed the Medicine Bow River and approached the North Platte and Rawlins, we moved out upon the surface of the Hanna Basin. It was choppy but essentially level nondescript ground, like all the rest of the rangeland on the apron of the mountains. It was not water, and we were not in a boat, but in some ways it seemed so as we crossed a basin forty-two thousand feet deep. It is the deepest structural basin in North America. It is Cretaceous, Paleocene, and Eocene rock, bent in U’s, with seams of coal as much as fifty feet thick in the arms of the U’s. Union Pacific.

  We crossed the North Platte, climbed some long grades, examined a few roadcuts, and pulled off on the shoulder at Rawlins to absorb, in the multiple exposures of the Rawlins Uplift, its comprehensive spread of time—Rawlins, where his mother had boarded the stage north, three-quarters of a century before.

  In the United States Geological Survey’s seven-and-a-half-minute series of topographic maps is a quadrangle named Love Ranch. The landscape it depicts lies just under the forty-third parallel and west of the hundred-and-seventh meridian—coordinates that place it twelve miles from the geographic center of Wyoming. The names of its natural features are names that more or less materialized around the kitchen table when David Love was young: Corral Draw, Castle Gardens, Buffalo Wallows, Jumping-Off Draw. To the fact that he grew up there his vernacular, his outlook, his pragmatic skills, and his professional absorptions about equally attest. The term “store-bought” once brightened his eyes. When one or another of the cowpunchers used a revolver, the man did not so much fire a shot as “slam a bullet.” If a ranch hand was tough enough, he would “ride anything with hair on it.” Coffee had been brewed properly if it would “float a horseshoe.” Blankets were “sougans.” A tarpaulin was a “henskin.” To be off in the distant ranges was to be “gouging around the mountains.” In Love’s stories of the ranch, horses come and go by the “cawy.” If they are unowned and untamed, they are a “wild bunch”—led to capture by a rider “riding point.” In the flavor of his speech the word “ornery” endures.

  He describes his father as a “rough, kindly, strong-willed man” who would put a small son on each knee and—reciting
“Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross to see a fine lady upon a white horse” —give the children bronco rides after dinner, explaining that his purpose was “to settle their stomachs.” Their mother’s complaints went straight up the stovepipe and away with the wind. When their father was not reciting such Sassenach doggerel, he could draw Scottish poems out of the air like bolts of silk. He had the right voice, the Midlothian timbre. He knew every syllable of “The Lady of the Lake.” Putting his arms around the shoulders of his wee lads, he would roll it to them by the canto, and when they tired of Scott there were in his memory more than enough ballads to sketch the whole of Scotland, from the Caithness headlands to the Lammermuir Hills.

  David was fifteen months younger than his brother, Allan. Their sister, Phoebe, was born so many years later that she does not figure in most of these scenes. They were the only children in a thousand square miles, where children outnumbered the indigenous trees. From the ranch buildings, by Muskrat Creek, the Wind River Basin reached out in buffalo grass, grama grass, and edible salt sage across the cambered erosional swells of the vast dry range. When the wind dropped, this whole wide world was silent, and they could hear from a great distance the squeak of a horned lark. The nearest neighbor was thirteen miles away. On the clearest night, they saw no light but their own.

  Old buffalo trails followed the creek and branched from the creek: old but not ancient—there were buffalo skulls beside them, and some were attached to hide. The boys used the buffalo trails when they rode off on ranch chores for their father. They rode young and rode long, and often went without water. Even now, so many decades later, David will pass up a cool spring, saying, “If I drink now, I’ll be thirsty all day.” To cut cedar fence posts, they went with a wagon to Green Mountain, near Crooks Gap—a round trip of two weeks. In early fall, each year, they spent ten days going back and forth to the Rattlesnake Hills for stove wood. They took two wagons—four horses pulling each wagon—and they filled them with limber pine. They used axes, a two-handled saw. Near home, they mined coal with their father—from the erosional wonderland they called Castle Gardens, where a horse-drawn scraper stripped the overburden and exposed the seams of coal. Their father was adept at corralling wild horses, a skill that called for a horse and rider who could outrun these closest rivals to the wind. He caught more than he kept, put his Flatiron brand on the best ones and sold the others. Some of them escaped. David remembers seeing one clear a seven-foot bar in the wild-horse corral and not so much as touch it. When he and Allan were in their early teens, his father sent them repping—representing Love Ranch in the general roundup—and they stayed in cow camp with other cowboys, and often enough their sougans included snow. When they were out on the range, they slept out on the range, never a night in a tent. This was not a choice. It was a family custom.

  In the earlier stretch of his life when John Love had slept out for seven years, he would wrap himself in his sougans and finish the package with the spring hooks and D-rings that closed his henskin. During big gales and exceptional blizzards, he looked around for a dry wash and the crease of an overhanging cutbank. He gathered sage and built a long fire—a campfire with the dimensions of a cot. He cooked his beans and bacon, his mutton, his sourdough, his whatever. After dinner, he kicked the fire aside and spread out his bedroll. He opened his waterproof packet of books and read by kerosene lamp. Then he blew out the light and went to sleep on warm sand. His annual expenditures were seventy-five dollars. This was a man who wore a long bearskin coat fastened with bone pegs in loops of rope. This was a man who, oddly enough, carried with him on the range a huge black umbrella—his summer parasol. This was a man whose Uncle John Muir had invented a device that started a fire in the morning while the great outdoorsman stayed in bed. And now this wee bairn with the light-gold hair was, in effect, questioning Love Ranch policy by asking his father what he had against tents. “Laddie, you don’t always have one available,” his father said patiently. “You want to get used to living without it.” Tents, he made clear, were for a class of people he referred to as “pilgrims.”

  When David was nine, he set up a trap line between the Hay Meadow and the Pinnacles (small sandstone buttes in Castle Gardens). He trapped coyotes, bobcats, badgers. He shot rabbits. He ran the line on foot, through late-autumn and early-winter snow. His father was with him one cold and blizzarding January day when David’s rifle and the rabbits he was carrying slipped from his hands and fell to the snow. David picked up the gun and soon dropped it again. “It was a cardinal sin to drop a rifle,” he says. “Snow and ice in the gun barrel could cause the gun to blow up when it was fired.” Like holding on to a saddle horn, it was something you just did not do. It would not have crossed his father’s mind that David was being careless. In sharp tones, his father said, “Laddie, leave the rabbits and rifle and run for home. Run!” He knew hypothermia when he saw it, no matter that it lacked a name.

  Even in October, a blizzard could cover the house and make a tunnel of the front veranda. As winter progressed, rime grew on the nailheads of interior walls until white spikes projected some inches into the rooms. There were eleven rooms. His mother could tell the outside temperature by the movement of the frost. It climbed the nails about an inch for each degree below zero. Sometimes there was frost on nailheads fifty-five inches up the walls. The house was chinked with slaked lime, wood shavings, and cow manure. In the wild wind, snow came through the slightest crack, and the nickel disks on the dampers of the heat stove were constantly jingling. There came a sound of hooves in cold dry snow, of heavy bodies slamming against the walls, seeking heat. John Love insulated his boots with newspapers—as like as not the New York Times. To warm the boys in their beds on cold nights, their mother wrapped heated flatirons in copies of the New York Times. The family were subscribers. Sundays only. The Times, David Love recalls, was “precious.” They used it to insulate the house: pasted it against the walls beside the Des Moines Register, the Tacoma News Tribune—any paper from anywhere, without fine distinction. With the same indiscriminate voracity, any paper from anywhere was first read and reread by every literate eye in every cow camp and sheep camp within tens of miles, read to shreds and passed along, in tattered circulation on the range. There was, as Love expresses it, “a starvation of print.” Almost anybody’s first question on encountering a neighbor was “Have you got any newspapers?”

  The ranch steadings were more than a dozen buildings facing south, and most of them were secondhand. When a stage route that ran through the ranch was abandoned, in 1905, John Love went down the line shopping for moribund towns. He bought Old Muskrat—including the hotel, the post office, Joe Lacey’s Muskrat Saloon—and moved the whole of it eighteen miles. He bought Golden Lake and moved it thirty-three. He arranged the buildings in a rough semicircle that embraced a corral so large and solidly constructed that other ranchers travelled long distances to use it. Joe Lacey’s place became the hay house, the hotel became in part a saddlery and cookhouse, and the other buildings, many of them connected, became all or parts of the blacksmith shop, the chicken hatchery, the ice shed, the buggy shed, the sod cellar, and the bunkhouse—social center for all the workingmen from a great many miles around. There was a granary made of gigantic cottonwood logs from the banks of the Wind River, thirty miles away. There were wool-sack towers, and a wooden windmill over a hand-dug well. The big house itself was a widespread log collage of old town parts and original construction. It had wings attached to wings. In the windows were air bubbles in distorted glass. For its twenty tiers of logs, John had journeyed a hundred miles to the lodgepole-pine groves of the Wind River Range, returning with ten logs at a time, each round trip requiring two weeks. He collected a hundred and fifty logs. There were no toilets, of course, and the family had to walk a hundred feet on a sometimes gumbo-slick path to a four-hole structure built by a ranch hand, with decorative panelling that matched the bookcases in the house. The cabinetmaker was Peggy Dougherty, the stagecoach driver who had first brought Mis
s Waxham through Crooks Gap and into the Wind River country.

  The family grew weary of carrying water into the house from the well under the windmill. And so, as she would write in later years:

  After experiments using an earth auger and sand point, John triumphantly installed a pitcher pump in the kitchen, a sink, and drain pipe to a barrel, buried in the ground at some distance from the house. This was the best, the first, and at that time the only water system in an area the size of Rhode Island.

  In the evenings, kerosene lamps threw subdued yellow light. Framed needlework on a wall said “WASH & BE CLEAN.” Everyone bathed in the portable galvanized tub, children last. The more expensive galvanized tubs of that era had built-in seats, but the Loves could not afford the top of the line. On the plank floor were horsehide rugs—a gray, a pinto—and the pelt of a large wolf, and two soft bobcat rugs. Chairs were woven with rawhide or cane. John recorded the boys’ height on a board nailed to the inside of the kitchen doorframe. A brass knocker on the front door was a replica of a gargoyle at Notre-Dame de Paris.