Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  It was the general opinion on the range that if a man had that kind of money he did not need an oil well. Our mirage disappeared completely.

  Emblematically, fire broke out in the oil fields of Lost Soldier, fifty miles southwest, and for weeks lighted up the night sky. In Horseshoe Gulch, six miles from the ranch, Sinclair Wyoming drilled forty-three hundred feet and found gas, which came out with such force that it destroyed the drill stem and blew the wooden derrick to pieces.

  When the blast came, the driller was carrying a hundred-pound anvil across the rig floor. He told us that he raced half a mile over the sagebrush before he realized that he still held the anvil.

  The Loves hitched up a wagon and went after the wood. They would burn the entire derrick in their kitchen stove.

  David picked up a small, rough chunk of soft gray shale, blasted out of the depths of the well. He saw in it tiny marine fossils and fragile, lustrous pieces of mother-of-pearl, the size of his fingernail, that had once held the bodies of living clams; they came from more than half a mile underground; they lived before the time of men on the earth; they had been buried, how many ages, since they moved about that unseen shore. The driller told him that those shells predicted the presence of oil … . He brought home the rock with the delicate shells embedded in it and has kept it ever since in an Indian bowl.

  When the boys were teen-aged, they occasionally saddled up and rode twenty-six miles to dances in Shoshoni. (I once asked David if they were square dances, and he said, “No. It was contact sport.”) After dancing half the night, they rode twenty-six miles home. Their mother rented a house in Lander and stayed there with them while they attended Fremont County Vocational High School. One of their classmates was William Shakespeare, whose other name was War Bonnet. Lander at that time was the remotest town in Wyoming. It advertised itself as “the end of the rails and the start of the trails.” Now and again, when the boys and their mother went visiting, they went through Red Canyon. A scene of great beauty, long sinuous Red Canyon was a presentation of the Mesozoic, framed in wide margins of time. In the eastern escarpment, the rock, tilting upward, protruded from the earth in cliffs six hundred feet high, and these were Eocene over Paleocene over Cretaceous and Jurassic benches above the red Triassic wall. Upward to the west ran a sage-covered Permian slope, on a line of sight that led higher in altitude and lower in time to the Precambrian roof of the Wind River Range—peaks on the western horizon.

  Within the Triassic red was a distinctive white line that ran on as far as the eye could see. It was amazingly consistent, five feet thick, a limestone. In time, David would learn that this uniform bed covered fifty thousand square miles and was one of the most unusual rock units anywhere in the world, with such an absence of diagnostic fossils that no one could tell if the water it formed in was fresh or salt. (“It is a major marker bed of the Rockies,” he once said, pointing it out to me. “Fifty thousand square miles—try to imagine any place in the world today where you can find that kind of stability. I can’t. It’s unique geologically.”) As a youth, though, he was less fascinated by this Alcova limestone than by other aspects of Red Canyon. A woman who lived there was known as Red Canyon Red, for her striking Triassic hair. She was —as he would in later years describe her—“a whore par excellence.” This may have been one reason that the boys’ mother routinely accompanied her sons when they went through Red Canyon Red’s canyon.

  To shorten the trip to Lander, and make his own visits more frequent, John Love bought a used Buick.

  Under severe nervous and vocal strain, he taught himself to drive, alone, on a wide expanse of level ground. Automatically he called “Whoa, there!” when he wanted to stop.

  He knew a stockman who, in a similar effort, had failed, and had destroyed his car with an axe. John was resolved not to let that happen to him. He triumphed, of course, and the family was soon cruising to the Sweetwater Divide, with a picnic lunch and a jug of lemonade. Their horizons, already wide, before long rapidly expanded as John decided to take the first vacation of his life in order that the boys might see the Pacific Ocean before they went to college. The Loves headed west in the Buick. They had a breadbox, a camp stove, a nest of aluminum pots. The back seat was stacked high with blankets. Suitcases rode on the running boards, and on top of the luggage was a tepee.

  The boys went to the University of Wyoming, where Allan majored in civil engineering. David majored in geology, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Words carved into the university sandstone said:

  STRIVE ON—THE

  CONTROL OF NATURE

  IS WON NOT GIVEN

  David stayed in Laramie to earn a master’s degree, and later, on a scholarship, went east to seek a Ph.D. at Yale. Arriving with some bewilderment in that awesome human topography, he noticed a line from Rafael Sabatini carved in stone in a courtyard of the Hall of Graduate Studies: “He was born with a gift for laughter and a sense that the world is mad.” Those words steadied him at Yale, and helped prepare him for a lifetime in government and science. As a graduate student, he had to advance his reading knowledge of German, which he did over campfires on summer field work in the mountains of Wyoming. One book mentioned an inscription above a doorway at the German Naval Officers School, in Kiel—an unlikely place for a Rocky Mountain geologist to discover what became for him a lifelong professional axiom. As he renders it in English: “Say not ‘This is the truth’ but ‘So it seems to me to be as I now see the things I think I see.’”

  Yale had one of the better geology departments in the world, and its interests were commensurately global. It was syllogistic, encyclopedic, and stirred its students to extended effort—causing him to disappear into the library for months on end in what he calls his golden years. It was a department preoccupied with the Big Picture, and as a result it was not overcrowded with people who had seen a lot of outcrops. That, at any rate, is how it seemed to a student who had seen almost nothing but outcrops—close at hand, or slowly turning from the perspective of a saddle. In no way did this distinction diminish the reverence he felt for these eastern petrologues. “Their field geology was, let’s say, incomplete,” he will remark tenderly.

  He did his field work in exceptionally rugged country—in the Tetons for a time, during those grad-school summers, but mainly along the southern margin of the Absaroka Range, roughly a hundred miles northwest of the ranch. He chose an area of about three hundred thousand acres (five hundred square miles) with intent to develop an understanding of it sufficient for the completion of a doctoral thesis. Geologically, it was a blank piece of the earth. Virtually nothing was known. The area had been mapped topographically. He took the map with him. Some of its streams ran uphill.

  The Absarokas, it seemed, were a multilayered pile of pyroclastic debris—sedimentary rock whose components had once been volcanic outpourings. It was material that—after hardening—had been crumbled by weather and collected and moved by streams. The Absaroka volcanic sediments were a local part of the vast fill that had buried the central Rocky Mountains—a hard and therefore durable part. Their huge boulders indicated close proximity to the vents from which the rock had poured. (On a relief map, the Absarokas seem to spill out of Yellowstone Park.) During the Exhumation of the Rockies, the durability of these formations had left them in place. They resemble a battlement, standing seven thousand feet above the adjacent plains.

  When Love chose this thesis topic, he was not choosing a journey from A to B. He did not mark off a little basin somewhere and essay to describe the porridge it contained. He picked a spinning pinwheel of geology, with highlights flashing from every vane. For example, the western end of the Owl Creek Mountains is still buried—under the Absarokas in the area of Love’s thesis. Another chain of mountains is largely buried there, too. He discovered it and named it the Washakie Range. That the Absarokas were structurally separate from the Owl Creeks was obvious. It was not so readily apparent that the Owl Creeks were younger than the Washakies, or that the Washakies in their
early days had been thrust southwestward over undistorted shales on the floor of the Wind River Basin. Gradually, he figured these things out, alone in the country, on foot. His thesis area reached a short distance into the Wind River Basin, and thus completed in its varied elements the panoply of the Rockies. It included folded mountains and dissected plateaus. It included basin sediments and alpine peaks, dry gulches and superposed master streams, desert sageland and evergreen forest rising to a timberline at ten thousand four hundred feet. It contained the story unabridged—from the preserved subsummit surface to the fossil topographies exhumed far below. At any given place in the area, temperatures could change eighty degrees in less than a day. The territory was roadless, and after a couple of years on foot he was ready to bring in a horse. Methodically cross-referencing the lithology, the paleontology, the stratigraphy, the structure, he mapped the region geologically—discovering and naming seven formations.

  In one of those Yale summers, while taking some time away from the rock, he badly cut his foot in a lake near Lander. He made a tourniquet with his bandanna, and limped into town to see Doc Smith. This was Francis Smith, M.D., who had coaxed David’s father past the tick fever, had seen David’s mother through a strep infection that nearly killed her, and, over the years, had put enough stitches in David to complete a baseball. Now, as he worked on the foot, he told David that one of his recent office visitors had been Robert LeRoy Parker himself (Butch Cassidy).

  David said politely that Cassidy was dead in Bolivia, and everybody knew that.

  Smith said everybody was wrong. The patient had appeared in the doorway, and had stood there long and thoughtfully, searching the face of the doctor. Pleased by what he did not find, he said. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  The doctor said, “You look familiar, but I can’t quite say.”

  The patient remarked that his face had been altered by a surgeon in Paris. Then he lifted his shirt, exposing the deep crease of a repaired bullet wound—craftsmanship that Doc Smith recognized precisely as his own.

  The work that David Love was doing in Wyoming attracted the attention of the Geological Society of America. He was invited to speak at the society’s national meeting, which, in the course of its migrations, happened to be scheduled for Washington, D.C. He suffered great anticipatory fright. It was most unusual for a graduate student to be asked to speak to the G.S.A. He was intimidated—by the East in general, by the capital city, by the fact that the foremost geologists in America would be there. Bailey Willis, of Stanford, would be there; Andrew Lawson, of Berkeley; Walter Granger, of the American Museum of Natural History; Taylor Thom, of Princeton. The paper that Love presented was on folding and faulting in Tertiary rocks. The Tertiary period runs from sixty-five million to something under two million years before the present. When Love went to Yale, the conventional wisdom in geology held that all folded and faulted rock was older than the Tertiary—that all Tertiary rock was undeformed. For his thesis in the Absarokas, he had mapped many areas of folded and faulted Tertiary rock. He knew the fossils, the stratigraphy. This was in no sense a horseback guess. He practiced carefully what he would say, and, when his moment came, there he was on a platform in the ballroom of the Hotel Washington struggling to control his voice, unaware that he had forgotten to button his suspenders. They were hanging down in back, exposed and flapping. His embarrassment had scarcely begun. At the climax of his presentation—as he described the deformation that had made clear to him that fifteen million years into Tertiary time the Laramide Revolution had not quite ended—he heard what he describes as hoots of derision, and when he finished there was no applause. The big room was silent. A moment passed, and then the structural geologist Taylor Thom, some of whose work was challenged by Love’s paper, stood up and said, “This paper is a milestone in Rocky Mountain geology.”

  At his first G.S.A. meeting, a couple of years earlier in New York, about the only person he knew was Samuel H. Knight, his distinguished tutor from the University of Wyoming. Gradually, the faces and forms of strangers attached themselves to names long familiar to him on scientific papers and the spines of books. His personal pantheon came alive around him, and he was pleased to discover how easily approachable they were. When he tells of the experience—now that he is the Grand Old Man of Rocky Mountain Geology—he could be describing himself: “They put their pants on one leg at a time. They were very human individuals. They encouraged young people to speak out.” As they discussed one another’s papers, he relished their candor, their style of disagreement. A paleontologist named Asa Mathews got up and presented what he believed was the discovery that the world’s first bird had come into existence in Permian time—roughly a hundred million years earlier than Archaeopteryx, the incumbent first bird. Mathews detailed some remarkable trace fossils in Permian rock in Utah, which sequentially recorded, he said, a bird as it ran along the ground, its wingtips awkwardly scraping until, finally, it took off. Walter Granger arose before the assembly to greet this unusual news. He said, “Professor Mathews has undoubtedly demonstrated that the first bird flew over that part of Utah, but he has not demonstrated that it landed.”

  David Griggs, who was not much older than Love, gave a superb demonstration of some fresh ideas about mountain building. Afterward, Bailey Willis, whom Love describes as “one of the grandfathers of structural geology in the world,” anointed Griggs with praise. The great Andrew Lawson, who named the San Andreas Fault, was on his feet next, and virtually conferred upon Griggs an honorary degree by saying, “For the first and only time in my life, I agree with Bailey Willis.”

  In another context, a young geologist challenged Walter Granger, saying, “Dr. Granger, are you sure you’re right?” Granger answered, without a flicker of hesitation, “Young man, I will consider myself a great success in life if I prove to be right fifty per cent of the time.”

  After Yale, Love worked a season for the U.S. Geological Survey in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, scratching his way a step at a time through the dense, stiff branches of scrub oak that—ninety years before—had held up the Donner party enough to set the schedule for its eventual rendezvous with snow. Employed by the Shell Oil Company, he spent five years looking for areas of possible oil accumulation in the structures of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Georgia, Arkansas, Michigan, Alabama, and Tennessee. This increased his experience in ways that included a good deal more than rocks—especially in the southern Appalachians. Looking for outcrops, he walked many hundreds of miles of streambeds, “brushing water moccasins to one side.” He studied roadcuts and railroad cuts. He slept where the day ended. Sometimes he stayed, for weeks at a time, with farmers. A farmer in Tennessee took him aside one day and offered him his unusually beautiful teen-age daughter in marriage if David would buy her a pair of shoes—her first. Apparently, the girl had developed such a longing for the young geologist that her father wanted her to have him. David felt that he was receiving “the ultimate compliment,” for the farmer wanted to give him what the farmer valued most in the world. Earnestly, he wished not to offend, lest, among other things, he lose his advantage in a complicated country dissected by entrenched streams, a prime piece of the Mississippi Embayment, as geologists call the great bulb of sediments that reaches from the mouth of the Mississippi River as far north as Paducah, Kentucky. The farmer was in a strategic position to permit the young geologist to find certain permeable sandstones wedging out between layers of shale in updips where migrating petroleum might have become trapped. So he was anxious not to ruffle the feelings of his host. Besides, he was engaged.

  In Laramie in 1934, David had met a geology student from Bryn Mawr College who had come west to spend a couple of semesters at the University of Wyoming under an arrangement that he would ever after refer to as her junior year abroad. Her father, in granting her permission to go to Wyoming, had commented that everyone has a right—at least once in a lifetime—to run away to sea. Her name was Jane Matteson, and she had grown up in the quiet
streets and private educational enclaves of Providence, Rhode Island. She had twice the sophistication of this ranch hand, notwithstanding the fact that she wrote “crick” in her early field notes, believing that western geologists had taught her a new term. Moreover, she considered him “too good-looking.” (Had he ever been inclined to, he could have answered the complaint in kind.) He appealed to her, though—in part because he kept his distance. She liked her cowboys unaggressive, and this one (at the time) was so shy—so reserved and respectful—that he stayed on his own side of his little Ford coupé. Her philosophy of conjugal evolution was contained in the phrase “A kiss is a promise,” and for the time being there were no promises. He took her to the top of the Laramie Range, and up there on the pink granite under the luminous constellations gave her some gallant, if cryptic, advice. He said, “Whatever you do, don’t come up here to look at the stars with a geologist.”

  When a letter arrived containing his acceptance at Yale, they went over the mountains to celebrate in Cheyenne. On the return trip, on old U.S. 30, they were met at the gangplank by a spring storm, and they worried that they would be snowed in for the night, with resulting damage to their reputations. Forging on through the blizzard, they made it to Laramie. After Jane finished Bryn Mawr, she did graduate work at Smith, returning to Wyoming for the summer field work in the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains which led to her master’s thesis on Pennsylvanian-Permian rock. More apart than together while he completed his work at Yale, they exchanged long and frequent letters, which was her idea of a way for two people to get to know each other well and review their approaches to life. (When she was telling me this, not long ago, she added, with a bit of gemflash in her dark eyes, “I suppose that’s why young people live together now—instead of writing letters.”) In the nineteen-seventies, she edited a book on Mesozoic mammals for the University of California Press, but her own work in geology has been at best sporadic. “In our generation,” she once remarked to me, “a woman’s place was in the home raising a family if that was what she chose to do. I brooded a little bit about this but not much. You get to be twenty-five. You kick around the options. You decide you would rather be a wife and mother than a geologist. The fact that I can talk geology with him is just gravy.” She offers her thoughts as an advocate of the geological devil to assist in the refinement of David’s ideas. “What makes you think you know that? How could you possibly infer that?” she will say to him, not always stopping short of his Celtic irascibilities.