Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  At Love Ranch, in 1910 or so, and apropos of who knows what, David’s mother asked his father, “Is it true that it is necessary to kill a Scot or agree with him?”

  John Love took the question seriously. After thinking it over, he answered, without elaboration, “No.”

  “David is not afraid of a new idea,” Jane continues. “He’s a pragmatist. He never looks back. He is both ingenious and practical. On the ranch when he grew up there was no plumbing, no electricity, no automobile—and the equipment they had they repaired themselves. If he has a piece of baling wire, he can fix anything. He fixes everything from plumbing to cars. He applies the same practicality to geology. If a slide block suggests that it might go downhill, he has the physics and he knows if it will work. His talent lies particularly in his sense of cause and effect. His knowledge, experience, and curiosity extend far beyond the mere presence of a rock. He is the most creative geologist I know.”

  They were married in 1940. Two of their four children were conceived after a summer field season and born during the next one, with him off in the wild, hundreds of miles away. That, says Jane, is just one more facet of geology. On a field trip somewhere in the late nineteen-seventies, David said to me, “I’ve been hearing about it for thirty-four years.” The summer field season begins in June and ends about four months later, during which time she seldom saw much of him in their early years, a condition she regards as follows: “My father was a lawyer in Providence. After that junior year in Wyoming, the thought of being married to a lawyer in Providence gave me claustrophobia.”

  Their first child was a little white-haired kid named Frances, who arrived in Centralia, Illinois, where her father was based while he worked for Shell. Centralia was as rough as a frontier town, but “gone sour.” Much of what happened there offended David’s sense of fair play. In his words: “It was a boomtown, full of run-out seed. There hadn’t been a fair killing there since 1823.” There was union trouble. The hod carriers were trying to organize the oil drillers. The drillers resisted, and had no intention of paying what they regarded as tribute. The hod carriers attacked. They scalped a driller with a hunting knife and then broke his bones with hammers. “That was macho stuff, to them,” David comments. “They played rough. They were a mean bunch of bastards.” In some of the towns he visited were signs that said “NO DOGS OR OILMEN.” He posed as a travelling salesman.

  In Tennessee, he was sometimes mistaken for a revenue agent, which could have led to an unpleasant fate. And on one occasion he was taken for a railroad detective by some fugitives from the law. Jane happened to be with him, and as they made their way along the tracks, pausing like detectives to examine the rock, the fugitives—who had dumped into a railroad cut a corpse that had needed killing—were watching from the woods. They drew beads with their rifles but held their fire. They didn’t want to include Jane. Eventually, David learned all this from the fugitives themselves, and he asked them if they were not made uneasy by the discovery that they might have killed an innocent man. They gave him a jug of sorghum.

  In the evening in Centralia, David could read his newspaper by the light of gas flares over the oil fields. The company was burning off the gas because, at the time, it lacked economic value. This impinged his Scottish temper. “I don’t consider that good stewardship,” he explains. “We’re stewards here—of land and resources. If you gut the irreplaceable resources, you’re not doing your job. There were thousands of flares in Centralia. You could see them for a hundred miles.” He was troubled as well by the secrecy of the oil company, which was otherwise an agreeable employer. As a scientist, he believed in the open publication of research, and meanwhile his work was being locked in a safe for the benefit of one commercial interest. Moreover, he moved around so much that in the first two years of his daughter’s life she had been in thirteen states, while he was “looking for oil for some damn fool to burn up on the road.” With Jane, he reached an obvious conclusion: “There has to be more to life than this.”

  He resigned to return to Wyoming with the U.S. Geological Survey, at first to pursue an assignment critical to the Second World War. The year was 1942, and the United States was desperately short of vanadium, an alloy that enables steel to be effective as armor plate. Working out of Afton, in the Overthrust Belt, he looked for the metal in Permian rock. He first identified vanadium habitat (where it was in beds of black shale), and then—in winter—built a sawmill and cabins and made his own timbers for eight new mines. Afton was a Mormon redoubt. The municipal patriarch had thirty-four children. The Loves and the haberdasher Isidor Schuster were the only Gentiles in town. Love enlisted some Mormon farmers and taught them how to mine. They worked in narrow canyons, where avalanches occurred many times a day, coming two thousand feet down the canyon walls. David was caught in one, swept away as if he were in a cold tornado, and badly injured. He lay in a hospital many weeks. Not much of him was not damaged. His complete statement of the diagnosis is “It stretched me out.”

  After the mines were well established, the Loves moved to Laramie, where he set up the field office that he would stay in for the rest of his U.S.G.S. career. His children grew up in Laramie. Frances now teaches French in public schools in Oklahoma. The Loves’ two sons—Charles and David—are both geologists. Barbara is director of academic programs at Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute, in Spokane, a branch campus of Mukogawa Women’s University, in Nishinomiya, Japan. Gradually—as regional field offices were closed and geologists were being consolidated in large federal centers in Menlo Park (California), Reston (Virginia), and Denver—Love became vestigial in the structure of the Survey. He resisted these bureaucratic winds even when they were stiffer than the winds that come over the Medicine Bows. “The tendency has been to have all the geologists play in one sand pile,” he once explained diplomatically. And here his friend Malcolm McKenna, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, took up the theme: “Dave chose to stay where the geology is, and not to go up the ladder. He was so competent the Survey tried to get him to go out of Wyoming, but he wouldn’t go. His is one of the few field offices left. The Survey gets information from people in addition to providing it. People stop in to see Dave. When he goes, the office in Laramie will close—and that will be a loss to Wyoming. While a whole bunch of people sit in little cubicles in Denver, Dave is close to the subject. He can walk out the door in the morning and do important stuff.”

  Love said that a part of his job was to find anything from oil to agates, and then, in effect, say, “Fly at it, folks,” to the people of the United States. Within the law, he was always free to resign and then fly at something himself, but—whether by oil, uranium, gemstones, or gold—time after time he was not so much as tempted. Very evidently, he is not interested in money, and would not have joined the Survey in the first place if its services had been limited to commerce. The Survey evaluates the nation’s terrain for academic purposes as well, there being no good way to comprehend any one aspect of geology without studying the wider matrix in which it rests. Within the geologic profession, the Survey has particular prestige—as much as, or even more than, the geology faculties of major universities, where chair professors have been known to mutter about the U.S.G.S., “They think they are God’s helpers.” Academic geologists tend to look upon the Survey as “stuffy.” And, as Love discovered long ago, there is such an authoritarian atmosphere in the Survey—so much review of anything to be published, and so much hierarchical attention to a given piece of work—that sometimes when it is all done you cannot see the science for the initials that cover the paper. Established in 1879, the Survey had become so august that McKenna referred to it as “an inertial organization, a remnant of medieval scholasticism,” but went on to say, “University people have two months a year; company people are restricted. The Survey can do things no one else can do.” Many people in the profession tend to think that a geologist who has not at some point worked for the Survey has not been rigorously tra
ined.

  Love also established a base in Jackson Hole—a small house, eventually a couple of cabins. This would be the point of orientation for much of his summer field work. His absorptions over the years would take him to every sector of Wyoming, to other parts of the Rockies, and elsewhere in the world. Always, though, from his earliest days in geology, he would be drawn and drawn back to the Teton landscape—to the completeness of its history, the enigmas of its valley. To come to an understanding of one such scene is to understand a great deal about the geologic province of which it is a part, and more than any other segment of the Rockies he assigned himself to investigate the story of Jackson Hole.

  “Hole” was a term used by the earliest whites to describe any valley that was closely framed by very high mountains. It was used by David Jackson, who essentially had his valley to himself, running his trap lines in the eighteen-twenties in the afternoon shadows of the Teton Range. Over time, bands of outlaws followed him, then cattlemen, and eventually homesteading farmers, whose fences invaded the rangeland, creating incendiary tension and setting the scene for the arrival of Shane, who came into the valley wearing no gun and “riding a lone trail out of a closed and guarded past.” A farmer offered him employment, and he accepted—earnest in his quest for a peaceful life. The farmer asked Shane almost nothing of his history but felt he could trust him and imagined a number of ways in which the man might be needed on the farm. Deep in the stranger’s saddle roll was an ivory-handled Colt revolver that came out of its holster with no apparent friction, had a filed-down hammer and no front sight, and would balance firmly on one extended finger. The farmer’s young son quite innocently discovered the gun one day, and hurried to his father.

  “Father, do you know what Shane has rolled up in his blankets?”

  “Probably a gun.”

  “But—how did you know? Have you seen it?”

  “No. That’s what he would have.”

  “Well, why doesn’t he ever carry it? Do you suppose maybe it’s because he doesn’t know how to use it very well?”

  “Son, I wouldn’t be surprised if he could take that gun and shoot the buttons off your shirt with you a-wearing it and all you’d feel would be a breeze.”

  Shane, of course, was a fictional character, but the era he represented was a stratum of the region. In the opening words of the novel, by Jack Schaefer, “He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89.” He also glanced “over the valley to the mountains marching along the horizon.” The geography is vague, but Schaefer evidently had in mind a place beside the Bighorn Mountains. When Hollywood took up the story, though, and prepared to spread it from Cheyenne to Bombay, the valley that Shane would ride into seemed an almost automatic choice. Its floor, as he slowly moved across it, was generally as flat as the bottom of a lake. Incongruous in its center were forested buttes, with clear cold streams running past them. In many places, the flatness was illusory, for there was random undulation and, for no apparent reason, a lyrical quilting of stands of dark pine and broad open stretches of pale-green sage. There were ponds, some of them warm enough to hold trumpeter swans for the winter; and lying against the higher mountains were considerable lakes. Mountains were everywhere. On three sides of the valley, they went up in fairly stiff gradients—the Mt. Leidy Highlands, the Gros Ventre Mountains, the Snake River Range. On the western side—without preamble, without foothills, with a sharp conjunctive line at the meeting of flat and sheer—were the Tetons, which seemed to have lifted themselves rapidly past timberline in kinetic penetration of the sky. The Tetons resemble breasts, as will any ice-sculpted horn—Weisshom, Matterhorn, Zinalrothorn—at some phase in the progress of its making. Hollywood cannot resist the Tetons. If you have seen Western movies, you have seen the Tetons. They have appeared in the background of countless pictures, and must surely be the most tectonically active mountains on film, drifting about, as they will, from Canada to Mexico, and from Kansas nearly to the coast. After the wagon trains leave Independence and begin to move westward, the Tetons soon appear on the distant horizon, predicting the beauty, threat, and promise of the quested land. After the wagons have been moving for a month, the Tetons are still out there ahead. Another fortnight and the Tetons are a little closer. The Teton Range is forty miles long and less than ten across—a surface area inverse in proportion not only to its extraordinary ubiquity but also to its grandeur. The Tetons—with Jackson Hole beneath them—are in a category with Mt. McKinley, Monument Valley, and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River as what conservation organizations and the Washington bureaucracy like to call a scenic climax.

  In the Teton landscape are forms of motion that would not be apparent in a motion picture. Features of the valley are cryptic, paradoxical, and bizarre. In 1983, divers went down into Jenny Lake, at the base of the Grand Teton, and reported a pair of Engelmann spruce, rooted in the lake bottom, standing upright, enclosed in eighty feet of water. Spread Creek, emerging from the Mt. Leidy Highlands, is called Spread Creek because it has two mouths, which is about as common among creeks as it is among human beings. They are three miles apart. Another tributary stream is lower than the master river. Called Fish Creek, it steals along the mountain base. Meanwhile, at elevations as much as fifteen feet higher—and with flood-control levees to keep the water from spilling sideways—down the middle of the valley flows the Snake.

  One year, with David Love, I made a field trip that included the Beartooth Mountains, the Yellowstone Plateau, the Hebgen earthquake zone of the Madison River, the Island Park Caldera, and parts of the Snake River Plain. Near the end of the journey, we came over Teton Pass and looked down into Jackson Hole. In a tone of sudden refreshment, he said, “Now, there is a place for a kid to cut his eyeteeth on dynamic geology.”

  Among others, he was referring to himself. He rode into the valley in the summer of ’34. Aged twenty-one, he set up a base camp, and went off to work in the mountains. There were a number of small lakes among the Tetons at altitudes up to ten thousand five hundred feet—Cirque Lake, Mink Lake, Grizzly Bear Lake, Icefloe Lake, Snowdrift Lake, Lake Solitude—and no one knew how deep they were or how much water they might contain. The Wyoming Geological Survey wanted to know, and had offered him a summer job and a collapsible boat. He climbed the Tetons, and rowed the lakes, like Thoreau sounding depths on Walden Pond. He likes to say that the first time he was ever seasick was above timberline. If the Teton peaks were like the Alps—a transplanted segment of the Pennine Alps—there was the huge difference that just up the road from the Pennine Alps there are no geyser basins, boiling springs, bubbling muds, or lavas that froze in human time. His base camp was on Signal Mountain—by Teton standards, a hill—rising from the valley floor a thousand feet above Jackson Lake. More than fifty summers later, one day on Signal Mountain he said, “When I was a pup, I used to come up here to get away from it all.”

  I said, “By yourself?”

  And he answered, “Oh, yes. Always. No concubines. I’ve always been pretty solitary. I still am.”

  Gouging around the mountains in his free time—and traversing the valley—he would get off his horse here and again, sit down, and think. (“You can’t do geology in a hurry.”) On horseback or on foot—from that summer forward, whenever he was there—he gathered with his eyes and his hammer details of the landscape. If he happened to come to a summit or an overlook with a wide view, he would try to spend as much of a day as possible there, gradually absorbing the country, sensing the control from its concealed and evident structure, wondering—as if it were a formal composition—how it had been done. (“It doesn’t matter that I don’t know what I’m looking at. Later on, it becomes clear—maybe. And maybe not. You try to put the petals back on the flower.”) Some of those summits had not been visited before, but almost without exception he did not make a cairn or leave his name. (“I left my name on two peaks. When you’re young and full of life, you do strange things.”) Having no way to know what would or would not yield insight, he noticed almost
anything. The mountain asters always faced east. Boulders were far from the bedrock from which they derived. There was no quartzite in any of the surrounding mountains, but the valley was deeply filled with gold-bearing quartzite boulders. He discovered many faults in the valley floor, and failed for years to discern among them anything close to a logical sequence. There were different episodes of volcanism in two adjacent buttes. From high lookoffs he saw the barbed headwaters of streams that started flowing in one direction and then looped about and went the other way—the sort of action that might be noticed by a person carrying water on a tray. Something must have tilted this tray. From Signal Mountain he looked down at the Snake River close below, locally sluggish and ponded, with elaborate meanders that had turned into oxbows —the classic appearance of an old river moving through low country. This was scarcely low country, and the Snake was anything but old. Several miles downstream, it took a sharp right, straightened itself out, picked up speed, and turned white. Looking down from Signal Mountain, he also noticed that moose, elk, and deer all drank from one spring just before their time of rut, crowding in, pushing and shoving to get at it (“They honk and holler and carry on”), ignoring the nearby waters of river, swamp, and lake. He named the place Aphrodisiac Spring. Over the decades, a stretch at a time, he completely circumambulated the skyline of Jackson Hole, camping where darkness came upon him, casting grasshoppers or Mormon crickets to catch his dinner. There were trout in the streams as big as Virginia hams. Sometimes he preferred grouse. (“I could throw a geology hammer through the air and easily knock off a blue grouse or a sage chicken. In season, of course. Hammer-throwing season. In the Absarokas, I threw at rattlesnakes, too. I don’t kill rattlesnakes anymore. I’ve come to realize they’re a part of the natural scene, and I don’t want to upset it.”) He carried no gun. He carried a bear bell instead. One day, when he forgot the bell, a sow grizzly stood up out of nowhere—six feet tall—and squinted at him. Suddenly, his skin felt dry and tight. (“Guess who went away.”) A number of times, he was charged by moose. He climbed a tree. On one occasion, there was no tree. He and the moose were above timberline. He happened to be on the higher ground, so he rolled boulders at the moose. One of them shattered, and sprayed the moose with shrapnel. (“The moose thought it over, and left.”)