Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  I repeated the name Mammoth, trying to remember where it was, and then said, “That’s on the Montana border. It’s all the way across Yellowstone Park.”

  He said, “Yes.”

  In 1970, Love and his colleague J. M. Good had published a paper on this subject. After considering and rejecting a number of titles—seeking to fashion the flattest and drabbest appropriate phrase—they settled upon “Hydrocarbons in Thermal Areas, Northwestern Wyoming.” Now, with regard to my dart in the map, he said, “If you are interested in geochemistry, the composition of the oil from those seeps has not been studied. Is it Paleozoic high-sulphur oil? Mesozoic low-sulphur oil? Tertiary low-sulphur oil? One needs to know the quality of the oil and the depth of the reservoir rock.” His tone seemed to exclude both emotion and opinion. “If you’re interested in geophysics, what kinds of seismic reflections do you get from rocks below the volcanics?” he went on. “Can they be interpreted in a way that works out the prevolcanic structures? In terms of volcanic chemistry, what kinds of alteration of these Eocene volcanic rocks have occurred because of thermal activity and migration of oil into these rocks? None of this has ever been explored. In the regional context, a geologist cannot ignore the possibilities where that dart hit. A scientist, as a scientist, does not determine what should be the public policy in terms of exploration for oil and gas.”

  No rock could be more volcanic than the rock of Yellowstone Gorge—rose—and—burgundy, burnt-sienna, yellowcake-yellow Yellowstone Gorge—where petroleum comes out of the walls with hot water and steam. In 1939, when the National Park Service was digging abutments for a bridge downriver from the gorge, the National Park Service struck oil. Several workers, overcome by fumes of sulphur, died. These nagging facts notwithstanding, it was conventional wisdom in geology that where you found volcanics you would not find oil. In the nineteen-sixties, Love went out for a wider look. For example, he went on horseback into the Yellowstone backcountry carrying a four-foot steel rod. Twenty miles from the trailhead, he found swamps that were something like tar pits. When he jammed the rod into a swamp, a cream-colored fluid welled up. He put it in a bottle. In a day’s time, the mixture had separated, and much of it was clear amber oil. In pursuing this project, the environmentalist within him balked, the user of resources preferred the resources somewhere else, but the scientist rode on with the rod. He knew he would bring scorn upon himself, but he was not about to stifle his science for anybody’s beliefs or opinions. He did lose friends, including some Friends of the Earth. He lost friends in the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club as well. To them, the Yellowstone oil was only the beginning of the threat he might be raising. The Designated Wilderness Areas of the United States had been selected on the assumption that they were barren of anything as vital as petroleum. “I will admit that it bothers me that I have provoked the wrath of organizations like the Sierra Club,” Love remarked that day in the cabin. “My great-uncle John Muir founded the Sierra Club, and here I am, being a traitor.”

  Passing through Yellowstone on one of our journeys, Love and I found ourselves in foggy mists beside a boiling spring, and on impulse he got out a scintillometer and held it over the water. The scintillometer clicked away at a hundred and fifty counts per second, indicating that the radioactivity in the spring was about three times background. Interesting—but not exactly adrenalizing to a man who had seen the thing going at five thousand and upward.

  In the years that immediately followed the Second World War, the worldwide search for uranium was so feverish that geologists themselves seemed to be about three times background. Not only was the arms race getting under way—with the security of the United States thought to be enhanced by the fashioning of ever larger and ever smaller uranium bombs—but also there was promise of a panacean new deal in which this heaviest of all elements found in nature would cheaply heat homes and light cities. The rock that destroyed Hiroshima had come out of the Colorado Plateau, and it was to that region that prospectors were principally drawn.

  As any geologist would tell you, metal deposits were the result of hydrothermal activity. Geochemists imagined that water circulating deep in the crust picked up whatever it encountered—gold, silver, uranium, tin, all of which would go into solution with enough heat and pressure. They imagined the metal rising with the water and precipitating near the surface. By definition, a vein of ore was the filling of a fissure near a hot spring. This theory was so correct that it tended to seal off the conversation from intrusion by other ideas.

  Three geologists working in South Dakota in 1950 and 1951 found uranium in a deposit of coal. Locally, there was no hydrothermal history. Oligocene tuff—volcanic detritus blown east a great distance—overlay the coal. There were people who thought that ordinary groundwater had leached the uranium out of the tuff and carried it into the coal. Love was one of the people. If such a process—contravening all accepted theory—had in fact occurred, then uranium might be found not only in hydrothermal settings but also in sedimentary basins. When Love proposed a search of Wyoming basins, hydrothermalists in the United States Geological Survey not only mocked the project but attempted to block it. So goes, sometimes, the spirit of science. The tuffs of the Oligocene were a part of the burial of the Rockies, and most had been removed during the exhumation. Love looked around for sedimentary basins where there was evidence that potential host rocks had once been covered with tuff. He had a DC-3 do surveys with an airborne scintillometer over the Powder River Basin. Some of the readings were remarkably hot—notably in the vicinity of some high-standing erosional remnants called Pumpkin Buttes. He went there in a jeep, taking with him for confirming consultation the sedimentologist Franklyn B. Van Houten, who has described himself ever after as “Dave Love’s human scintillometer.” Love wanted to see if there had been enough fill by Oligocene time to allow the tuff to get over the buried Bighorn Mountains and be spread across the Powder River Basin. He and Van Houten climbed to the top of North Pumpkin Butte and found volcanic pebbles from west of the Bighorns in Oligocene tuff. Then Love went down among the sandstones of the formation lying below, where, at many sites, his Halross Gamma Scintillometer gave six thousand counts per second.

  In time, he and others developed the concept of roll fronts to explain what he had found. In configuration, they were something like comets, or crescent moons with trailing horns—convex in the direction in which groundwater had flowed. As Love and his colleagues worked out the chemistry, they began with the fact that sixvalent uranium is very soluble, and in oxidized water easily turns into uranyl ions. As the solution moves down the aquifer, a roll front will develop where the water finds an unusual concentration of organic matter. The organic matter goes after the oxygen. The uranium, dropping to a four-valent state, precipitates out as UO2—the ore that is called uraninite.

  One way to find deeply buried uraninite, therefore, would be to drill test holes in inclined aquifers. Wherever you found unusual concentrations of organic matter, you would move up the aquifer and drill again. If you found red oxidized sandstone, you would know that uraninite was somewhere between the two holes.

  Drafting his report to the Geological Survey, Love described the “soft porous, pink or tan concretionary sandstone rolls in which the uranium was discovered,” and added that “the commercial grade of some of the ore, the easy accessibility throughout the area, the soft character of the host rocks and associated strata, and the fact that strip-mining methods can be applied to all the deposits known at the present time, make the area attractive for exploitation.” With those sentences he had become, in both a specific and a general sense, the discoverer of uranium in commercial quantity in Wyoming and the progenitor of the Wyoming uranium industry—facts that were not at once apparent. Within the Survey, the initial effect of Love’s published report was to irritate many of his colleagues who were committed hydrothermalists and were prepared not to believe that uranium deposits could occur in any other way. They were joined in this opinion by the director o
f the Division of Raw Materials of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. A committee was convened in the Powder River Basin to confirm or deny the suspect discovery. All the members but one were hydrothermalists, and the committee report said, “It is true that high-grade mineral specimens of uranium ore were found, but there is nothing of any economic significance.” Within weeks, mines began to open in that part of the Powder River Basin. Eventually, there were sixty-four, the largest of which was Exxon’s Highland Mine. They operated for thirty-two years. They had removed fifteen million tons of uranium ore when Three Mile Island shut them down.

  In 1952, after Love’s report was published, the Laramie Republican and Boomerang proclaimed in a banner headline, “LARAMIE MAN DISCOVERS URANIUM ORE IN STATE.” The announcement set off what Love described as “the first and wildest” of Wyoming’s uranium booms. “Hundreds came to Laramie,” he continued. “I was offered a million dollars cash and the presidency of a company to leave the U.S.G.S. At that time, my salary was $8,640.19 per year.”

  The discovery predicted uranium in other sedimentary basins, and Love went on to find it. In the autumn of 1953, he and two amateurs, all working independently, found uranium in the Gas Hills—in the Wind River Basin, twelve miles from Love Ranch. By his description: “Gas Hills attracted everybody and his dog. It was Mecca for weekend prospectors. They swarmed like maggots on a carcass. There was claim jumping. There were fistfights, shootouts. Mechanics and clothing salesmen were instant millionaires.”

  As it happened, he made those remarks one summery afternoon on the crest of the Gas Hills, where fifty open-pit uranium mines were round about us, and in the low middle ground of the view to the north were Muskrat Creek and Love Ranch. The pits were roughly circular, generally half a mile in diameter, and five hundred feet deep. Some four hundred feet of overburden had been stripped off to get down to the ore horizons. The place was an unearthly mess. War damage could not look worse, and in a sense that is what it was. “If you had to do this with a pick and shovel, it would take you quite a while,” Love said. The pits were scattered across a hundred square miles.

  We picked up some sooty black uraninite. It crumbled easily in the hand. I asked him if it was dangerously radioactive.

  “What is ‘dangerously radioactive’?” he said. “We have no real standards. We don’t know. All I can say is the cancer rate here is very high. There are four synergistic elements in the Gas Hills: uranium, molybdenum, selenium, and arsenic. They are more toxic together than individually. You can’t just cover the tailings and forget about it. Those things are bad for the environment. They get into groundwater, surface water. The mines are below the water table, so they’re pumping water from the uranium horizon to the surface. There has been a seven-hundred-per-cent increase of uranium in Muskrat Creek at our ranch.”

  We could see in a sweeping glance—from the ranch southwest to Green Mountain—the whole of the route he had taken as a boy to cut pine and cedar for corral poles and fence posts. An hour before, we had looked in at the ranch, where most of those posts were still in use—gnarled and twisted, but standing and not rotted. From John Love’s early years there, when he slept in a cutbank of the creek, the ranch had belonged only to him and his family. The land was leased now—as was most of the surrounding range—to cattle companies. In the last half mile before we reached the creek, David counted fifty Hereford bulls and remarked that the lessees seemed to be overgrazing. “The sons of bitches,” he said. “That’s way too many for this time of year.” Noticing some uranium claim stakes, he said, “People stake illegally right over land that has been deeded nearly a century.”

  Over the low and widespread house, John Love’s multilaminate roof was scarcely sagging. No one had lived there in nearly forty years. The bookcases and the rolltop desk had been removed by thieves, who had destroyed doorframes to get them out. The kitchen doorframe was intact, and nailed there still was the board that showed John Love’s marks recording his children’s height. The green-figured wallpaper that had been hung by the cowboys was long since totally gone, and much of what it had covered, but between the studs and against the pine siding were fragments of the newspapers pasted there as insulation.

  POSSE AFTER FIVE BANDITS

  BATTLE NEAR ROCK ISLAND TRAIN

  Robbers Are Found in Haystack

  and Chase Becomes Hot

  BOTH SIDES ARE HEAVILY ARMED

  Fugitives Are Desperate, but Running Fight

  Is Expected to End in Their Capture

  Spinach had run wild in the yard. In the blacksmith shop, the forge and the anvil were gone. Ducks flew up from the creek. There were dead English currant bushes. A Chinese elm was dead. A Russian olive was still alive. David had planted a number of these trees. There was a balm of Gilead broadleaf cottonwood he had planted when he was eleven years old. “It’s going to make it for another year anyway,” he said. “It’s going to leaf out.”

  I said I wondered why the only trees anywhere were those that he and his father had planted.

  “Not enough moisture,” he replied. “Trees never have grown here.”

  “What does ‘never’ mean?” I asked him.

  He said, “The last ten thousand years.”

  An antelope, barking at us, sounded like a bullfrog. Of the dozen or so ranch buildings, some were missing and some were breaking down. The corrals had collapsed. The bunkhouse was gone. The cottonwood-log granary was gone, but not Joe Lacey’s Muskrat Saloon, which the Loves had used for storing hay. Its door was swinging in the wind. David found a plank and firmly propped the door shut. The freight wagon was there that he had used on trips for wood. It was missing its wheels, stolen as souvenirs of the Old West. We looked into a storage cellar that was covered with sod above hand-hewn eighteen-inch beams. He said that nothing ever froze in there and food stayed cold all summer. More recently, a mountain lion had lived there, but the cellar was vacant now.

  In the house, while I became further absorbed by the insulation against the walls, Love walked silently from room to room.

  Bizerta, Tunis, May 4—At a reception tendered him by the municipality, M. Pelletan, French Minister of Marine, in a brief speech, declared that France no longer dreamed of conquests, and that her resources would hereafter be employed to fortify her present possessions.

  Cattle chips and coyote scat were everywhere on the floors. The clothes cupboards and toy cupboards in the bedroom he had shared with Allan were two feet deep in pack-rat debris.

  Have you lost a friend or relative in the Klondike or Alaska? If so, write to us and we will find them, quietly and quickly. Private information on all subjects. All correspondence strictly confidential. Enclose $1.00. Address the Klondike Information Bureau, Box 727, Dawson, Y.T.

  David came back into the space that had been his schoolroom, saying, “I can’t stand this. Let’s get out of here.”

  In the Gas Hills, as we traced with our eyes his journeys to Green Mountain, he said, “You can see it was quite a trek by wagon. Am I troubled? Yes. At places like this, we thought we were doing a great service to the nation. In hindsight, we do not know if we were performing a service or a disservice. Sometimes I think I might regret it. Yes. It’s close to home.”

  Book 4

  Assembling California

  You go down through the Ocean View district of San Francisco to the first freeway exit after Daly City, where you describe, in effect, a hairpin turn to head north past a McDonald’s to a dead end in a local dump. You leave your car and walk north on a high contour some hundreds of yards through deep grasses until a path to your left takes you down a steep slope a quarter of a mile to the ocean. You double back along the water, south to Mussel Rock.

  Mussel Rock is a horse. As any geologist will tell you, a horse is a displaced rock mass that has been caught between the walls of a fault. This one appeared to have got away. It seemed to have strained successfully to jump out of the continent. Or so I thought the first time I was there. It loomed in fo
g. Green seas slammed against it and turned white. It was not a small rock. It was like a three-story building, standing in the Pacific, with brown pelicans on the roof. You could walk out on a ledge and look up through the fog at the pelicans. When you looked around and faced inland, you saw that you were at the base of a fifty-foot cliff, its lithology shattered beyond identification. A huge crack split the cliff from top to bottom and ran on out through the ledge and under the waves. After a five-hundred-mile northwesterly drift through southern and central California, this was where the San Andreas Fault intersected the sea.

  I went to Mussel Rock that foggy afternoon in 1978 with the geologist Kenneth Deffeyes. I have returned a number of times since, alone or in the company of others. With regard to the lithosphere, it’s a good place to sit and watch the plates move. It is a moment in geography that does your thinking for you. The San Andreas Fault, of course, is not a single strand. It is something like a wire rope, as much as half a mile wide, each strand the signature of one or many earthquakes. Mussel Rock is near the outboard edge of the zone. You cannot really say that on one side of the big crack is the North American Plate and on the other side is the Pacific Plate, but it’s tempting to do so. Almost automatically, you stand with one foot on each side and imagine your stride lengthening—your right foot, say, riding backward toward Mexico, your left foot in motion toward Alaska. There’s some truth in such a picture, but the actual plate boundary is not so sharply defined. Not only is the San Andreas of varying width in its complexity of strands, it is merely the senior fault in a large family of more or less parallel faults in an over-all swath at least fifty miles wide. Some of the faults are to the west and under the ocean; more are inland. Whether the plate boundary is five miles wide or fifty miles wide or extends all the way to central Utah is a matter that geologists currently debate. Nonetheless, there is granite under the sea off Mussel Rock that is evidently from the southern Sierra Nevada, has travelled three hundred miles along the San Andreas system, and continues to move northwest. As evidence of the motion of the plates, that granite will do.