Basin and Range

First Edition.
Since his return from Alaska and the completion of Coming into the Country, John McPhee has been traveling with geologists, looking at roadcuts, listening to geological stories, and “trying to develop at least a rudimentary understanding of the long history and odd behavior of the planetary surface where our kind has made its sudden and alarming appearance.”
The first result is Basin and Range, a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world-a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light.
The Basin and Range is the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges green with junipers and often white with snow, a spectacular topography that is never evoked by people who dismiss it as “desert.”
The Basin and Range is expanding, spread-ing. The sites of Reno and Salt Lake City have moved apart fifty miles in eight million years-to a geologist, a small amount of time. Two hundred million years ago, there was a Basin and Range province along what is now America’s eastern seaboard. As it pulled apart, it produced the Atlantic Ocean.
On and off Interstate 8o, the author traversed the Basin and Range with Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a professor of geology at Princeton who has been both an oil geologist and a chemical oceanographer and has also done extensive feld-work in Nevada. With fascinating digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale, McPhee frames his setting and the rock and the people it con-tains. He calls geology “a fountain of metaphor.” His awesome search through the annals of the former world has been, as much as anything else, a gathering of “metaphors by which to measure what we’ve done.” Basin and Range is written with a quiet lyricism that is appropriate to the subject. It is a narrative that follows a majestic theme.