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Writing the Journey: June 1999

" Seeing the USA with John McPhee: Deep Structure and Travels in the Fourth Dimension"


Theodore C. Humphrey
California State University, Pomona
tchumphrey@CSUPomona.edu

John McPhee's latest book, Annals of the Former World (New York: FSG, 1998) is a masterful travel book, an in-depth tour of North America. Like all good travel writers, McPhee engages his readers, showing them a view of the country, the culture, the "hot spots," providing a narrative that helps the reader, the tourist, discover through constructing a meaningful narrative of the land how to make sense of it. So far, nothing especially unusual about McPhee's purpose or indeed, even of his strategy. Enter the unknown territory at a particular point, proceed in an orderly fashion, pick up local guides where necessary, and make sense of the place. All this McPhee does. The distinction, however, between McPhee and most other travel writers, even those with a distinctly historical turn of mind, is that they rarely show us the country as deeply as John McPhee, for his subject is nothing less than the country on a geological time scale, his controlling element plate tectonics, his device the journey, his guides a host of expert geologists, his basic route Interstate 80 as it slices across the US from New York to San Francisco, his time line 200+ millions of years and more, much more, touching at times 4 billions of years. The result is a nearly 700-page volume on the geology of the United States with excursions as he says "as far away from Interstate 80 as mainland Greece, the island of Cyprus, a mining camp in Arizona, and the San Andreas Fault from end to end" (5-6).

The particular focus of this paper will be to examine how this travel writer conceives his audience, the strategies and devices he employs to make known to his reader the arcane and technical worlds, theories, and discoveries of geologist, paleobotonist, and paleo geomorphology. Even as an English major designate while in prep school at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, McPhee was developing a generalist's background in geology with the aid and inspiration of a talented teacher. As a professional writer (this is his 27th published volume), mostly for the New Yorker, McPhee is an extraordinary stylist, a writer of clear, detailed expository prose. He is the quintessential guide whether into a profession, a person, a scientific theory, or a road cut. In these capacities, McPhee makes us see and understand the travels of land forms over thousands of miles and millions of years. For example, in Book 2, In Suspect Terrain, as he prepares to take us into road cuts along I-80 just west of the Delaware River with Anita Harris, a geologist who is "cool" toward some theories such as plate tectonics, but who can "read rock" very well, we learn that the age of the Delaware River "was a hundred and fifty million years. Another fifty million years before that, the Taconic mountains appeared. The river 150, the rock 400, the first ancestral mountains 450 million years before the present-these dates are so unwieldy that they might as well be off a Manchu calendar unless you sense the pace of geologic change and draw an analogy between, say, a hundred million years of geology and one human century, with its upward-fining sequences, its laminations of events, its slow deteriorations and instant catastrophes. You see the rivers running east. Then you see the mountains rise. Rivers run off them to the west. Mountains come up like waves. They crest, break, and spread themselves westward. Then they are spent, there is an interval of time, and then again you see the rivers running eastward. You look over the shoulder of the painter [George Innes, 1859, The Delaware Water Gap] and you see all that in the landscape. You see it if first you have seen it in the rock. The composition is almost infinitely less than the sum of its parts, the flickers and glimpses of a thousand million years" (209). McPhee makes us see the rock.


Theodore C. Humphrey
Department of English and Foreign Languages
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
3801 Temple Avenue
Pomona, CA 91768
tchumphrey@CSUPomona.edu

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Updated May 23, 1999