Basin and Range

McPhee, John. Basin and Range. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.

John McPhee can make anything interesting. His book Basin and Range chronicles his travels across Interstate 80 with geologist Kenneth Deffeyes. And rocks are interesting. Basin and Range takes the reader on a geological history tour of the United States, and the continent’s westward movement.

McPhee uses a variety of techniques throughout the text, some more effective than others. His descriptions that use a series of short crisp sentences engage the reader—one can see Deffeyes with his “tenured waistline” lecturing in sneakers (31). One can sense the tension driving on mountain roads, or the frustration the author feels trying to find silver with a broken military shovel.

Basin and Range is as much about Deffeyes as it is about geology—it becomes difficult to separate one from the other. McPhee paints a vivid picture of Deffeyes relationship to geology, to his students and to the project at hand. There are places in the middle of the book that the reading slows down with two-page paragraphs and lots of geo-jargon; places where Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, phytoplankton, all melt together into a blur and the reader begins to pull words that make sense: catastrophe, meteorites, calculations, pulverized (117-119). The big-boom theory takes shape and one is sure their head is about to explode. Almost.

But then suddenly McPhee transports his reader to the hills in Nevada and it is all very serene. There is time in the text to breathe, to read pleasurably, to explore the depths of geology and Deffeyes character – to see where he fits into the earth’s history. McPhee forces the reader to consider where she fits – and ultimately where humanity fits. Without the longer passages about geological history the sense of the smallness of humanity would be lost. Humanity being small in the scheme of things is hard to swallow and McPhee, by providing such a vast timeline, is successful in making at least this reader see just that.