The Drift...and How to Get it

John McPhee is a talent. He’s been with the New Yorker for 400 years, and has published, at last count, 300 books. He goes in for odd subjects, but attaches himself to an expert idea or person in each field he investigates. I read everything he writes for the NYer (which includes the best thing they’ve published in the past 10 years), and yet I’ve only read 3 complete books. One, on oranges (entitled Oranges) is about said oranges. Another, The Founding Fish, is a narrative of the shad, a tough as nails fish that runs through the Delaware River back east and the Russian River out here. Shad birds are unique and resolute; they make their own darts (lures, flies, to the rest of us) and know that once on, they will fight like hell to land. McPhee is shad brained.

I read Assembling California over the weekend, and it’s frighteningly good. The premise, now gospel but shaky, is that your fair state of CA is comprised of once proud islands that have rammed together to over millions of years to make this weird land. Our state’s costal ranges, Great Central Valley, and Sierras, are the result. Evidence is everywhere. The north edge of the Napa Valley is oceanic; the Oakland hills are one of the most inland points of coastal range, thus perhaps the meeting point of a long ago island. The faults that shake the crap out of here are the still moving parts of the state – San Diego is pushing towards Sacramento. In eight hundred million years, Japan will be affixed to Alaska.

McPhee’s guide is Eldridge Moores of UCD, the drift pioneer. He takes McPhee from the top of the Sierra’s down I-80 and lays out the history of the world in our own back yard. In Davis he can pinpoint areas in the flat tundra where new mountains are birthing. McPhee states at one point the summary of the books is this; the rock at the apex of Mt. Everest is oceanic.

The geology-speak is interrupted by two great narratives; once concerns the gold rush and the other the Loma Prieta quake of 1989. He also lays out the worst spots to be during the upcoming Hayward Fault big one. Barclays, alas, looks safe.