Mitt liv som Tobin

On the plane to Chicago, and between X-files episodes in the hotel room, and lazily in my room at the co-op, next to the open window, I read John McPhee's Basin and Range. I would describe it as a reasonably good book. Others give it higher praise; it did, for instance, win the Pulitzer, collectively with its brethren in Annals of the Former World. John McPhee has a tendency to use lists. He has a tendency to use foreign words, be they in french or the argot of a particular profession. He has a tendency to use lists of words which I do not know how to pronounce. My internal monologue stumbles. I bought and started La Place De La Concorde Suisse to educate myself on the Swiss army (just prior to my move to Geneva) but it was more than a year before I made the effort to press on beyond the first couple pages. I am not sure how these books are intended to be read. Is the reader to decipher each technical term before proceeding, or are their meanings intended to be inferred through immersion? In Basin and Range the foreign terms are principally geologic eras, all those words like "Jurassic" and so forth.

It is difficult to read technical books in the oxygen-deprived environment of transcontinental jet travel. I opted for the immersive approach. The book tells of the evolution of geology that parallels the evolution of astronomy and biology you've doubtlessly been told many times in school. It also tells the story of the "Basin and Range," the geologic province centered around Nevada and including my recent travels in the Owens Valley of Eastern California. It tells of hot springs that I will in time seek out. Buried in the text we find McPhee describing his observation of a UFO. The book told me that the Great Salt Lake is divided in half by a railroad piling, that the lake level is different on one side than the other. I first learned about this railroad a week earlier when one of our hitchhiking rides told us about it, how the great salt lake it so shallow that they built a railroad across it. Our ride told of hopping a freight train across that track. John McPhee tells how the lake itself was made. It would have helped to read along with a map.

Despite his lapses into extreme dryness (I could not read Coming into the Country), John McPhee is perhaps my favorite contemporary author. I took the train to Davis to see him and the geologist Moores. The Control of Nature is one of my favorite non-fiction books. It could be the geologic counterpart to Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire. Also, Irons in the Fire. These are, in my mind, grand works. It's both the subject matter and the mode of writing that attract me; I imagine this is exactly the sort of thing I would like to do: going out on adventures (missions!), investigating ecclectic matters of interest to me, tagging along with experts and documenting both the people and the places. The subjects are matters of people, natural history, and infrastructure, sort of the place where seismology meets hitchhiking. I expect I will adore his new book, Uncommon Carriers.

I went to Davis today, on the Amtrak train at half past nine. The Berkeley Amtrak station is nothing more than a park bench under an overpass (the address is officially "third street under university avenue").

Saw John McPhee at the University House. Unfortunately they didn't have nearly enough room for everyone who arrived. He's a very friendly man and it turns out he's buddies with William Least Heat Moon.