Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  If Wyoming can be said to have been acupunctured for energy, nowhere was this so variously evident as in the southwestern quadrant of the state, from the new coalfields near Rock Springs to the new oil fields of the Overthrust Belt, not to mention experimental attempts to extract petroleum from Eocene lacustrine shale, which —in that corner of Wyoming and adjacent parts of Colorado and Utah—contains more oil than all the rock of Saudi Arabia. More than the Union Pacific was after such provender now. “We are at the mercy of the east-coast and west-coast establishments,” Love said. “It’s been called energy colonization.” And while we traversed the region, with scene after scene returning us to this theme, his reactions were not always predictable. There were moments that emphasized the scientist in him, others that brought out the fly-at-it-folks discoverer of resources, and others that brought forth a vigorous environmentalist, conserving his native ground, fulminating in the face of effronteries to humanity and the earth. Love is a prospector in the name of the people, who looks for the wealth in exploitable rock. He is also a pure scientist, who will follow his instincts wherever they lead. And he is a frequent public lecturer who turns over every honorarium he receives to organizations like the Teton Science School and High Country News, whose charter is to understand the environment in order to defend it. Thus, he carries within himself the whole spectrum of tensions that have accompanied the rise of the environmental movement. He carries within himself some of the central paradoxes of his time. Among environmentalists, he seems to me to be a good deal less lopsided than many, although beset by contradictory interests, like the society he serves. He cares passionately about Wyoming. It may be acupunctured for energy, but it is still Wyoming, and only words and images, in their inevitable concentration, can effectively clutter its space: a space so great that you can stand on a hilltop and see not only what Jim Bridger saw but also—through dimming tracts of time—what no one saw.

  The Rock Springs Uplift, like the Rawlins Uplift, is a minor product of the Laramide Revolution, a hump in the terrain which did not keep rising as mountains. There was “red dog”—red clinker beds—in low cuts beside the road. When a patch of coal is ignited by lightning or by spontaneous combustion, it will oxidize the rock above it, turning it red. The sight of clinker is a sign of coal. Love said that this clinker was radioactive. Like coal, it was adept at picking up leached uranium. As the cuts became higher, we could see in the way they had been blasted the types of rock they contained. Where the cuts were nearly vertical, the rock was competent sandstone. Where the backslope angle was low, you knew you were looking at shale. Cuts that went up from the road through sandstone, then shale, then more sandstone, had the profiles of flying buttresses, firmly rising to their catch points, where they came to the natural ground. The shallower the slope, the softer the rock. The shallowest were streaked with coal.

  At Point of Rocks, a hamlet from the stagecoach era, was a long roadcut forty metres high, exposing the massive sands of a big-river delta, built out from rising Rockies at the start of the Laramide Orogeny into the retreating sea. We left the interstate there and went north on a five-mile road with no outlet, which followed the flank of the Rock Springs Uplift and soon curved into a sweeping view: east over pastel buttes into the sheep country of the Great Divide Basin, and north to the white Wind Rivers over Steamboat Mountain and the Leucite Hills (magmatic flows and intrusions, of Pleistocene time), across sixty miles of barchan dunes, and, in the foreground—in isolation in the desert—the tallest building in Wyoming. This was Jim Bridger, a coal-fired steam electric plant, built in the middle nineteen-seventies, with a generating capacity of two million kilowatts—four times what is needed to meet the demands of Wyoming. Twenty-four stories high, the big building was more than twice as tall as the Federal Center in Cheyenne, which is higher than Wyoming’s capitol dome. Rising beside the generating plant were four freestanding columnar chimneys so tall that they were obscured in cumulus from the cooling towers, which swirled and billowed and from time to time parted to reveal the summits of the chimneys, five hundred feet in the air. “This place is smoking the hell out of the country,” Love said. “The wind blows a plume of corruption. In cold weather, sulphuric acid precipitates as a yellow cloud. It’s not so good for people, or for vegetation. Whenever I think of this plant, I feel sadness and frustration. We could have got baseline data on air and water quality before the plant was built, and we muffed it.” He blames himself, although at that time he had arsenic poisoning from springwater in the backcountry and was sick for many months.

  The idea behind Jim Bridger was to ship energy out of Wyoming in wires instead of railway gondolas. Ballerina towers, with electric drapery on their outstretched arms, ran from point to point to the end of perspective, relieving pressure on the Oregon-Idaho grid. The coal was in the Fort Union formation—in a sense, the bottom layer of modern time. Locally, it was the basal rock of the Cenozoic, the first formation after the Cretaceous Extinction—when the big animals were gone, but not their woods and vegetal swamps. Wyoming had drifted a few hundred miles farther north than it is now, and around the low swamplands were rising forests of oak, elm, and pine. The terrain was near sea level. Mountains had begun to stir—Uintas, Wind Rivers, Owl Creeks, Medicine Bows—and off their young slopes they shed the Fort Union, its muds burying the compiled vegetation, cutting off oxygen, preserving the carbon. As the mountains themselves became buried, the fallen vegetation in the thickening basins was ever more covered as well, to depths and pressures that caused it to become a soft and flaky sub-bituminous low-rent grade of coal, a nonetheless combustible low-sulphur coal. With the Exhumation of the Rockies, nature, in the form of wind and water, worked its way down toward this coal. By the middle nineteen-seventies, nature had removed a mile of overburden, and had only sixty feet to go. At that point, something called the Marion 8200, an eight-millionpound landship also known as a walking dragline, took over the job.

  The machine was so big it had to be assembled on the site—a procedure that required fourteen months. Now working within a mile or two of the generating plant, it could swing its four-chord deep-section boom and touch any spot in six acres, its bucket biting, typically, a hundred tons of rock, and dumping it to one side. The 8200 had dug a box canyon, its walls of solid coal about thirty feet thick. The inside of the machine was painted Navy gray, and had non-skid deck surfaces, thick steel bulkheads, handrails, and oval doors that looked watertight. They led from compartment to compartment, and eventually into the air-conditioned sanctum of Centralized Power Control, where, lined up in ranks, were electric motors. The foremost irony of this machine was that it was far too large and powerful to operate on diesel engines. Although the chassis was nine stories high, it could not begin to contain enough diesels to make the machine work. Only electric motors are compact enough. Out the back of the machine, like the tail of a four-thousand-ton rat, ran a huge black cable, through gully and gulch, over hill and draw, to the generating plant—whose No. 1 customer was the big machine.

  Once every couple of hours, the 8200 walked—raised itself up on its pontoonlike shoes and awkwardly lurched backward seven feet, so traumatically compressing the dirt it landed on that smoke squirted out the sides and the ground became instant slate. This machine—with its crowned splines, its precise driveline mating, its shop-lapped helical gears, its ball-swivel mounting of the boompoint sheaves, its anti-tightline devices and walking-shoe position indicators—had unsurprisingly attracted the attention of Russian engineers, who came in a large committee to see Jim Bridger, because they were about to build twenty-five similar generating stations in one relatively concentrated area of Siberia, which, they confided, closely resembled Sweetwater County, Wyoming.

  This strip mine, no less than an erupting volcano, was a point in the world where geologic time and human time overtly commingled. Ordinarily, the close relationship between the two is masked: human time, full of beepers and board meetings, sirens and Senate caucuses, all happening in microt
emporal units that physicists call picoseconds; geologic time, with its forty-six hundred million years, delivering a message that living creatures prefer to return unopened to the sender. In this place, though, geology had come up out of its depths to join the present world, and, as Love would put it, all hell had broken loose. “How people look at it depends on whose ox is being gored,” he said. “If you’re in a brownout, you think it’s great. If you’re downwind, you don’t. Wyoming’s ox is being gored.”

  When the Bridger operation was under construction, hundreds of tents and trailers lined most of the five miles of the spur road to the site—an “impact” that ultimately shifted to Rock Springs, thirty miles away, and Superior, and other small towns in the region. Populations doubled during the coal rush, which was close in time to the booms in trona mining and oil. Even after the booms had settled down, twenty-eight per cent of the people of Wyoming were living in mobile homes. During the construction of Jim Bridger, Rock Springs, especially, became a heavy-duty town, attracting people with no strong attachments elsewhere who came into the country in pickups painted with flames. With its bar fights and prostitutes, it was wild frontier territory, or seemed so to almost everyone but David Love. “Fights were once fights,” he commented. “Now the fight starts and your friends hold you back while you throw insults.” Cars were stripped of anything that would come off. Pushers arrived with every kind of substance that could stun the human brain. A McDonald’s sprang up, of course, decorated with archaic rifles, with plastic cattle brands lighted from the inside, with romantic paintings of Western gunfights—horses rearing under blazing pistols on dusty streets lined with false-fronted stores. A Rock Springs policeman shot another Rock Springs policeman at point-blank range and later explained in court that he had sensed that his colleague was about to kill him. How was that again? The defendant said, “When a man has the urge to kill, you can see it in his eyes.” The jury saw it that way, too. Not guilty. Some people in Sweetwater County seemed to be of the opinion that the dead policeman needed killing.

  Love’s son Charlie, who lives and teaches in Rock Springs, once told us that the community’s underworld connections were “only at the hoodlum level.” He explained, “The petty gangsters here aren’t intelligent enough for the Mafia to want to contact. You can’t make silk purses out of sows’ ears.”

  The number of cowboys in Wyoming dropped from six thousand to four thousand as they rushed into town to join the boom, disregarding the needed ratio of one man per thousand head of cattle. In desperation for help at branding time, calving time, and haying time, ranchers had to go to the nearest oil rig and beg the roughnecks to moonlight.

  For a steam-driven water-cooled power plant, this one seemed to have a remarkably absent feature. It seemed to be missing a river. The brown surrounding landscape was a craquelure of dry gulches. In one of them, though—a desiccated arroyo called Dead Man Draw—was a seventy-five-acre lake, fringed with life rings, boats, and barbecue grills. At the rate of twenty-one thousand gallons a minute, Jim Bridger was sucking water from the Green River, forty miles to the west. To cool an even drier power station, some hundreds of miles away in northeast Wyoming, a proposal had been made to pump Green River water over the Continental Divide to the Sweetwater River, which runs into the North Platte, from which the water would be pumped over a lesser divide and into the Powder River Basin. Love said, “That would destroy the whole Sweetwater regimen, destroy the Platte, and destroy the Powder River, all for coal in the Powder River Basin—a slurry pipeline or something of the sort. It’s very much on the books. If they go in for the gasification of coal, they’re going to need it. It’s known as the transbasin diversion of the Green River. The water has fluorine in it. Wherever it gets into the ground, it can pollute the water table in ten to fifteen years. The river also picks up sodium from trona. In the town of Green River, the sodium in the drinking water greatly exceeds E.P.A. standards. If they decide to pipe the water over the Continental Divide, water quality could be lowered in the Powder River Basin to the point of needing a desalinization plant.”

  We moved on toward Green River, where the most spectacular suite of roadcuts and rock exposures anywhere on Interstate 80 contained in its sediments the history of these evils. Dark mountains, spread low across the horizon, might have been a storm coming on—and in a sense they were, or had been. They were the Overthrust Belt, cumulate from the west. Looking north to the even more distant Gros Ventres and Wind Rivers, and south to the high cirques of the Uintas, we were encompassing in a wide glance about sixteen thousand square miles of land, much of it so dry, stacked flat like crumbling hardtack, that only a geologist could absorb such a scene and see in it a lake that would rank seventh in the world.

  In the Eocene, when the lake existed, the appearance of North America approached its present form. The journey from New York to Paris may have been eight hundred miles shorter than it is now, but the North Atlantic was a maturing ocean. The Appalachians were much higher. There were no Great Lakes. There was no westerly rise to the Great Plains. The foreland ranges of the Rockies had pooched out from their sea-level platform, and west-running rivers were flowing around them to pool against the overthrust mountains. In California there was no Sierra, in Nevada and Utah no mountains of the Basin and Range—only moist gentle country coming in from the Pacific Coast. This Eocene time line, drawn from either end of the continent, would have converged in western Wyoming in something comparable to the Sea of Azov. A hundred and fifty miles long, a hundred miles wide, it was larger by far than Erie, larger than Lake Tanganyika, larger than Great Bear. It was two hundred times Lake Maggiore. It had no name until a century ago, when a geologist called it Lake Gosiute.

  Lakes are so ephemeral that they are seldom developed in the geologic record. They are places where rivers bulge, as a temporary consequence of topography. Lakes fill in, drain themselves, or just evaporate and disappear. They don’t last. The Great Lakes are less than twenty thousand years old. The Great Salt Lake is less than twenty thousand years old. When Lake Gosiute took in the finishing touch of sediment that ended its life, it was eight million years old.

  West of Rock Springs, we came to an escarpment known as White Mountain, standing a thousand feet above the valley of Killpecker Creek. In no tectonic sense was this a true mountain—a folded-and-faulted, volcanic, or overthrust mountain. This was just a Catskill, a Pocono, a water-sliced segment of layered flat rock, a geological piece of cake. In fact, it was the bed of Lake Gosiute, and contained almost all of the eight million years. Apparently, the initial freshwater lake eventually shrank, became bitter and saline, and intermittently may have gone dry. Later, as the climate remoistened, water again filled the basin, and the lake reached its greatest size. As we looked at White Mountain, we could see these phases. It was the dry, salt-lake interval in the middle—straw and hay pastels so pale they were nearly white—that had given the bluff its name. The streams that had opened it to view were lying at its base. Killpecker Creek (full of saltpeter) flowed into Bitter Creek, and that soon joined the Green River.

  Down the road a couple of miles was a pair of tunnels—snake eyes in the lakebed. They were one of the three sets of tunnels on Interstate 80 between New York and San Francisco, and they had to be there in the nose of White Mountain, or the interstate, flexing left, would destroy the town of Green River. Tower sandstone stood on the ridgeline in castellated buttes. With each mile, they increased in number, like buildings on the outskirts of a city. Off to the left was the island from which the geologist John Wesley Powell—seven years before the battle of the Little Bighorn—set off in a flotilla of dinghies to follow the Green River into its master stream, and to survive the preeminent rapids of North America on the first known voyage through the Grand Canyon. A huge sandstone broch stood in brown shale above the tunnels, which penetrated the lakebed’s saline phase.

  We burst into the light at the western end among concentrated stands of lofted redoubts, a garden of buttes, and huge wal
ls of flat strata in roadcuts and rivercuts extending a full mile. William Henry Jackson photographed this scene, in 1870, for the Hayden Survey. The buttes have been given names like Tollgate Rock, Teakettle Rock, Sugar Bowl Rock, Giant’s Thumb. Love said there were Indian petroglyphs on Tollgate Rock but they were far too high to see. “You’d have to be a mountain goat to get up there,” he went on, and scarce had he uttered the words when a figure white as gypsum appeared on a cone of talus at the base of the Tower sandstone, close by the petroglyphs, its head in motionless silhouette. “You can tell people just to look for that goat if they want to see where the petroglyphs are,” he advised me. “They can always find the petroglyphs by looking for the goat.”

  About halfway up White Mountain was a layer of sandstone that happened to be phosphatic and contained uranium. Love said he knew this because he had discovered the uranium. Non-marine phosphate, largely unknown elsewhere in the world, was one of the many legacies of this strange vanished lake. A few miles back, the uraniferous phosphatic sandstone had formed a low ridge in the path of the interstate, which cut straight through it, dosing all drivers with a few milliroentgens to keep them awake.

  He also remarked that the sedimentary story was reflecting a lot of tectonic history. You could see the orchestration of the mountain ranges by reading backward through the layers of sediment. For example, from the age and position of the sedimentary rock derived from the Uinta Mountains and the Wind River Range you could see the Wind Rivers developing first.

  At all moments in the history of Lake Gosiute, it was replete with organic life, from the foul clouds of brine flies that obscured its salty flats to the twelve-foot crocodiles and forty-pound gars in the waters at their widest reach. For this was Wyoming in the Eocene, and in the lake at varying times were ictalurid catfish, bowfins, dogfish, bony tongues, donkey faces, stingrays, herring. The American Museum of Natural History has a whole Gosiute trout perch in the act of swallowing a herring, recording in its violence two or three seconds from forty-six million years ago. In the museum’s worldwide vertebrate collection, roughly one fossil in five comes from Wyoming, and a high percentage of those are from Gosiute and neighboring lakes. Around the shores were red roses and climbing ferns, hibiscus and soapberries, balloon vines, goldenrain. The trees would generally have been recognizable as well: pines, palms, redwoods, poplars, sycamores, cypresses, maples, willows, oaks. There were water striders, plant hoppers, snout beetles, crickets. The air was full of frigate birds. Dense beds of algae matted the shallows. In all phases through the eight million years, quantities of organic material mixed with the accumulating sediments and are preserved with them today in the form of oil shale. On the far side of the Uinta Mountains was another great lake, reaching from western Colorado well into Utah. Lake Uinta, as it has come to be called, and Lake Gosiute and several smaller lakes left in their shales a potential oil reserve estimated at about one and a half trillion barrels. This is the world’s largest deposit of hydrocarbons. It is actually nine times the amount of crude oil under Saudi Arabia, and about ten times as much oil as has so far been pumped from American rock.