The Control of Nature, by John McPhee

I am down in Florida for a few days having just taken my Anatomic and Clinical Pathology Board exams. My father lives 2.5 hours due south of Tampa in the sunny confines of a Naples housing development and I decided to shoot down Rt. 75 for a two day visit before returning home to Watertown, Mass. For diversion I brought along a copy of John McPhee’s The Control of Nature, a three story foray into man’s efforts to subdue enormously powerful natural events. What timing! Now in the spring of 2011 we have historically high water levels on the Mississippi and a volcano exploding in Iceland. By all rights, the events McPhee narrates seem, at times, futile, full of hubris, dangerous, and ridiculous if not outright insane. The first tale concerns the lower Mississippi and the Army Corps of Engineers’ efforts to control its flow. When I was eighteen years old I visited New Orleans and made my way to Jackson Square in the French Quarter. I asked a passerby where the river was – I couldn’t find it. Pointing, she directed me up a series of stone steps – 20 or 30 of them – at the top of which I found myself standing on the concrete bank of the river flowing by just a yard or so below my feet. I turned and looked way down at the city of New Orleans and laughed. Apparently, the lower Mississippi is leveed for hundreds of miles along both sides to protect the hundreds of thousands (millions) of people who have settled the land along and in the “shadow” of the river. Before we came along and built levees, the river flowed where it wished, always seeking the easiest and fastest route to the Gulf of Mexico. The main branch hasn’t always flowed to New Orleans and without the Army Corps of Engineers’ intervention in the 1960’s it likely wouldn’t now. McPhee’s first story is a tale of the Atchafalaya river which branches off the Mississippi three hundred miles above New Orleans. In the 1960’s fully 30% of the river flow diverted down this sizeable branch - a number that was increasing. If the Atchafalaya took over the main flow, the old main river would diminish, taking with it the thriving port city of New Orleans and all the industry that had been built along the banks over the preceding decades. Unacceptable. So they built a massive barrier that controlled the flow of water into the Atchafalaya, forever affecting the lives of the people for hundreds of miles around. For better and worse. McPhee’s second tale is about a volcanic eruption on a small island south of Iceland on which there lives a community of 5000 people. The harbor is among the best in the world and supports a thriving fishing community essential to Iceland’s financial well-being. The explosion of the volcano launched flaming boulders thousands of feet and unleashed rivers of slowly advancing lava toward the harbor. The people of the island undertook a massive engineering project of cooling the lava by pumping millions of gallons of seawater at it. They bulldozed it. They stood out on those hardened lava fields, only recently cooled by seawater with still molten lava flowing inches below their feet, directing hoses as new lava flows advanced. They worked in shifts for months. They saved the harbor and, in doing so, reshaped, together with the volcano, the geology of the island. The third tale is of Los Angeles and the city’s efforts to control or, at least, minimize the damage of the mud/boulder/water flows that occasionally devastatingly rumble down from the San Gabriel mountains north of the city and oftentimes into the city. The most remarkable aspect of this third tale is the willingness (blindness?) of the locals to continue to build homes and communities in the shadow of great masses of boulders perched on tenuous steep terrain. Apparently the views (and air) are worth the risk. All three tales are full of geology, history, entertaining and fascinating personalities and, most of all, tasty prose. McPhee’s style is great fun and a joy to read. I devoured another of his works, Coming into the Country, a series of tales of Alaska, many years ago and am glad that I found him again. This great book made the torments of my two exam days in Tampa a bit easier to bear.