“At one time and another in what now approached fifteen years, Moores and I would not so much traverse California as go into it in both directions trom the middle.”
John MCPhee, Assembling California, 1993
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If Jack Kerouac wrote about geology, the result would be “Assembling California.” It’s a quirky book, part esoteric tectonic theory, part travel memoir, about the author John McPhee’s various and varied conversations with beatnik-savant geologist Eldridge Moores.
These excerpts of the pair’s discussion while ostensibly on a field trip to to Napa Valley gives a sense of it:
“No one hurries anyone away, and in the cool quiet we sample half a dozen bottles, talking geology with our noses in the outcrop. Louis Martini’s wines are straightforward, stalwart, allusive, volcanic. They are prepared to travel — like the terrane they derive from, and like the first Martini (who emigrated from Italy in 1894), and, according to Moores, like Italy itself, which departed from Europe in the Jurassic but later went home…”
“Martini’s Pinot Noir has the brawny overtones of an upland Rioja, the resilient spring of an athletic Médoc. Moores wonders if I have noticed that “the claret coast of France” and the Cantabrian coast of northern Spain seem to suggest an open bivalve, with Bordeaux at the hinge. In the early Cretaceous, when the Atlantic was young and narrow, there was no water between western France and northern Spain; the hinge was closed…“
“During the zinfandel, Moores summarizes the United Kingdom as “the remnants of a collision that occurred at the end of the Silurian.” Mélanges resembling the Franciscan were caught in it, he says — for example, Caernarvonshire and Anglesey, in Wales…”
Truly a sprawling, ping-ponging ride through the emergence of the theory of plate tectonics, how Moores came to play the cello, the bitter water wars of the American West, and the series of events James W. Marshall put in motion when he told John Sutter he found gold at their mill.