Category Archives: reading

Filling In Details with Historical Fiction

books, reading

Mary Doria Russell‘s fictional story of Michigan’s Copper Country strike that took place overBook covernine months in 1913 – 1914 is painful, violent, riveting and somehow triumphant. The strike was led by Annie Clements, the wife of a miner, who became known as the Joan of Arc of America. The Women of the Copper Country is mainly her story but as the title suggests, it is the story of all the women. They led unbelievably difficult lives, often beaten by their alcoholic husbands and thrown out of their company homes with their children when those husbands died in the mines. But, they managed to make something out of nothing, sharing whatever they had and often going hungry themselves.

Russell’s prose is rich with details, pulling us into miners’ shacks and millionaires’ mansions as she recreates this pivotal time in labor history. It is difficult sometimes for us to realize just how courageous these early protesters were to suggest that they had rights. Russell depicts the coldness of the bosses and upper class towards the workers, their belief in their superiority by reason of birth, and the casual violence they dispense to protect their profits.

Russell stays close to the historical events while providing information about larger history and personalities related to labor strikes. Mother Jones makes an appearance along with Ella Reeve Bloor. But it is the stories of the people of Calumet, focused on Annie, that brings that history alive. Their feelings, their daily struggles, their dreams of a better life. The writer of historical fiction is able to create the specific out of the general in a way that allows us to learn history and connect with the humans who lived it.

And, Clements’ maiden name was Klobuchar!

Randomly Connected Threads

books, history, reading, thinking out loud

Sometimes there is a bit of serendipity in my reading and learning. This morning, Tim Stahmer’s post about data mining became a catalyst for that serendipity. He used this photo of the Hope-Katy Mine in Basin, Montana from Wikimedia Commons as a metaphor and mentioned not knowing what might have been mined there. With my new found interest in US geology ala John McPhee, Mine entranceI went out to look and discovered it was gold and silver as they were the two most valuable ores found in the area.

The rich veins formed after molten rock came to the surface, turned into granite that cracked as it cooled, which allowed for the gold and silver to fill in. And all this happened some 81 to 74 million years ago. Geological history is a bit overwhelming at best.

More recent history in the West also fascinates me. The history of Basin, Montana, is one that repeated itself in towns across the West as miners and companies came and went, got out all but the impossible ore, and moved on, creating waves of boom and bust. But, Basin has reinvented itself somewhat as a health town, encouraging people to descend into the Merry Widow Health Mine to inhale radon and drink the pure spring water to cure a whole host of ailments.

In addition to McPhee, my 2020 reading included Tim Egan’s The Big Burn, his history of the 1910 wildfire that burned large sections of Idaho and Montana, destroying several railroad towns. Firefighters fought a losing battle but stories of heroism were born. And here is where this thread connects to the last: a US Forest Service ranger Ed Pulaski saved most of his crew by escaping into an abandoned mine, near Wallace, Idaho, which was partially destroyed in the fire.

Earlier, in the late 1800s, Wallace had been the site of a union strike that led to the wider Coeur d’Alene labor strike. And that ends this journey with my current read: The Women of the Copper Country, which tells the fictionalized story of Anna Clemenc and her labor activism during the Copper County, Michigan, strike in 1913 – 1914.

Geology, history, literature, biography: all these threads come together around the stories of the landscape and its people.

 

 

Writing About Geology: Poetry and Prose

books, reading,

Book I of John McPhee’s epic geological history Annals of the Former World ends with the rise of the plate tectonics theory in the 1950s and 1960s. Led by Harry Hess, a mineralogist who used his time on an attack transport in World War II to map the ocean floor with a new tool called a Fathometer. One feature he saw, according to McPhee, “were dead volcanoes, spread out around the Pacific bottom like Hershey’s Kisses on a tray” (p. 127). It’s images like this that make Annals so accessible and even a little fun.

As the ocean mapping and seismological monitoring brought in detailed data revealing patterns across the Earth, Hess began to see “that seafloors were spreading away from mid-ocean ridges, where new seafloor was continuously being created in deep cracks” (p. 128). He pulled it all together in an essay called “History of Ocean Basins” and, harkening back to Umbgrove, a Dutch geological writer, described the work as “an essay in geopoetry.” Basically, he was creating a foundation for a theory and that required some suspension of belief. New paradigms require new ways of thinking and they may not always be grounded in current science.

He concluded:

It is hardly likely that all of the numerous assumptions made are correct. Nevertheless it appears to be a useful framework for testing various and sundry groups of hypotheses relating to the oceans. It is hoped that the framework with necessary patching and repair may eventually form the basis for a new and sounder structure (p. 129)

McPhee brings the theory into the present day as he works alongside Kenneth Deffeyes, an oil geologist with whom he spends time in the book. When McPhee asks about geologists who do not accept plate tectonics, Deffeyes seems unphased, with skepticism being a part of the field and science in general:

There are always many ideas in various stages of acceptance. That is how science works. Ideas range from the solidly accepted to the literally half-baked–those in the process of forming, the sorts of things about which people call each other up in the middle of the night. All science involves speculation, and few sciences includes as much speculation as geology (p. 133).

McPhee shows how the scientists set out to fill in the gaps that will either prove or disprove the theory. At one point, Hess sends Deffeyes to test the age of some rocks that, if he were right, would be young. If not, the whole theory would be called into question. This is serious hypothesis testing.

But then, there is a moment when the various threads seem to click and the theory becomes accepted because its explanations seem to make sense. McPhee quotes a marine geologist who was a graduate student at the time: “It is a wondrous thing to have the random facts in one’s head suddenly fall into the slots of an orderly framework. It is like an explosion inside…I think I spend half my time just talking and listening to people from many fields, searching together for how it might all fit together. And when something does fall into place, there is that mental explosion and the wondrous excitement. I think the human brain must love order” (p. 135).

 

 

Understanding a Writer’s Lens

books, reading

Book cover for Midnight in SiberiaDavid Greene‘s reporting memoir of his journey on the Trans Siberian Railway, Midnight In Siberia: A Train Journey Into the Heart of Russia, provides a view of Russia that gets out of the urban centers and into the heart of the country where small communities fight to survive, often against their own government. He finds a balance between personal narrative and professional reporting that made this an excellent exploration of a very different world.

Greene paints loving portraits of those he meets even as he struggles to understand their perspective of loving their country despite its flaws. He finds that perspective particularly difficult, he admits, when he spends time with people like him, urban professionals who are “happy with our jobs, enjoying our friends, the local music scene, and vacations together.” They should, at least in Greene’s opinion, want more of a Western style of life with freedoms and opportunities. They are willing to live in a country that they admit is “ill,” something he and Rose do not believe about the society in which they live.

That view shows a blind spot in Greene’s view of the United States that kept getting in my way. Here is his description of Russia:

This is a wild, entertaining place full of culture, creativity, and craziness. I understand why Russians go to the United States and find it boring and too controlled. Here, it’s the Wild West, for better or worse. Worse, surely, if you have to live here with little means. For those with wealth the place must feel like an electrifying vacation where any amount of adventure or luxury is possible. For people without money, the chaos must be a cruel existence, because life can feel so uncertain. Little is possible, and little seems fair. I have kept that in mind at every stop on this journey, tempering the fun and wild moments with a dose of reality (p. 279).

I wonder what a poor person in the United States would make of this description? In an earlier passage, Greene references the corrupt, chaotic legal system in Russia and, again, seems to be blind to the failings of his own country when it comes to those not living the upper middle class life in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

No one said, I’m satisfied with the system in Russia–let’s leave it as it is. As an American, sure, I’d love to make some tweaks. But all in all, if a Russian writer came and asked me, I would say I am pretty proud of what I have. No one is Russia said that (p. 287).

Again, this passage is tone deaf to real structural problems in the United States around equity and justice. A few tweaks? I suspect, he would find Americans living in poverty and experiencing injustice, who also loved their country and carry that same pride but would not be quite as satisfied with the system as Greene seems to be.

Here is where reading both opens us to a new world but also reminds us that authors write from their own perspective, their own lens on the world. Greene did, during the early days of the Obama administration, make a similar trip into the heart of America to see how the recession was impacting Americans. I wonder if the interesting book might be to compare apples to apples: impoverished, struggling Americans living in small, dying towns with their counterparts in Russia.

Measuring the Pulse of the Earth

books, reading,

I am currently reading Annals of the Former World, John McPhee’s geological history of the United States. It pulls together four previously published books and then a final fifth book and includes a fascinating narrative table of contents where McPhee gives an overview of two decades of travel and writing.

I have had it on my shelf for a very long time and decided this was the year to dive in. And, I am so glad I did. McPhee was an English major who dabbled in science, especially geology. His writing is a pleasure to read. The first book, Basin and Range, is a combination of travel memoir and scientific treatise and historical outline. McPhee’s passion spills over when he tries to explain his interest in geology:

Geology was called a descriptive science, and with its pitted outwash plains and drowned rivers, its hanging tributaries and starved coastlines, it was nothing if not descriptive. I was a fountain of metaphor–of isostatic adjustments and  degraded channels, of angular unconformities, and shifting divides, of rootless mountain and bitter lakes (p. 31)

He introduces us to the early geologists, including Sherlock Holmes who despite being fictional was the first forensic geologist, interpreting bits of grit from various locales.

And, I learned that it is not just the water tides that are impacted by the moon. In fact, there are solid-earth tides: “The sea is not all that responds to the moon. Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot. That kind of force and that kind of distance are more than enough to break hard rock” (p. 21). I did not know this bit of geological trivia. While I don’t completely understand the science described here, this article describes the idea of “rock tides.”