John McPhee, staff writer for the "New Yorker" is highly regarded for the quality and diversity of his twenty-seven non-fiction books. This Pulitzer-Prize-winning author expounds on subjects as various as oranges, nuclear power, and the merchant marine. In “The Control of Nature” (1989) he pits man, the controller against Nature, the destroyer. This book is divided into three sections:
“Atchafalaya – the shifting flow of the Mississippi”: The maintenance of the Atchafalaya River as a navigable channel of the Mississippi River has been an expensive, ongoing project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) for more than a century. This river became the main channel of the Mississippi for a decade, starting in 1839 when a huge log jam that was obstructing the Atchafalaya River was removed. The Mississippi River would have preferred to continue flowing through this new main channel, but that would have left New Orleans and Baton Rouge in the backwater (literally) of history, so the USACE stepped in and forced Old Man River back into the channel that flows past Louisiana’s two great port cities. A navigation lock was dug between the two rivers, and on the day the author paid a visit, “the water on the Mississippi side was eighteen feet above sea level, while the water on the Atchafalaya side was five feet above sea level.” It is as obvious as gravity why the Mississippi wants to divert into the Atchafalaya, and according to McPhee, one day it will.
“Cooling the Lava”: The Icelandic campaign to save its best port began after January 23, 1973, when a fissure suddenly opened in the outskirts of a community of five thousand people and a curtain of lava five hundred feet high and a mile long fountained into the sky above the island of Heimaey.
Physicist, Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson came up with the idea of cooling the front of the lava flow with fire hoses and diverting it around the city and the harbor.
“This was in February, 1973. Quickly, the cooling of the lava became a national joke. The people called the action pissa a hraunid, in which ‘a hraunid’ meant ‘on the lava.’”
McPhee’s vivid descriptions of lava flows in Iceland, Hawaii, and Italy will put readers on the spot, sometimes on rock that causes boots to burst into flame. Many of the island’s homes were destroyed, but Heimaey’s all-important harbor was saved by Thorbjorn’s ‘pissa a hraunid.’
“Los Angeles Against the Mountains”: This section of the book meant the most to me since I have a sister who lives in the shadow of the crumbling San Gabriel Mountains. My favorite Thoroughbred race track, Santa Anita is sitting on the edge of one of the San Gabriels’ numerous alluvial fans. The mountains make a beautiful backdrop for the track, but one day they’re going to come sliding down for a visit. The danger is especially great after a fire. Once the chaparral is burned, the next big rainstorm will send rocks and mud sliding down the slopes, sometimes wiping out the houses of the people who were foolish enough to build them in San Gabriels’ canyons. My sister lives below a dam, but before I read “Control of Nature” I didn’t know enough to ask her whether the dam was built to hold back water or a mountain.
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