Rising From the Plains, John McPhee’s third installment in his multi-volume geological history of the United States Annals of the Former World, tells the story of Wyoming: its birth on the supercontinent Pangea, its arrival in North America, the growth of its mountains, the source of its fossils and oil and jade and uranium, and how it rose from the mid-western plains to its east, swelling up like an air-mattress filled with molten rock. Book one covered tectonics, book two, tectonics and glaciers, book three, tectonics, glaciers, and vulcanism. Wyoming is the most geologically confused state in the country.
However, unlike the first two books in the Annals of the Former World, the star of Rising From the Plains isn’t geology, it’s the geologist David Love and his family. The geologic story of Wyoming is interlaced with a Love family history taken from the remarkable diary of David Love’s mother, Ethel Love, nee Waxham. A decade after writing Rising from the Plains, McPhee said Mrs. Love was “probably the most arresting personality I have encountered in the course of my professional work.” No one who reads Rising From the Plains will find that at all surprising.
