The Control of Nature

“The greatest arrogance was the stealing of the sun. The second-greatest arrogance is running rivers backward. The third-greatest arrogance is trying to hold the Mississippi in place.”

Oliver Houck—a professor of law at Tulane University—tries to underscore the arrogance that humans demonstrate in their belief that they can contain the Mississippi to a single course of flow. Houck makes this arrogance clear by comparing the manipulation of the Mississippi to other human efforts, such as stealing the sun or trying to reverse the course of rivers. In including this quote, McPhee shows that some humans believe that their power—and thus the Army’s power—is limited and will likely fail when it comes to the Mississippi. 

“And Dugie said, ‘You’ve heard of Murphy—‘What can happen will happen’? This is where Murphy lives.”

In the early part of this chapter, McPhee interviews LeRoy Dugas—nicknamed “Dugie”—who has worked at the Old River Control since 1963. Dugie is of Acadian origin and is native to the area. In his earlier years, Dugie thought that trying to direct the Mississippi’s flow was a foolhardy idea, since he grew up with flooding. Now, he believes in the mission of controlling the Mississippi, but the process of trying to manage the river has worn him down over the years. In this passage, he refers to the eponymous “Murphy” from the concept of Murphy’s law, which essentially states that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Dugie brings up Murphy’s law to show how chaotic the situation is in the Mississippi—and how futile efforts are to tame the river when the engineers cannot predict what will go wrong.  

“A ship carrying Leif Eriksson himself, however, would be less likely to arrest the undivided attention of the lockmaster than a certain red-trimmed cream-hulled vessel called Mississippi, bearing Major General Thomas Sands.” 

There are several important things to pay attention to in this passage. The first is the description of the Mississippi boat, which McPhee describes such that the reader can easily visualize it floating down the river. The second is the reference to Leif Eriksson, a Norse explorer whom most credit with being the first European to reach North America. McPhee says that not even such a figure reappearing from the dead could compete with the attention that Major General Sands commands in the Louisiana area. This passage effectively sets up Sands as a key player in this essay. 

“In addition to all the things the Corps actually does and does not do, there are infinite actions it is imagined to do, infinite actions it is imagined not to do, and infinite actions it is imagined to be capable of doing, because the Corps has been conceded the almighty role of God.” 

General Sands—the Army Corps manager—begrudges civilians who assume that the Corps can do anything and everything and so seek out the Corps for any minor grievance that they need fixing. Following his chat with General Sands, McPhee implies the danger in the public deeming the Corps as this godlike authority. The public believes that the Corps is all-powerful—an idea that the Corps has, ironically, propped up—a belief that feeds into the false notion that the Corps can successfully control nature in all aspects. McPhee also uses the phrase “infinite action it is imagined” multiple times to enforce the idea that the Corps’s actual power may be more imaginary than real. 

“One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver […] that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, ‘Go here’ or ‘go there,’ and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.” 

Author Mark Twain wrote this statement in his book Life on the Mississippi. Twain was infamous for being a riverboat captain, though some of McPhee’s sources state that Twain was not really that experienced a boat captain. In this passage, Twain criticizes the notion that any sort of body like a River Commission could tame the Mississippi; he thinks the effort is a fool’s errand. The River Commission was the first congressionally funded effort by the Army Corps to intervene in the Mississippi River, and it set the stage for what the Corps would do nearly a century later. McPhee cites this passage to bolster the argument against controlling the Mississippi. 

“Who will win as this slow-motion confrontation between humankind and nature goes on? No one really knows. But […] if we had to bet, we would bet on the river.”

McPhee occasionally cites from second-hand sources such as newspapers in order to demonstrate the ripple effect that the events in the book are having on the national discourse. This line comes from a 1980 Washington Post editorial that discusses the Corps’s efforts on the Atchafalaya and the Mississippi River. The editorial weighs these interventions and determines that despite the confidence that the Corps projects, it really has no idea whether its efforts will be successful in the long run, although based on the river’s proven strength, it is likely that the river has the advantage over the Corps. 

“You put five feet on and three feet sink.”

This is a direct quote from a Corps engineer on what it’s like to install levees along the Mississippi River. The levees are put in place to protect New Orleans from rising water levels due to the river. However, the engineer’s words imply that the Corps is fighting a losing battle. He states that no matter how tall you build the levees, they continue to sink into the ground, thus diminishing protection for the city and undoing the engineers’ actions. The passage serves to illuminate the futility in the Corps’s efforts to tame Mother Nature.

“It’s like treating cancer. You get in early, you may do something.” 

In response to the erosion of the Louisiana coastline and the subsequent threat that erosion poses to New Orleans, a coastal geologist tells McPhee that they cannot return nature to a time before large-scale human colonization. Scientists can, however, try to treat the symptoms of erosion, much like how a doctor cannot reverse cancer but can treat its symptoms. This quote shows that not only McPhee employs simile to explain difficult concepts. Experts also routinely use comparisons to break down ideas for the layperson. 

“Society required artifice to survive in a region where nature might reasonably have asked a few more eons to finish a work of creation that was incomplete.”

In this passage, historian Albert Cowdrey discusses the Atchafalaya river region in Land’s End, which serves as the official Army Corps history of the area. The Army Corps, naturally, wants to tout its intervention in southern Louisiana by demonstrating how the devices that it has built have allowed human settlements to flourish. Cowdrey tacitly justifies the Corps’s determination to control nature as a necessary “artifice” in order to enable humans to survive in an inhospitable environment. In fact, Cowdrey seems to praise the Corps’s actions as a way of subverting nature’s intentions, as the Atchafalaya river region is constantly shifting—and likely would have been for many centuries more if the Corps hadn’t intervened. McPhee includes this passage to help the reader understand the Corps’s staunch interventionist mindset.  

“To be in the Atchafalaya is to float among trees under silently flying blue herons, to see the pileated woodpecker, to hope to see an ivorybill, to hear the prothonotary warbler.” 

Throughout this book, McPhee visits places of beauty and peaceful tranquility, despite the violent natural—and man-made—disasters that he describes. Whenever possible, McPhee attempts to transport the reader into the place that he is visiting through descriptions of scene and setting. In this passage, he discusses the sensory details that bring the Atchafalaya to life: the sounds and sights of the different birds that make this river their home. 

“In our minds, those were the two most dangerous things—the Turks and the mountain.”

Magnus Magnusson takes McPhee to see a monument that was removed during the eruption and later returned after the lava stopped flowing. The monument pays tribute to a priest who was killed by invading Moroccan pirates in 1627. Magnus tells McPhee that children on the island are raised from birth to fear two things: the invading pirates—known as “Turks” locally—and the mountain, which can erupt with volcanic activity at any time. Although Magnus’s fears may seem reasonable to him, to an outsider, they seem somewhat incomparable. A volcanic eruption seems much more likely than an invasion by the descendants of pirates in a far-off country, especially centuries after the initial invasion. In Magnus’s mind as a child, the two fears were one and the same, showing how our fears—both rational and irrational—coexist. Sometimes, the greatest threat is the one closest to home. 

“Not every mayor, of course, would know what to do if his town split open and lava factioned the streets. Magnus Magnusson knew what to do.” 

McPhee brings the figures in his book—the people whom he interviews—to life through many different techniques. In this instance, McPhee sets up the complex character of Magnus Magnusson, who was previously mayor of the town during the lava flow and has held numerous political positions in Iceland. The lava flow represented an enormous, life-or-death situation for the people of Heimaey, and the actions that the mayor took could either save or ruin his people. Many weaker-willed leaders would buckle under the task, but the mayor of this small town held it together. McPhee sets up Magnus’s intriguing and powerful personality in this passage, enticing the reader to continue on to see how this man shouldered this heavy burden.

“We were retreating day and night. Sometimes we were retreating fast and sometimes we were retreating slow—but we were retreating all the time.” 

Gudmundur Karlsson, who aided the cooling efforts in Iceland, speaks with McPhee about an unsettling development in his operation. A new lava flow headed straight for town at a rate of several acres per day, forcing the lava cooling operation to continuously move back the pumps. For a moment, it seemed like all hope was lost and that the operation—and the island—was doomed. Karlsson talks about their operation in retreat, as they if were retreating further and further to escape an enemy—much as a losing army would do in wartime. His speech continues the book’s pattern of using war analogies to convey ideas to readers. 

“When the lava moved against them, some flared up like Ping Pong balls ignited by a match, others were crushed like eggshells.” 

McPhee is a master of simile. Here, McPhee describes the different ways that lava can crush the houses in Heimaey by drawing comparisons to ignited Ping Pong balls and eggshells. These highly specific similes help the reader imagine the exact nature of the lava’s destruction. The more specific the reader’s understanding, the better, as this specificity helps maintain the scientific accuracy of the book. 

“Pall Zophoniasson told a reporter from Iceland Review, ‘The pumice-grit gets through every crevice, even into people’s souls, if I may say so.’” 

For the residents who stay in Vestmannaeyjar, the first few years following the eruption are a rough time. The volcanic rock and ash from the eruption bang against walls during windstorms. Zophoniasson—a resident of Heimaey—underscores how deeply the volcanic rock has permeated the residents. The resident implies that the eruption has had long-term, permanent—perhaps even negative—psychological damage upon the residents who have chosen to remain. Seeing their homes and their island culture irrevocably altered has taken a toll on these residents.  

“As Thorbjorn is the first to suggest, however, the true extent of victory will never be known—the role of luck being unassessable, the effects of intervention being ultimately incalculable, and the assertion that people can stop a volcano being hubris enough to provoke a new eruption.”

More than five months after the eruption, Thorbjorn finally declared the eruption over. Although casual observers might attribute credit to Thorbjorn’s cooling operation, even Thorbjorn admits that he cannot be sure that his actions decisively changed the outcome. Luck factors into the success of the operation, and so McPhee makes the point that we must curtail our human ego, which leads us to believe we are solely responsible for whether we can tame nature. The sentence structure here also highlights McPhee’s skill as a writer. McPhee separates the second half of this passage into three parts that match each other in terms of the placement of nouns and adverbs, which creates a rhythmically pleasing sentence that captures attention. 

“Boulders sat on the roof. Thirteen automobiles were packed around the building, including five in the pool. A din of rocks kept banging against them. The stuck horn of a buried car was blaring. The family in the darkness in their fixed tableau watched one another by the light of a directional signal, endlessly blinking.”

The writing that McPhee employs in this book is commonly referred to as literary nonfiction or literary reportage. Writers of literary reportage take literary techniques commonly found in fiction and apply them to nonfiction in order to bring the writing to life in an engaging way, as opposed to simply stating facts and events that have occurred. One such technique is “show don’t tell,” which entails using description of a scene to convey an image to a reader and highlight a certain mood. Instead of stating something along the lines of “the scene looked like a horror movie,” McPhee shows the reader the horrors of a debris flow. He describes in blunt fashion the boulders crushing the roof or the stillness of a family who can do nothing but watch a blinking light as they contemplate their deaths. 

“Advancing this national prejudice even further, debris flows, mudslides, and related phenomena have ‘provided literary minds with a ready-made metaphor of the alleged moral decay of Los Angeles.’”

McPhee quotes Reyner Banham, a professor in London who loved Los Angeles and wanted to defend the city against its detractors. Due to the prevalence of the entertainment industry, Los Angeles has a reputation for being a city filled with superficial people and sinful behaviors, which outsiders cite as representing symbolic and moral decay among Angelenos. Banham acknowledged that the crumbling mountainsides turned this symbolic moral decay into literal decay, which opponents could latch onto when they made fun of the city. McPhee cites this quote with a tinge of dry humor, which seems to be the author’s trademark. 

“Exceptional flows are frequent, in other words, but not frequent enough to deter people from building pantiled mansions in war zones, dingbats in the line of fire.”

Here, McPhee highlights one of the main problems in this essay: Heavy debris flows occur, but not often enough that people would avoid building houses against the mountains. Humans settle in places with fairly frequent natural disasters all the time, even though common sense should dictate that residing in such an area is unadvisable. They flout logic to satisfy their desires—in this case, building luxurious mansions in areas where boulders come tumbling down the mountainside. This passage is another example of McPhee comparing natural disaster areas to war zones. The reader can also intuit that McPhee looks somewhat scornfully upon the situation, given that he calls the people residing in these areas the “dingbats,” which is an impolite way to refer to someone of low intelligence.

“Drawing himself up, he said, ‘I beg your pardon, sir. It is not rotten. It is shattered.’”

On a lark, McPhee visits the California Institute of Technology, where he meets Leon Silver, who is an isotope geologist at the university. Silver shows McPhee to the roof of the university, where they can take in the surroundings. Large faults or cracks dot the mountainous landscape. McPhee describes the rock in the mountains around the university as rotten, offending Silver. Silver corrects McPhee by stating that the landscape is shattered. This close attention that Silver pays to terminology shows that this is a technical man who cares about his field. Quotes like these not only establish the character’s personality, but also help the reader connect to the sources whom McPhee interviews. 

“That’s an awful pile of rock and dirt up there, and we’re proposing to hold it back […] there are so many of us here to pay the bill, to protect those who insist on living up there.”

McPhee chats with Vito Vanoni, a professor emeritus, civil engineer, and founding member of Caltech’s Environmental Quality Laboratory. Here, Vanoni speaks somewhat cynically of the efforts of engineers like himself to hold back debris using debris basins and other man-made inventions. Vanoni calls out the somewhat uneasy predicament of Los Angeles residents who end up footing the bill financially—via taxes—for these debris basins, even if they don’t live near the mountains and thus don’t benefit from them. The county of Los Angeles is expending millions of dollars and countless hours of the engineers’ manpower to build these basins to protect only a minority of its residents. This dilemma underlies much of the tension in this essay.

“With enough money, enough dump trucks, enough basins cupped beneath the falling hills—Los Angeles could defy the mountains, and append to an already impressive list one more flout in the face of nature.”

Following a debris flow—known as the New Year’s Day Flood—that devastates the town of Montrose, a gravel pit above the village of Tujunga fills up with debris. Engineers will turn this gravel pit into a prototype debris basin to protect towns from future debris flows. McPhee follows this information with the passage above. He underscores the perspective of residents and engineers in Los Angeles, who believe that they can throw money at the problem by building debris basins. The idea that they might not be able to overcome nature—no matter how much money or how many basins they build—does not occur to them. Residents want to live in this area, and, so, they will—by any means necessary. They believe they will be successful, as they’ve controlled nature many times before.

“Los Angeles did not spread out like a blooming flower, or grow from a center, like continental ice. It grew at once all over the plain.”

This passage refers to the explosive population growth in Los Angeles during World War II. Job opportunities linked to wartime production became plentiful in the area, and housing developments spread, resulting in the cutting down of the citrus trees in Los Angeles. McPhee often employs simile to illustrate a phenomenon. In this case, he uses simile to show how the growing population is not like a gradually blooming flower, but, rather, a sudden growth all around the city. The passage allows the reader to visualize this population boom as if it were happening in real-time. This population growth also sets up the clash between the new residents and the mountains that surround them.