Mountains From Molehills : Speck by Speck, Writer John McPhee Compiles Scary Tale of L.A.’s Slippery Geology

John McPhee faced the San Gabriel Mountains, lifted a chunk of rock he had been examining, and tossed it into a rusty sheet metal culvert.

Clop! Crack! Clunk! The rock bounded back in the direction from which it once came. McPhee smiled like a naughty boy at this disruption of the morning tranquillity--or maybe at the symbolism of the Sisyphean gesture.

Three years ago, McPhee, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, had pulled into Southern California and ranged along the foothills of the San Gabriels, talking to people who had heard a much bigger sound made by much bigger rocks going in the other direction.

In his new book, “The Control of Nature,” the sound of those boulders stampeding toward Los Angeles in a “debris flow” of water, silt, tree stumps--and sometimes cars, expensive homes, and corpses--rises up like the ominous bass line in a horror film.

As McPhee describes it, the phenomenon is at least as horrifying as getting slimed.

“It was just one big black thing coming at us, rolling, rolling. . . ,” a resident of Shields Canyon said of a debris flow that swept down one night. McPhee’s book picked up the narrative: “. . . The shattering of safety glass made terrific explosive sounds. A door burst open. Mud and boulders poured into the hall.”

The debris forced the family into a bedroom, McPhee writes. They jumped on a bed, but it began to rise on the flow, pinning the family’s two children against a wall. Boulders scraped across the roof and drummed against 13 automobiles that had been swept by the debris flow against the house and into the swimming pool.

As the mud continued to rise, a car horn blared. Buried to their chins in the ooze, the children stared at their horrified parents in the eerie light of an endlessly blinking turn signal.

McPhee didn’t spend three weeks in Los Angeles back in 1986 to spin a horror tale, though. Rather, he came as “a foreign correspondent,” here to cover with a fresh eye the theme he examines in each of three sections of his new book: the battle between humanity and nature.

In the first segment of the book, McPhee details the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Olympian efforts to keep the Mississippi River from seeking its natural course and bypassing New Orleans and billions of dollars worth of riverside industry.

The second segment describes an Icelandic community’s heroic fight to save its port by spraying millions of gallons of water on an advancing lava flow.

To understand why McPhee would then arrive in Los Angeles to mine a gripping yarn from a range of smog-veiled mountains and the complex arrangement of basins of concrete, rock, dirt and steel designed to keep the mountains from rampaging down into the city, it’s necessary to understand McPhee.

McPhee, 58, was born in Princeton, N.J., grew up there, went to public schools there and graduated from the town’s namesake university, where he now lives with his family, does his writing and teaches a class titled--by the university, he stresses--”the Literature of Fact.”

In 1965, McPhee profiled Bill Bradley--then a basketball star, now a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey--for the New Yorker magazine.

McPhee’s description of Bradley’s elegant technique--”he . . . has apparently never made a move merely to attract attention”--bears some resemblance to McPhee’s own style, and soon after the piece ran, the late William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, gave McPhee a job.

Since then, McPhee has told the magazine’s readers about such disparate and unlikely subjects as oranges, nuclear physics, birch bark canoes, and the Swiss army. In many cases, the articles then became books.

Some Reviewers Complain

Occasionally, reviewers get fed up with McPhee--”It is admirable to deal with things in their full complexity,” one sniffed, “but it is tedious to go into every detail.”

But reviewers are writers, and most writers can’t help but get sloppy about the sort of wordsmith who observes that the masonry of an old Victorian house “is grouted with sunlight.”

“John McPhee ought to be a bore,” a Christian Science Monitor reviewer wrote. “With a bore’s persistence he seizes a subject, shakes loose a cloud of more detail than we ever imagined we would care to hear on any subject--yet somehow he makes the whole procedure curiously fascinating.”

“Somehow,” of course, is not in McPhee’s vocabulary. The how is often the best part. And how McPhee crafts a story is almost as intricate and tortured a process as how a mountain range sprouts.

With typical precision--and an assertive humility--McPhee traces what he does to several sources. His curiosity and enthusiasm for the outdoors stems from the summers he spent, canoeing and exploring at Camp Keewaydin, where his father was camp physician, and where he would eventually become a masterful canoeist.

His devotion to craft was triggered by Olive McKee, the English teacher at Princeton High School who required he write three compositions a week, complete with an outline defending each composition’s structure.

Four decades later, McPhee remains as intrigued with the construction of a piece of writing as he is the construction of an elaborate dam and valve system on the Mississippi or the “perforated risers” in Southern California debris basins, which suck the water out of debris flows to be used by the city below: “You brush your teeth with water taken from these basins,” McPhee pointed out.

To research the articles on Los Angeles’ debris basins, McPhee spent three weeks poring over information at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works (the old Flood Control District). He then toured the San Gabriel mountains and the foothill communities that spill from them with experts and people who have confronted “slugs” of debris that slither down from the steep canyons every now and then.

McPhee talks reluctantly about himself. When he talks about almost anything else or anyone else, he gestures energetically, as if to gently wring a bit more nuance from his own expended breath.

People apparently see this enthusiasm and figure they’ve found the one person whose eyes won’t glaze over at their own passion for the matter at hand. Usually they’re right. McPhee listens more enthusiastically than he talks, his eyes sparking with curiosity behind unfashionable bifocals.

Wade Wells, a hydrologist with the U.S. Forest Service, was unsure what to make of McPhee when he met him three years ago: “He doesn’t really interview you so much as ask, ‘Do you mind if I spend a few days with you? You just go about your job, and I’ll observe, if you can stand having me around.’ ”

Informal Conversations

The time Wells and McPhee spent together, a cornerstone of the Los Angeles segment of the book, “was more just an afternoon-in-the woods-type situation,” Wells said. “The conversations got so informal, I’d sometimes forget, until I saw him writing it down, that I’d better be factual.”

McPhee said of himself, “I’m full of trepidation when I go into an interview situation. After all these years, I still feel that I don’t know what I’m doing. . . . I can’t just walk up to someone and ask them a question. Whereas, if I’m in a pickup, talking with a game warden, I am completely comfortable.”

This is not the Sam Donaldson school of hit ‘em hard journalism, nor does McPhee desire to work that niche of the profession, where confrontation is a necessity. Former President Ronald Reagan couldn’t wait to get rid of Donaldson; Bill Bradley made McPhee his daughter’s godfather.

“After just a few minutes talking to him, I felt like I’d known him for a long time,” Minor Harkness, a member of the Sierra Madre search and rescue team who figures prominently in the new book, said of McPhee. “I wish he’d come back so we could go on about a two-week backpacking trip into the Sierra.”

Once his research is completed, McPhee begins a construction process that is legend in nonfiction writing classes.

Using a computer that a friend adapted to his method, McPhee transcribes his notes from the field and his periodic forays into Princeton’s 4-million volume library. He then arranges the transcripts in computer files or binders.

“I go through the notes over and over, and at some point I find what I think would be a good beginning,” he said on a recent afternoon spent roaming the mountains again, during a very brief pass through Los Angeles. “Sometimes it’s only a paragraph. Sometimes it’s several thousand words. The idea is to get a lead that is honest and relevant. It should shine like a flashlight far down into the piece. Writing becomes much easier once I’ve got that beach landing.”

Continuing to pore over the transcripts, McPhee creates 3 x 5 cards, coded with themes, which he then shuffles through in search of patterns and connections, playing what one observer termed “a sort of writer’s solitaire.”

When he finally has the cards arranged in an order that will carry the story best, he puts them on a bulletin board, sticks a pin attached to “a tiny cloth tomato that says NJ” on it next to the first card, then begins the actual writing. That can take from three years (for his best-selling “Coming Into the Country”) to three days (for a “Talk of the Town” piece in the New Yorker).

“It sounds mechanical,” he said. But “it’s not a way of making a Tinker Toy or Erector Set piece of writing. It’s a way of getting clear of that sort of thing.” With the mechanics out of the way, the writer is free to write, he said.

“The first rough draft I put down is really bad. I can’t stand it,” McPhee said, as he sat at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, sipping iced tea and watching a dozen or more hummingbirds flitting about a feeder, behind which was a solid gray background where the city of Los Angeles might have been.

‘Panic-Stricken Fugitive’

“Putting it down, I’m an irritated, panic-stricken fugitive,” he said. “. . . Look at those hummingbirds, they’re like mosquitoes! I’d have come up here just to see that.”

As a piece approaches completion, McPhee pays particular attention to how it sounds. “I couldn’t publish a sentence without reading it aloud first,” he said.

On Rocky Turf

Three of the six books McPhee has published since 1981 were on geology and geologists, and he projects a fourth book on the subject. There are folks who wish he would get back to less rocky turf, he concedes.

But “for every lawyer in Boston who sends me a letter saying, in bold type: ‘PLEASE STOP WRITING ABOUT GEOLOGY,’ there is a United Airlines pilot who writes ‘The Uinta mountains, are they only glaciated on the north side?’ ”

“Control of Nature” is about geology only in the most superficial sense, McPhee stressed. “I’m sensitive about that.”

The book, he said, touches on geology “in that it describes how debris flows from a young and rapidly disintegrating mountain range. But there it stops. I wanted to write about what people were doing about it. Not about geology.”

McPhee is intrigued with the engineers who created the ingenious and elaborate system of debris basins and the 2,000 miles of concrete stream beds and pipes and channels designed to protect foothill communities from debris flows. He empathizes with the people whose homes are destroyed on those rare occasions when they don’t.

Still, his loyalties in the battle between man and mountain are unclear.

Riding along Angeles Crest Highway, McPhee punctuated his relaxed conversation with exclamations: “See how shattered this range is? That rock has really been knocked around!” Later, he said: “I just can’t believe these mountains! Look at that! Every time I come here, I can’t get over how wonderful they are.”

Down in the foothills, though, McPhee is equally absorbed with the structures that hold the mountains at bay.

For all a new arrival to Southern California would know on this brownish-gray summer day, it’s a straight line from Pasadena to the Mojave desert. The mountains that allegedly intervene are nowhere to be seen.

But McPhee has been tutored by experts. He knows how to scout 50-mile “front” from Tujunga to San Dimas where the battle between the San Gabriels and the foothill communities is fought: Trace the winding roads up the alluvial fans; follow the oleander-lined fences; find the “No Trespassing” signs marking the 120 or so debris basins scattered at 700-yard intervals.

‘It’s All Here’

Finding one large basin, McPhee looked down from the terraced lots of a new housing development and gestured broadly.

“It’s all here,” he said, his voice charged with something akin to affection.

‘A Giant Colander’

Like the basins McPhee describes in his book, this one is simple yet ingenious, “a giant colander” designed to strain out the tree trunks and boulders that nature would prefer continue on toward the flatlands below. Sculpted by bulldozers at the mouth of a steep, chaparral-covered canyon, it sports a long concrete spillway, steel girder “trash racks” designed to hold back logs, and a perforated riser to drain off water for later “harvesting.”

Above the basin are “oversteepened” canyons from which the debris flows and upon which remain a few charred snags--evidence of the sort of fire that is key to the intricate cycle needed to produce a major flow.

McPhee compares this complex natural sequence of events to the charging of an 18th-Century muzzle loader.

“To live under one of those canyons is . . . to look up the barrel of a gun,” he writes in “Control of Nature.” And after a major fire has burned off the canyon’s chaparral, the muzzle loader is set to explode. “For a full-scale flat-out debris flow to burst forth from the mountains, the final requirement is a special-intensity storm,” he writes.

And those storms happen. In January, 1969, for example, “more rain than New York City sees in a year fell in the San Gabriels in nine days.”

Debris Trucked Back

Just cleaning out the debris basins can cost more than $60 million a year. And the engineers are running out of places to put the stuff. So, McPhee reports, they’re hauling it back into the mountains. One tributary of the San Gabriel drainage, for instance, now contains 14 million cubic yards of debris that was trucked back up at a cost of $20 million.

Overall, the system has cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

“People of Gardena, Inglewood, and Watts no less than Azusa and Altadena pay for the defense of the mountain front,” McPhee notes flatly in “Control of Nature.”

His tone is equally flat as he quotes real estate agent after real estate agent, professing ignorance of any threat to the expensive properties built smack in the path of debris flows.

“I want the judgments to be performed by the reader,” he said. “There are some people who think that one ought to be more forceful in one’s judgments and have an ax to grind. I don’t want to grind axes in my writing. But I want to have plenty of axes out there for others to do their own grinding on.”

Human Battle

McPhee emphasizes that the human battle against debris has been largely successful to date. “I’m anxious not to be the Cassandra of Los Angeles,” he said. “Ninety percent of the time, debris basins do exactly what they’re meant to do.

“It’s the remaining percent that produces the drama,” he added.

It was dramatic, for instance, when a debris flow moseyed through the Verdugo Hills Cemetery, sending 35 coffins slithering down the hillsides and into people’s yards. It’s dramatic when a debris flow picks up so many cars and trucks that “it was like bread dough mixed with raisins.”

Tranquillity Disrupted

On these rare occasions, the tranquillity of the hills is disrupted. Boulders running in the creeks click together “like giant castanets,” one witness said. “It sounds like an avalanche,” a Glendale resident told McPhee. “You can hear it start to rumble. The rocks crash against the house.”

But on this recent afternoon, the canyons were peaceful.

A hawk screeched in the sky. Sprinklers chink-chink-chinked water onto new lawns, and down below, an ice cream truck jingled in the distance, working its way through a pleasant tree-lined neighborhood built years ago on a deep, steeply sloping debris flow.

McPhee took it all in, measuring and figuring.

He is a modest man, condescending only when guarding his humility. (“Understand this, I don’t want to sound pretentious,” he said, prefacing a passionate discussion of his craft. “I want it clear that everything I’m saying is what I imagine might work, or idealize, not necessarily what I think I’ve accomplished.”)

But as he turned and hiked back up the terraced hillside, the gray dirt clods of an impending development crunching softly underfoot, he had the serene air of a craftsman who knows he got something 100% right.