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• Author: Van Wolverton
• Publisher: Microsoft Press
• Publish Date: 2003
• ISBN: 0735618127
• Pages: 612

Preface to the 20th Anniversary Edition

What is 20 years? To a writer like John McPhee ^{[Download Link (1)]}, awarded a Pulitzer Prize for documenting the riffs of poetry, the lyrical odes and sonnets gracing the undending hymn of the epic, tumbled among the tuff and breccia and sandstone and mudstone and granite and diorite and all the other rock that makes up a slice through the U.S. roughly along the path of Interstate 80 from New Jersey to California—to a writer like John McPhee, soldiering away at presenting 540 million years (give or take), 20 years doesn't register, unless perhaps as a possible way to estimate the length of some cataclysmic event, a volcanic eruption or sudden draining of many cubic miles of rock—but these events would more likely be measured in 20 days or even 20 hours; that's what made them cataclysmic. No, I would avoid asking John McPhee to ponder the period of 20 years for fear of evoking the same sort of response I got when I asked Derry Odonovan, racing enthusiast and true son of Eire, why the drag racer he built (and drove) didn't have a tachometer (although I said, of course, tach): Well, let's see (rolls his eyes a bit), I make it through the quarter in something less than 5 seconds and the engine's turning around 7 grand most of the time, which means that (longer pause, eyes squinched tight shut to let me know that he is calculating...) the beast will turn over maybe 600 times. Now why would you be wantin' me to count them? (Although he had long since left the Emerald Isle for California and supported his racing by masquerading as a lineman for PG&E and sounded as though he was born and raised in the Santa Clara Valley, whenever I asked a question that required him to expend more than 15 or 20 words in showing just how little I really knew, he sounded like a leprechaun by the time he was through.)

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