Eugenious

Sure, I am experiencing that odd restless leg syndrome that sometimes accompanies pregnancy, but that’s not what I mean.

I just read Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, and Weisman’s various travels ignited my old travelin’ yearnin’. I hadn’t even heard of the two places that garnered my most serious vacation envy: Cappadocia, Turkey and the Bialowieza Puszcza Preserve straddling Poland and Belarus. Cappadocia’s geology alone could arouse wanderlust in a geology major like me. Volcanic ash cemented into tuff, a relatively soft rock, which was overlaid with basalt, which is really durable. The result, after millions of years of erosion, was a landscape of deeply-cut valleys and “fairy towers,” narrow pillars of tuff capped with basalt. The tuff was also stable enough but soft enough that, at least 1700 years ago, people started to carve rooms, hallways, and entire cities many stories down into the earth. Weisman’s description of Cappadocia’s underground world enchanted me, and, while I wouldn’t be able to live underground for most of the year like some of those folks apparently did, I do want to get a room in a cave hotel for a few nights.

And how could I have not heard of the Bialowieza Puszcza forest before? Old growth in Europe. With wisents. Sound like creatures of Tolkien’s.

Regarding Weisman’s book, The World Without Us: I’d originally heard about it last August in a public radio interview, and Weisman’s conceptual undertaking interested me. Weisman suggests that humans might be spirited away in some manner, and he ruminates on how the Earth will both bounce back and continue to be affected by our presence — even in our absence.

Like an overzealous graduate student, Weisman may have done a bit too much research. The book doesn’t flow very naturally, since it simply includes so much information gleaned from so many sources. But the thing is, most of the information is just fascinating, and each individual section is written well. I didn’t notice the writing, which is one of the ways I recognize good writing. I wanted to read every word, even though I knew I couldn’t retain it. I learned about places I’d never heard of before, and Weisman’s first few chapters, about how our buildings and cities will fare without us, were imaginative feats.

Time to lace up my new Keens and hit the highway — well, maybe I’ll wait until this baby has popped him/herself out.

This entry was posted in the categories Julie by julie on Tuesday, 6 May 2008, 21:44. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.