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Why Basin and Range is My New Favorite Book
Basin and range alternates narrow mountain ranges and flat valleys.
Basin and Range by John McPhee is the most thrilling book I have read in years. It’s also the most exciting book about geology I’ve ever read, not withstanding that I’ve never read a book about geology but even if I had and I’ve forgotten the statement still stands. Even if I read another 100 books about geology, I can easily predict it’s unlikely I’ll forget my initial infatuation with Basin and Range. Which is really weird since I managed to avoid most of the sciences in my formal education curriculum; I had pursued an English and Communications major, and presently sell Sacramento real estate as a top producer Realtor.
But then I think back to a day in the 1990s at the Minnesota State Fair, wandering into the Education building. I happened across an interactive computer exhibit that promised to predict your perfect job. It was a software program that asked a bazillion questions and then formulated a prediction based on your responses. Sure, I’ll give it a whirl. I was as honest as I could be with my answers. When the time came to spit out a job description, the computer told me there were no careers in the world for me.
I was basically, unemployable.
Fortunately, the program gave me the opportunity to change some of my answers.
OK . . . A concession. So maybe I would be willing to work with people.
You might laugh, but hey, they were talking about your perfect career. Removing people from the equation sounded like an excellent idea to me. People are always a stumbling block, doing stuff you wish they wouldn’t, impeding progress. So, given the fact that I was now willing to work with others, the computer predicted I should be a geologist. Too bad, I was in my 40s and not going back to school. Besides, I love real estate.
John McPhee helped to pioneer my favorite kind of writing: creative non-fiction; a Princeton professor, he won a Pulitzer for the 1999 Annals of the Former World, a huge book, over 1,000 pages, containing 4 books and a bonus, one of which is Basin and Range, 1981. It reads like a suspense novel, sucks you in, making you turn each page and stay up way past your bedtime. He weaves the storyline of real people into facts about how earth began in such a way that before you realize it, you’re printing out charts to figure out when the Miocene occurred.
When I graduated high school in 1970, continental drift was a pooh-poohed theory, a pseudoscience. Today, students learn about plate tectonics and whoa, Pangea, a supercontinent. They watch animated videos of India breaking away from Australia and slamming into China. Basin and Range takes you across Interstate 80 and suspends you in time to watch the earth change over hundreds of millions of years: floods, plates pulling apart, plates slamming together, plates sliding under each other, forcing mountain ranges into the sky only to eventually tear them down.
Without giving away the plot, here are interesting facts I learned from Basin and Range, the latter which you can clearly see illustrated on a map of Nevada. Alternating long, narrow mountain ranges separated by basins. Thanks to TMBG, Why does the Sun Shine, I already knew the earth was 93 million miles from the sun, but I did not know its circumference was 25,000 miles. Nor that the radius is 3,959, which makes more sense if, in real estate terms, you think about a 6-block radius for a comparable sales home search from a particular address. The earth is 4.5 billion years old.
McPhee says we humans typically think in terms of 5 generations: two before, two after and the one in the middle. This perception makes it hard for us to wrap our heads around eras and the hundreds of millions of years that pass as the earth tears apart and rebuilds. Much of life on earth has been mostly destroyed 5 times. Five extinctions.
The earth is moving now. At the Equator, the earth spins at 1,000 miles per hour a day. Let’s not even talk about its orbital speed as it revolves around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour a day. On top of this, the Pacific Plate is moving about 3 to 4 inches a year. Eventually California will become an island. Death Valley will fill with water.
Granite, the stuff your kitchen counters are made out of, is a plutonic rock that cooled slowly from molten rock. Half Dome (granite) at Yellowstone is a batholith. The takeaway in Basin and Range is the top of Mount Everest is marine limestone, which means it was under water for a long time. The Pacific Ring of Fire is the source of many earthquakes and volcanic activity. The Pacific ocean floor is dotted with volcanoes, which McPhee calls Hershey’s Kisses with the tops cut off.
Our magnetic poles have flipped hundreds of times. How about THAT? You can see the positive and negative lines in the rocks in Nevada. One day your compass points to magnetic north and millions of years later, it points south, and eventually again to the north. How about this? Salt can explode granite. Itty bitty salt. If you already know all of this stuff, this might seem elementary to you as a 12-year-old. But to a Sacramento Realtor who spends all day in another line of work, Basin and Range is fascinating reading and magical. It’s where we live. It changes you.
If Real Estate Clients Don’t Embrace Technology, It’s OK
Repetition is the key to learning, not only in the real estate business but for almost anything. I think back to my early guitar teacher: You must play this song at least 6 times in a row without a mistake to master it. Yes, grasshopper, but I wanted to play The Monster Mash not Red River Valley. To retain what you learn, you’ve got to use it, and that’s where consistency plays an important role. Doing the same thing over and over, yet improving on it.
I mean, I can fly by the seat of my pants as well as the next Sacramento real estate agent, but it makes more sense to have a rhythm and way of doing business. Not to mention, if one has a method, there is no question as to whether a task was completed or even how it was completed, because it’s always done the same way. It takes all of the guesswork out of it. But that doesn’t mean the method can’t be improved.
We really ought to strive to be continual life-long learners to fully participate in the world, while we’re still here. Not just in our personal life but particularly in our business life. Because things change. It’s not easy always keeping up with change. One day you’re told that, oh, for example, gluten is good, and you should read the fine print on every loaf of bread you buy to make sure it has gluten in it. Next day, gluten kills you and is evil. Or, how about the niacin and cholesterol thing? Do you know how it feels to take 3,000 mg of niacin? Ask the 8-year-old who insisted on taking it. I watched him. First his body turned red from waist up, then his head turned beet red, his ears quickly inflamed and his eyeballs exploded, just like in the cartoons.
I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking whaaa, niacin, you can’t take big ol’ gobs of niacin anymore? Yeah, 3 or 4 years ago, I don’t recall, new research showed that niacin wasn’t helping cholesterol and, in fact, could be bad for you when ingested in large dosages. You can’t take a fact, stick it in your head and rely on it forever. Which I find hugely distressing after going to all of the trouble to acquire it in the first place. If you don’t believe me, take a look at what happened since I was in school and learning about continents. Continental drift was a contested concept. Ditto Super Continent. Today, kids learn about Pangaea and watch videos of India slamming into Asia without batting an eye.
I’m constantly staying on top of things that change in Sacramento real estate and adapting, which means new technology and learning curves. A seller complained the other day I was too high-tech, what with my iPad shooting video of her home instead of taking notes. An iPad is just a convenience to doing more work better and faster. When it’s time for you to hire a Sacramento real estate agent, you should probably consider whether your agent works with the technology of 2013 because that’s how the industry interacts.
However, if you don’t like to use technology, that’s OK, too. I can still press my Bluetooth device to call you on your land line phone. I have a car, a driver’s license and I can drive over to see you.
Call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916 233 6759 for your real estate needs. I answer my phone.
A Dinosaur Named Sue at The Field Museum
You might hear people say that certain types of dinosaurs are well suited to play piano, but I learned that is not true. Not true at all. Not even in the tiniest little bit. While it is indeed amusing to think about dinosaurs pecking away at the ivories, the truth is those Tyrannosaurus Rex guys couldn’t really play anything more complicated than Chopsicks. That’s because they have only two fingers on those tiny little hands. A T-Rex can only take selfies of her neck.
It’s kind of depressing to visit The Field Museum in Chicago because you learn these kinds of things. Right up front, when you walk in the door, there is Sue, the real Sue T-Rex, right there in front of your nose. I knew she was somewhere but I had no idea she was living at The Field Museum. I think they found almost all of her bones, too, unlike some of those other dinosaurs, including the guys from Spielberg’s movie — but those are up on the top floor, way in the back. And you have to wade through all of those depressing Mass Extinctions that happened when everybody was wiped off the face of the Earth, not once or twice, like you’d imagine but a whole bunch of times. So many that they pretty much lost count and started including some of the smaller mass extinctions in which only like 50% of the population of alive things died off.
That photo of Sue’s head is not her real head. Oh, her real head is at The Field Museum all right. It’s encased in glass in its own special exhibit. You might think it’s to stop you from poking at her enormous teeth and trying to feel the tips, but she’s in the glass case because her real head is too heavy to sit on top of her enormous body. Yup, that’s right, your head still stays fat and heavy even after millions of years of sitting in the sand and getting rained and snowed on now and then. There were all of those glaciers, too, and chunks of land splitting off, India slamming into Asia, although South Dakota stayed pretty much intact.
I hate to admit this but it was only recently that I learned about the Super Continent. All of my life I had suspected that South America had once been part of Africa, and a few years ago I discovered it was true. That was an amazing discovery for me because this was not something I had learned in school. It’s not that I was sleeping through my classes; I received a lot of A’s and stars and learned how to play nicely with others. But I did not realize that new things were being discovered about the earth each and every single day to the point that the entire way our planet was formed had changed overnight, and every person on earth knew about the Super Continent and Pangaea, except me.
This is what happens when you’re busy selling Sacramento real estate.
