The title piece of this collection resulted from a casual conversation
in which a friend of John McPhee's told him that he had recently been in
Nevada and had seen at a remote crossroads a white vehicle with whirling
red-and-blue roof lights and the Nevada state seal on the door. Above
the seal, where he expected to see the words State Police, he saw the
words Brand Inspector. This suggested to him that cattle rustling was
not just history in Nevada. He told McPhee that he had thought of him,
and what a reporter might learn if he spent a few weeks in that vehicle.
The conversation took place in New Jersey. Virtually the same day, the
author departed for Nevada. The differing contents of this book reflect
the variety in the overall span of McPhee's work - compositions that
have in common only and essentially the fact that they are about real
people in real places. The longest piece, called "The Gravel Page, " is
about forensic geology - insights from the science as they are used to
help solve major crimes and puzzles on an even greater scale. The
shortest piece - "Rinard at Manheim" - is an experimental story about an
auction of exotic cars, in which the interviewee, Rinard, takes over the
narrative while McPhee's remarks are confined to brackets. Items as
unlikely as a virgin forest in central New Jersey, a blind
writer-professor working at his computer, and a mountain of scrap tires
(forty-four million scrap tires) in California shape the scenes and
substance of other pieces. Not to mention Plymouth Rock. "Travels of the
Rock, " which ends the book, is about a day when the State of
Massachusetts had to call in a mason to repair the nation's most
hallowed lithic relic. McPhee stood in th pit with the mason in Plymouth
and watched the attentive public leaning on the railings above. "Travels
of the Rock" is a blend of colonial history, paleogeography, radiometric
dating, societal drift, tectonic theory, schoolkids by the busload, and
Mayflower descendants in leath
