The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, October 15, 2023

Notably: If you were to read John McPhee’s Rising from the Plains–the third of five books that formed Annals of the Former World–as it appeared in The New Yorker’s February 24, 1986 issue, you would notice on page 66 the vividly stark description of the most dangerous stretch of Interstate in winter, I-80 in Wyoming. You will also notice the following line: I-80 in that area “is known as the Snow Chi Minh Trail. Before Amtrak dropped its Wyoming passenger service, people stranded on the Snow Chi Minh Trail used to abandon their cars and make their escape by train.” As in:

By the time McPhee re-issued the book as part of Annals of the Former World, the two references to the Snow Chi Minh Trail were gone, even though it’s still very much a thing: the Wyoming Tribune Eagle (or the Laramie Boomerang: it’s hard to keep them straight once they’re done deceiving you with their web optimization tricks) headlined the terms just three years ago in a commemoration of the stretch’s 50th anniversary, a piece by John R. Waggener, an archivist at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center who’d written a book of the same name. He hints: “The fact that the infamous title is no longer commonly used is the result of the WYDOT’s unending efforts to improve road and travel conditions, highway safety and information technology.” The Torrington, Wyoming Telegram published a similar piece in 2021, “The history of the Snow Chi Minh Trail,” citing Wagner’s authority on the origins of the terms: “Waggener believes the name “Snow Chi Minh Trail” originated with truckers, who compared it to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a treacherous roadway used by soldiers in the Vietnam War. Waggener said the name quickly caught on and was used in newspaper articles by the end of the first year of the road being open.” But why its disappearance from the 1998 edition of McPhee’s Annals? I suspect it’s an example of political correctness, what we would call wokism today. Maybe it’s considered inappropriate appropriation, a form of stereotyping, a faint suggestion of racism. I don’t know. If so, it seems, like that stretch of highway, over the top: the nickname may be all sorts of anachronisms, but it isn’t offensive, and McPhee, whose allusive and clever-by-half style can sometimes become hard to bear, edited out the wrong lines. Anyway, McPhee, who is 92, has a piece in the current New Yorker, “Under the Carpetbag,” about his 60-year friendship with Bill Bradley.

—P.T.

 

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On the western side–without preamble, without foothills, with a sharp conjunctive line at the meeting of flat and sheer–were the Tetons, which seemed to have lifted themselves rapidly past timberline in kinetic penetration of the sky. The Tetons resemble breasts, as will any ice-sculpte horn–Weisshorn, Matterhorn, Zinalrothorn–at some phase in the progress of its making. Hollywood cannot resist the Tetons. If you have seen Western movies, you have seen the Tetons. They have appeared in the background of countless pictures, and must surely be the most tectonically active mountains on film, drifting about, as they will, from Canada to Mexico, and from Kansas nearly to the coast. After the wagon trains leave Independence and begin to move westward, the Tetons soon appear on the distant horizon, predicting the beauty, threat, and promise of the quested land. After the wagons have been moving for a month, the Tetons are still out there ahead. Another fortnight and the Tetons are a little closer. The Teton Range is forty miles long and less than ten across–a surface area inverse in proportion not only to its extraordinary ubiquity but also to its grandeur. The Tetons with Jackson Hole beneath them–are in a category with Mt. McKinley, Monument Valley, and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River as what conservation Organizations and the Washington bureaucracy like to call a scenic climax. In the Teton landscape are forms of motion that would not be apparent in a motion picture. Features of the valley are cryptic, paradoxical, and bizarre. In 1983, divers went down into Jenny Lake, at the base of the Grand Teton, and reported a pair of Engelmann spruce, rooted in the lake bottom, standing upright, enclosed in eighty feet of water. Spread Creek, emerging from the Mt. Leidy Highlands, is called Spread Creek because it has two mouths, which is about as common among creeks as it is among human beings. They are three miles apart. Another tributary stream is lower than the master river. Called Fish Creek, it steals along the mountain base. Meanwhile, at elevations as much as fifteen feet higher–and with flood-control levees to keep the water from spilling sideways–down the middle of the valley flows the Snake.

–From John McPhee’s Rising from the Plains (1986).

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