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Review by Alden Mudge
Between November 1944 and the end of World War II in 1945, the Japanese launched more than 9,000 bomb-laden paper balloons as part of a terror campaign against the United States. About 1,000 balloons actually made the 5,000-mile journey from Japan to North America. One traveled as far as Farmington, Michigan, before exploding. Another landed in the woods of eastern Oregon and was discovered by five Sunday-school children and a minister's wife on a fishing trip; they became the only mainland casualties of the war.
American military intelligence believed it impossible for balloons to travel to North America from Japan; they suspected submarine-borne landing parties on the beaches of California or, worse, traitors in the Japanese American relocation centers of the West. A packet of sand used as ballast for one of these balloons wound up in the hands of scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey's Military Geological Unit. Through painstaking research and microscopic analysis, the scientists pinpointed one of three balloon launch sites in Japan.
This little-known episode of the war is just one of several fascinating stories related by John McPhee in "The Gravel Page," a 67-page miscellany about forensic geology. Brief as this telling is, it offers an apt distillation of the qualities that make the astonishingly prolific McPhee our best literary journalist -- an eye for the vagrant tale that offers surprising depths of human drama, an unassuming precision and economy of language, an expansive curiosity about who people are and about the details of what they do, to name three of those qualities.
"The Gravel Page" is just one, and perhaps not even the best, of seven nonfiction pieces assembled in Irons in the Fire, McPhee's twenty-fourth book. At least as interesting is the title story, in which McPhee travels with brand inspector Chris Collis in Nevada and discovers, among other things, that cattle rustling in the modern West is as rife as it was in the old West.
Other stories concern a primeval forest that continues to exist untouched and unscathed in the heart of New Jersey, the enterprising and odd experiments people are undertaking to dispose of the more than 250 million, nearly-indestructible tires that Americans jettison each year, and the strange and amusing career of our nation's earliest landmark -- Plymouth Rock.
All of these pieces originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine. At least six of the seven richly reward a second look.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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