Mapping The Reefs of Earth

They were sliding down Green River in the slanting darkness, and they found it pleasant. Earth has a beauty even for the Pucas—at night, with the dog-elm and the crooked-neck cedar trees giving their smell to the setting and leaning out over the water, with the moon coming up over the shaggy little river, and the night cicadas talking—it is especially beautiful when seen through green eyes. — The Reefs of Earth, 142.

A friend and I were recently discussing The Reefs of Earth, which made me want a set of maps for my next reading. I built this tool around the Berkley Medallion edition, the most widely available print edition.

The first sheet is a topographic quadrangle at 1:24,000. It covers Lost Haven, the Green River bottoms, the strip pits along Crow Creek and Mud Bayou, and mystical Misu Mound. The second sheet, at 1:100,000, shows the county seat and Catoosa, along with the roads Henry Dulanty takes when he escapes from jail.

Clicking the links opens scene notes with page and chapter references. You can also enter the page you’re reading. Places and events introduced after that page will then gray out, with their descriptions hidden.

Making these maps meant locking down a lot that the novel leaves open. Even the riverbanks provoke an argument:

There is one spot on the Green River that is always foggy. Even at midday there is so strong a haze that you can look straight at the sun, and it is blue. The fog comes from Misu Mound that stands on the right bank of Green River, though Helen said it was the left bank.

I’ve placed each site as closely as I could to Lafferty’s descriptions, then built out the surrounding countryside from those locations. For Lost Haven, I used the plan of an Indian Territory coal townsite from about 1907. That seemed to me the sort of town Lafferty had in mind.

The maps follow the style of the US Geological Survey’s 7.5-minute series from the 1960s. For the strip pits, I consulted two published quadrangles of strip-mined ground: Chelsea, Oklahoma (1970), and West Mineral, Kansas (1973). Both are available through the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. I also checked the strip-pit widths and lengths against the USGS National Hydrography Dataset for the West Mineral district.

The countryside uses a computed elevation model with points spaced twenty-six feet apart. I ran several erosion passes to make sure every stream flows downhill. The railroad has a grade of 1.25 percent, with cuts, fills, bridges, and culverts. Helen gives the waterways their course:

“She went down Mud Bayou till it runs into Crow Creek in the strip pits,” Helen told her. “She went down Crow Creek till it goes into Green River, down Green River till it goes into the Arkansas River, down the Arkansas till it goes into the Mississippi, and down the Mississippi till it goes in the Ocean. It’s downhill all the way and you can’t miss it.”

The strip pits were fun to work out. I kept redoing them until they looked the way I imagined them. Lafferty writes:

The strip pits are a dozen square miles of mountains turned inside out, threaded by canals, and with bottomless chasms. The artificial hills are full of shafts and pits and caves both above and below water level. Coalfactor Stutgard owned all this, but he had closed down the coal mines several years before.

In this version, the mine follows a coal bed 2.8 feet thick. It slopes gently toward the west-northwest at about eighteen feet in a mile. The cuts run parallel to the line where the coal comes to the surface. The dug-out earth takes up a quarter more room in the spoil heaps than it did in the ground. As in real life, each pit lake would fill with water until it spilled over the lowest point of its rim. Exceptions occur when groundwater is lower or the “lake” opens onto a creek and takes on the creek’s level. The thickness of the coal, the depth of earth over it, the width of the pits, and the steepness of the spoil heaps were calculated to fall within the range found in accounts of the Cherokee Group coal beds and of strip mining with power shovels in northeastern Oklahoma and southeastern Kansas.