Moses On The Beach

A tribute to one of the great chapters in the history of nonfiction prose, and a few thoughts on the power—and challenge—of writing on different time scales.

There’s a brilliant scene near the end of one of the opening chapters of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, where a young Robert Moses—on the cusp of his first major achievement as a planner, the creation of the Long Island park system—wanders across the remote white sands of Fire Island, following maps that had been drawn thirty years before. A state park had been built on one end of the barrier island, but there was little evidence of its existence. With no roads connecting the island to the mainland, the park was effectively off limits to New Yorkers without boats. A hotel that had been built near the park had burned down a few years before; only its rubble remained. “Studying maps,” Caro writes, “Moses was puzzled.”

They showed the park as comprising the westernmost portion of Fire Island, except for a little enclave on the island’s tip which was occupied by an unmanned Coast Guard station. The telegraph tower, which stood on the station, was shown at the very tip. But as Moses stood alongside the tower, the island stretched westward as far as he could see.

Then he remembered what the baymen had told him about the set of the ocean. Since 1892, the waves had been piling sand on Fire Island’s Western end. He began to walk along the new land—and he walked for four miles. The Coast Guard station wasn’t a little enclave any more; its area, he calculated, was at least six hundred acres. And the station was deserted. No one even knew the added six hundred acres were there.

It’s a memorable image: Moses out there in the dunes, trying to make sense of his obsolete maps. But it resonates even more because Caro has set the whole frame of the story—Moses’ personal journey of discovery—in the deep history of geology: in the collision between water, ice, soil, and sand that made Long Island itself. Early in the chapter, Caro rewinds the clock about ten thousand years, to the glaciers that retreated north at the end of the so-called Wisconsin glaciation:

The melted ice ran south, flooded a huge low-lying meadow on the south side of the Island and left on the ocean side of the meadow just enough low sand bars and dunes to form a barrier beach Island, and then let them continue as gentle waves that washed the Island’s shores… And the tides of eons gently etched into the south shore of the mainland a panorama of incredibly twisting channels and coves and necks, of sandy shoals and tiny bays off the big one, of a marshland catacomb.

As Caro continues he weaves in other developments that shaped Moses’ thinking in this period: the new technology of the automobile suddenly making it possible for the growing population of the city to escape to Long Island without public transportation; the clash between the affluent neighborhoods on the North Shore and the working-class, insular fishing communities on the South. And of course, Moses’ own personal ambitions, dreaming of re-making the landscape of greater New York.

In the previous installment of the Creative Workflow series, I mentioned that I think of the Jones Beach chapter—which is called “A Dream”—as one of the greatest individual chapters in the annals of historical nonfiction. It’s long been a lodestar for my own writing. And so it was a particular treat to get to pay homage to it in the wonderful new documentary about Caro and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb, Turn Every Page. Here’s part of my tribute:

When I first saw a rough cut of the film, that section on “A Dream” put two thoughts into my mind. My first thought was just how delightful the format of the section is: one practitioner describing the craft and the magic that they see in the work of one of their heroes. There’s something lovely about paying tribute publicly in that way. I’m sure there’s some version of this out there, but this sort of format would make a fascinating podcast series: each week you interview a creator about a particular work that inspired them, give them thirty minutes to pay homage to another person’s artistry. We could use more of that purely appreciative mode of discourse in the world, I suspect.

But the second thought it put into my mind was more of a question: why am I drawn to these kinds of stories as an author? They are hard to write. You have to take the reader out of the traditional chronological flow. That can be powerful when done well, as the last ten years of time-hopping prestige television dramas have demonstrated. But it unquestionably requires some narrative gymnastics to pull off. Flashbacks that travel back in a single character’s timeline are easy to explain: you can illuminate the character’s present-day actions by casting the light backwards. But why you need to wind the clock all the way back to the Wisconsin glaciation is another question altogether.

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Part of the appeal is poetry, to be sure. There’s a kind of gravitas that comes from opening up a chapter million years in the past. The first chapter of my book How We Got To Now begins with a “flashback” to the Oligocene Era:

Roughly 26 million years ago, something happened over the sands of the Libyan Desert, the bleak, impossibly dray landscape that marks the eastern edge of the Sahara. We don’t know exactly what it was, but we do know that it was hot. Grains of silica melted and fused under an intense heat that must have been at least a thousand degrees…

But I think there’s something more substantive at work here in jumping back and forth between different time scales. It really comes down to what you are trying to do as a storyteller. Is your primary aim to explain what happened, or why it happened? If the former, you can just tell the story in chronological order. But if you’re trying to document the array of forces that made those historical events possible, then you have to work on varying time scales. And moving across those temporal scales also forces you to move across disciplines. “A Dream” operates on four: the glacial scale of geology and climate; the sociological scale of settlement patterns along the South Shore of Long Island; the technological scale of the automobile’s invention; and then a very specific biographical stretch of Robert Moses’ life in his early early thirties, when it first became possible to imagine him becoming the power broker of the book’s title. That’s a ten-thousand year story interlaced with a three-hundred-year story interlaced with a twenty-year story, interlaced with a two-year story.

Most of my narrative history books—Ghost Map, Invention of Air, Enemy of All Mankind, the new one I’m currently writing—have used this technique in one form or another. The most extreme case is Invention, which is mostly set in the late 1700s, but has a chapter in the middle that time travels back to the Carboniferous era. Because Enemy was ultimately a book about the collision between the pirate Henry Every, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and the newly formed East India Company, I ended taking the reader through a few centuries of Mughal rule, and traced the history of piracy back to the Bronze age, and ventured back a hundred years or so to document the first encounter between British merchants and the Mughal court. If you’re just reading to find out what the fearsome pirate did next, those investigations can no doubt seem like they are getting in the way of the plot. But if you are trying to understand the full array of factors at work in the story of Henry Every and his terrible crimes, you have to zoom out for a wider view, travel back in time.

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One question that inevitably comes up when I talk about writing in this mode is how you avoid the infinite drift towards ever longer time-scales and ever-more cosmic causal chains. Robert Moses came up with the idea for Long Island’s park system in part because of the geological forces that made the barrier island beaches on the South Shore. But he also came up with the idea because the universe contains an electromagnetic force. Does that mean you have to explain the origins of the universe every time you sit down to write a “long zoom” history? Why not go from a pirate’s crimes in 1695 all the way down to quantum gravity?

That question turns out to be relatively easy to answer. If you want to embrace this kind of long zoom storytelling, you need only cover the forces that have some unique purchase on the events at the center of the story. The geological forces that built those barrier islands had a material impact on Robert Moses’ career. Change the geography of Long Island, and you change the arc of Moses’ life. So it makes sense for Caro as a writer wrestling with the why of history—and not just the what—to take us back to the Wisconsin glaciation. But it doesn’t make sense for him to zoom all the way out to, say, the gravitational forces that allow the earth to rotate around the sun—because there isn’t anything distinctive in the way that Moses’ life was influenced by those forces. It's true enough that Moses’ life would have been transformed if that gravitational force had not existed, but it would have been transformed in the exact same way that all life on Earth would have been transformed: it would have never existed in the first place.

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One last word about Turn Every Page. I am a little biased because it was directed by an old friend of mine, Lizzie Gottlieb, but it is truly a delightful film: full of humor, and warmth, and heated discussions over the proper use of a semi-colon. As I mentioned in my Creative Workflow post, it’s one of the first films to truly capture the writer-editor relationship—all its complexity and contestation and potential for greatness. And if you are a Caro devotee, it’s a must see.