John Mcphee The World's Largest Pile of Tires

   I chose to read John Mcphee’s “The World’s Largest Pile of Tires” from “Irons in the Fire”. I have to state that upon reading the title, I was intrigued on what it could be about, to my amusement, it was in fact an environmental piece about a pile of tires. The author begins immediately by giving the reader a visual that it is so big, it is almost visible from the Interstate 5 in California (off the bat I can tell this is written for Californians).  The first paragraph paints a vivid picture of the tire mountain to the reader. Similes and metaphors such as “the individual tires appear to be grains of black sand” (p85), are used to take the reader from seeing one tire, and how they pile up and up to be one whole mountain. Mcphee also highlights the many things you can see from the tire pile, that you can look in one direction and see 100 miles to the Sierra..close to them you walk in tire canyons”. One feels as though it is a land all its own, eroded from the tires. Mcphee begins his transition to talking about the environmental impact of all these tires, by  next talking about how they got there and how no one could pinpoint how many there were, that geologists even tire experts topographically couldn't size this mountain and calculate how many there were.

The final paragraph is one where it gets away from the tire pile itself, into the environmental impact. The deeper meaning of this pile is that, its tires, something we all use, we are all responsible for, “They are everybody’s tires. They are Environmental Defense funds tires, Rainforest Action Network tires... They are California's Natural Resources Federation tires...No one in innocent of scrapping those tires.” Mcphee lists 10 national, local, and federal environmental groups who are equally responsible for the tires being in the pile they are in. This leads him into stating his main idea, “Of the problem the tire pile represents, everybody is the cause and the problem, like the pile, has been increasing.”

Mcphee ends his description of  the tires and their meaning with highlighting irony. The irony that these tires are so hard to dispose of because of how good they are at being tires. Everything about how a tire is made, to be safe and indestructible, makes it near impossible to safely dispose of “When they are thrown away, they are just as tough as they were when they felt Kick One”. Mcphee doesn’t offer a solution to the problem of the tire pile at the end of this selection, but instead his delve into the tire pile, how vast it is, how impossible it could be to destroy, how it is our responsibility that it is there, only leaves the reader in thought.

Mcphee, John. ""The World's Largest Pile of Tires"" Prose Models. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978. N. pag. Print.