September 4, 2023 Issue

This week’s issue (“An Archival Issue”) contains an early piece by John McPhee that I was unaware of. Titled “On the Way to Gladstone,” it originally appeared in the July 9, 1966 New Yorker. It’s a “Talk of the Town” story, written from “Talk”’s weird “we” perspective, about the death of a New Jersey bear. McPhee writes, “The bear was shot by a Pottersville farmer. After it had been hit once, with No. 5 shot, it climbed into a tree in the farmer’s front yard. The farmer fired at it enough additional times to knock it out of the tree, dead.” He points out that the loss of this bear reduced the number of bears in New Jersey from twenty-two to twenty-one. 

The piece is slight, but it’s interesting to me because it’s a sort of prequel to McPhee’s great “A Textbook Place for Bears” (The New Yorker, December 27, 1982; included in his wonderful 1985 collection Table of Contents). That piece profiles Patricia McConnell, a biologist who works for the State of New Jersey trapping bears. It’s set in the Kittatinny Mountains where McConnell has a trap line. McPhee reports his experience accompanying McConnell as she checks her bear traps:

She had set snares – a pair of them, about thirty feet apart. And now, making rounds, at a few minutes to six in the morning, June 19, we went down into the woods to see what sort of mischief might have happened near the snares. The site was some distance from the road, and the mountainside fell steeply away. The only sound we heard was the tread of our feet. “There’s no bear here or we’d have heard it by now,” she was saying, but then she drew in her breath and stopped. She stared through the trees in excited disbelief. “This could only happen once,” she said. “We have hit the daily double. A bear in each snare.”

“A Textbook Place for Bears” mentions the Pottersville shooting:

The first wild bear I ever saw was in Vermont, eating raspberries, in 1946. I have since seen others, in remoter places. But I’ve never seen a bear in Princeton, or anywhere near it, and, in fact, was unaware that bears live in New Jersey until one morning about fifteen years ago when an interview I had been granted by Lester MacNamara, the state’s Director of Fish and Game, was interrupted by a ringing telephone. MacNamara was a big man from California with a weathered countenance, and he looked out of place in the confinement of a Trenton office. Relaxed and reminiscing, he had been telling me that he much preferred New Jersey’s wild terrain to the ones of his youth in California. The phone call made him furious. He was learning that a farmer in Pottersville had murdered with a shotgun a treed and frightened bear. MacNamara’s responses were not so much spoken as detonated. When he hung up, he almost broke the phone.

“On the Way to Gladstone” joins what is already a splendid McPhee bear oeuvre, including “A Textbook Place for Bears,” “Under the Snow,” “Direct Eye Contact,” and his classic “The Encircled River.”