This great book first appeared in The New Yorker, in two installments (November 25 & December 2, 1967). It’s an immersive portrait of an enormous tract of New Jersey wilderness called the Pine Barrens. “New Jersey wilderness” may seem like an oxymoron. New Jersey, as McPhee points out, has “the greatest population density of any state in the Union. In parts of northern New Jersey, there are as many as forty thousand people per square mile.” Whereas, “in the central area of the Pine Barrens – the forest land that is still so undeveloped that it can be called wilderness – there are only fifteen people per square mile.”
The Pine Barrens is an incongruity. It is six hundred and fifty thousand acres of wilderness – “nearly as large as Yosemite National Park,” says McPhee – abutting one of the most massive transportation corridors in the world (“The corridor is one great compression of industrial shapes, industrial sounds, industrial air, and thousands and thousands of houses webbing over the spaces between the factories”). Yet, inside the Pine Barrens, you’d never know such intensive development existed. It’s a distinct and separate world. Here, from the book’s superb opening paragraph, is McPhee’s description of it:
From the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill, in Washington Township, Burlington County, New Jersey, the view usually extends about twelve miles. To the north, forest land reaches to the horizon. The trees are mainly oaks and pines, and the pines predominate. Occasionally, there are long, dark, serrated stands of Atlantic white cedars, so tall and so closely set that they seem to be spread against the sky on the ridges of hills, when in fact they grow along streams that flow through the forest. To the east, the view is similar, and few people who are not native to the region can discern essential differences from the high cabin of the fire tower, even though one difference is that huge areas out in this direction are covered with dwarf forests, where man can stand among the trees and see for miles over the uppermost branches. To the south, the view is twice broken slightly – by a lake and by a cranberry bog – but otherwise it, too, goes to the horizon in forest. To the west, pines, oaks, and cedars continue all the way, and the western horizon includes the summit of another hill – Apple Pie Hill – and the outline of another fire tower, from which the view three hundred and sixty degrees around is virtually the same view from Bear Swamp Hill, where, in a moment’s sweeping glance, a person can see hundreds of square miles of wilderness.
McPhee spent about eight months roaming the Pine Barrens, driving its sand roads, canoeing its rivers, visiting forest towns, talking with woodlanders, fire watchers, forest rangers, botanists, cranberry growers, blueberry pickers, keepers of a general store – logging impressions as he went. Here are some of the things he noted:
There is no white water in any of these rivers, but they move along fairly rapidly; they are so tortuous that every hundred yards or so brings a new scene – often one that is reminiscent of canoeing country in the northern states and in Canada.
The characteristic color of the water in the streams is the color of tea – a phenomenon, often called “cedar water,” that is familiar in the Adirondacks, as in many other places where tannins and other organic waste from riparian cedar trees combine with iron from the ground water to give the rivers a deep color.
It is possible to drive all day on the sand roads, and more than halfway across the state, but most people need to stop fairly often to study the topographic maps, for the roads sometimes come together in fantastic ganglia, and even when they are straight and apparently uncomplicated they constantly fork, presenting unclear choices between the main chance and culs-de-sac, of which there are many hundreds.
When I first stopped in there [Chatsworth General Store], I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a well shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter.
The Rubel blueberry was named for Charlie Leek’s uncle Rube Leek. The Stanley was named for Charlie’s older brother. Both varieties are grown in the blueberry patch where Charlie is foreman. He told me this in his pick-up truck on the way out there from Buzby’s store.
A remarkably common cause of fire in the pines is arson. Standing in all that dry sand, the forest glistens with oils and resins that – to some people – seem to beg for flame. Oak leaves in forests that are damp and rich are different from Pine Barrens oak leaves, which have so much protective oil concentrated within them that they appear to be made of shining green leather.
Twenty-three kinds of orchids grow in the Pine Barrens – including the green wood orchid, the yellow-crested orchid, the white-fringed orchid, the white arethusa, the rose pogonia, and the helleborine – and they are only the beginning of a floral wherewithal that botanists deeply fear they will someday lose.
One summer morning, in a place called Hog Wallow, near the center of the Pine Barrens, McPhee stops at a house to ask for water. Here he meets one of the book’s key figures – Fred Brown. McPhee describes the encounter:
Fred Brown’s house is on an unpaved road that curves along the edge of a wide cranberry bog. What attracted me to it was the pump that stands in his yard. It was something of a wonder that I noticed the pump, because there were, among other things, eight automobiles in the yard, two of them on their sides and one of them upside down, all ten years old or older. Around the cars were old refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, partly dismantled radios, cathode-ray tubes, a short wooden ski, a large wooden mallet, dozens of cranberry picker’s boxes, many tires, an orange crate dated 1946, a cord or so of firewood, mandolins, engine heads, and maybe a thousand other things. The house itself, two stories high, was covered with tarpaper that was peeling away in some places, revealing its original shingles, made of Atlantic white cedar from the stream courses of the surrounding forest. I called out to ask if anyone was home, and a voice inside called back, “Come in. Come in. Come on the hell in.”
And with that, one of the all-time great McPhee “characters” enters the narrative. In the weeks that follow, McPhee stops in many times to see Fred. He takes Fred with him on several of his drives through the pines. Fred, who is seventy-nine, brims with local knowledge, and is “expansively talkative.” McPhee writes, “As the car kept moving, bouncing in the undulations of the sand and scraping against blueberry bushes and scrub-oak boughs, Fred kept narrating, picking fragments of the past out of the forest, in moments separated by miles.”
I love that “picking fragments of the past out of the forest.” It’s exactly what McPhee does in this book. He visits the sites of vanished iron towns, forge towns, jug taverns, ruins of old factories, and describes what’s there, and what used to be there. Here, for example, is his depiction of the furnace town of Martha, then and now:
Martha Furnace was built in 1793, a few miles southeast of Jenkins. The furnace has long since collapsed, and a large earth-covered mound remains where a high double-walled pyramid of bricks once stood. The spillway runs back to a broken dam on the Oswego River at Martha Pond. There were about fifty houses in the town, a central mansion, a school, and a small hospital – all interspersed with stands of catalpa trees, which were planted throughout the town and are about all that remains of it. With the exception of the furnace mound, there is not a trace of a structure in Martha now. The streets are bestrewn with green and blue glittering slag, but they are indistinguishable from the sand roads that come through the woods from several directions to the town, and if it were not for the old and weirdly leaning catalpa trees, it would be possible to pass through Martha without sensing the difference from the surrounding woodland.
The Pine Barrens seems to tell a story about place that reverses the usual process of land taken, exploited, and destroyed by human development. In the Pine Barrens, nature appears to win the ecological war, with towns and factories in ruins, absorbed back into the ground. But that’s not the way the book ends. It ends ominously, with a planner showing McPhee his vision of the Pine Barrens as the location of a new city and jetport. McPhee concludes that, without legislative protection, the Pine Barrens are headed for extinction.
In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of The Pine Barrens, including its action, structure, description, sense of place, and point of view. But first I want to introduce the second book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands.
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