March 5, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s delightful “Direct Eye Contact,” in which he tells about his yearning to see a bear in his Princeton backyard (“While I flossed in the morning, looking north through an upstairs bathroom window, I hoped to see a bear come out of the trees”). McPhee is a bear writer extraordinaire: see, for example, his classic “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977) and his superb “A Textbook Place for Bears” (The New Yorker, December 27, 1982). Compared to these masterpieces, “Direct Eye Contact” is slight, only twenty-three hundred words long. But it contains many of McPhee’s signature moves: vivid imagery [“In Manchester Township (Ocean County), a wild black bear went up a back-yard tree in a neighborhood called Holly Oaks, where it tried to look like a black burl weighing two hundred and fifty pounds”]; geological description (“Kittatinny is actually a component of one very long mountain that runs, under various names, from Alabama to Newfoundland as the easternmost expression of the folded-and-faulted, deformed Appalachians”); interesting facts (“In the past three years, twenty-one bears have entered New Jersey homes, with no human fatalities”). My favourite passage in the piece is a description of a fallen oak:

In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show. 

That last line made me smile. “Direct Eye Contact” is an excellent addition to McPhee’s bear oeuvre. I enjoyed it immensely.