Best of the Decade: #5 John McPhee's "The Orange Trapper"

Photo by Phillip Toledano, from John McPhee's "The Orange Trapper"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #5 pick – John McPhee’s “The Orange Trapper” (The New Yorker, July 1, 2013; included in his 2018 collection The Patch). 

“The Orange Trapper” is a perfect example of McPhee’s late style – personal, playful, artful. It’s about McPhee’s golf ball collecting compulsion (“From my bicycle in New Jersey, if I am passing a golf-links batture, my head is turned that way and my gaze runs through the woods until a white dot stops it, which is not an infrequent occurrence. I get off my bike and collect the ball”). And what, you might ask, is a “golf-links batture”? McPhee explains: 

The woods that lie between public roads and private fairways remind me of the dry terrain between a river levee and the river itself. In Louisiana along the Mississippi this isolated and often wooded space is known as the river batture. If you’re in Louisiana, you pronounce it “batcher.” 

McPhee’s descriptions of his golf ball hunting adventures generate delectable quasi-surreal passages. For example:

You get off your bike, pick up a ball, and sometimes are able to identify the species it hit. Pine pitch makes a clear impression. Tulip poplars tend to smear. An oak or hickory leaves a signature writ small and simple. A maple does not leave maple syrup.

Tulip poplars tend to smear– pure McPhee. I devour it. Why? Why do I relish that sentence? It’s only five words – but what a delightful combination! Tulip poplars tend to smear– it chimes. There’s poetry in it. 

And how about this beauty:

This is not on one of my biking routes, but on solo rides I have been there, and returned there, inspired by curiosity and a longing for variety and, not least, the observation that in the thickets and copses and wild thorny roses on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence are golf balls—Big Bank golf balls, Big Pharma golf balls, C-level golf balls (C.E.O., C.O.O., C.F.O. golf balls), lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay.

That “in the thickets and copses and wild thorny bushes on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence” is wonderful. But what makes the construction a true McPhee is that inspired last bit – “lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay.” I’m willing to bet that, in all of literature, no writer has ever before combined “biking routes,” “solo rides,” “thickets and copses and wild thorny roses,” “Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence,” “golf balls,” “Big Pharma,” “abandoned,” “snorkeling in Caneel Bay” in one line. It’s a gorgeous, cabinet-of-wonders sentence, one among many, in this marvellous, memorable, light-hearted piece.