10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #6 John McPhee's "Season on the Chalk"

Photo by John Holloway, from John McPhee's "Season on the Chalk"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is John McPhee’s “Season on the Chalk” (March 12, 2007).

In this splendid piece, McPhee explores the geology and geography of the chalk-based landscape that extends from the downs and sea cliffs of southeast England to the Champagne country of northern France. It contains one of the most beautiful landscape descriptions in all of New Yorker writing. Before I get to it, I want to set the scene.

McPhee starts in Gravesend, England, and introduces his theme immediately:

The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and—from Erith Reach to Gravesend—under fifteen miles of the lower Thames. My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water. Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat—skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream. He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. Chalked graffiti line the revetment and have attracted the attention of Tommaso, who now starts his own with the letter “R.” Two of his grandsons, Tommaso and Leandro, are with him. 

Notice McPhee’s use of the present tense. Tomasso appears. The tide is out. Boats are at rest on the riverbed. Tomasso cracks the cobble. Everything is happening now. The immediacy of McPhee’s writing distinguishes it from the retrospective accounts of the previous four pieces in this series. I relish it.

“Season on the Chalk” unfolds in seven untitled segments. Segment 1 describes the chalk landscape of southern England – the town of Chalk (“with a thoroughfare called Chalk Road, a barber’s called Chalk Cuts, and a neighborhood called Chalk Park, where mobile homes have tile roofs”), the cliffs of Dover (“the chalk cliffs under their cap of vegetation are like the filling in a broken wafer, a cross-sectional exposure of the nation’s basement”), the North Downs, and the South Downs:

In billows of chalk, the Downs rise from the sea and go on rising northward to elevations approaching a thousand feet, culminating in the escarpment that plunges to the Weald. 

Segment 2 takes us to a vineyard in a small, deep South Downs valley, “countersunk in the highest chalk,” called Breaky Bottom. McPhee visits there with his friend Hal Doyne-Ditmas. McPhee writes, 

We descend, helically, and park under a horse chestnut near a flint wall, a house, a flint barn. We step into a scene of utter quiet. Call this the most peaceful place in Europe—willows over the flint garden wall, a line of poplars against the sky, cattle like brown pebbles far up the circumvallate grazings, fewer than few human inhabitants, proprietor nowhere in sight. He is in his kitchen, conferring with a buyer.

Notice the mention of flint. It’s a secondary theme of this piece. McPhee will have more to say about it in segment 6.  

The owner of the Breaky Bottom vineyard is Peter Hall. He gives McPhee and Doyne-Ditmas a tour of his flint barn where his fermentation tanks and wine press are located. They then adjourn to Hall’s kitchen and engage in some wine-tasting. McPhee writes, 

The kitchen in Breaky Bottom’s farmhouse trails modern kitchens by about a hundred years and is a hundred times as pleasant, with its apparatus in heavy black iron, its slanting window light, its glasses and bottles on the blue oilcloth of a large wooden table. Listening to Peter Hall, we sit and sip, appreciate, spit. A pitcher is in service as a glass spittoon. A 2003 still wine is “like sucking a lemon at half time,” we are told. “It’s refreshing, zestful.” A 1996 Müller-Thurgau is “elegantly shaped, like a Gewürztraminer, but it has backed off from there.” The main events are the champagnes (a term he doesn’t use). “This young ’03 is pretty zesty, sharp, punchy stuff.” This 1999 is “more rounded, bigger flavor—quite a drink. . . . I’m growing Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Seyval Blanc now principally with fizz in mind, to see what comes off this chalk.” Already, his production is “preponderantly fizzy,” and soon, he says, he might decide “to go a hundred per cent fizz.”

McPhee says, “For my part, I am not ejecting a whole lot of what I am sipping, and I am getting a little drunk.”

In segment 3, McPhee is on the French chalk. The transition is a beauty:

From Breaky Bottom out through Beachy Head, under the Channel, and up into Picardy, and on past Arras and Amiens, the chalk is continuous to Reims and Épernay. To drive the small roads and narrow lanes of Champagne is to drive the karstic downlands of Sussex and Surrey, the smoothly bold topography of Kentish chalk—the French ridges, long and soft, the mosaic fields and woodlots, the chalk boulders by the road in villages like Villeneuve-l’Archêveque. Here the French fieldstone is chalk, and the quarry stone—white drywalls, white barns, white churches. The chalk church of Orvilliers-Saint-Julien. The chalk around the sunflowers of Rigny-la-Nonneuse. The chalkstone walls at Marcilly-le-Hayer. Near Épernay, even the cattle are white; and vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

Oh, man! That is a gorgeous piece of writing. I love its specificity. I love its vividness. I love its rhythm. I love its use of sentence fragments. I love its use of place names. It’s an inspired prose poem! 

In this segment, McPhee drives the roads and lanes that connect the Champagne vineyards: “Up in the vineyards over Ay, a Sunday afternoon in steady rain, the green vines glisten, while water on the chalk roads runs like milk. Your car goes up to its hubcaps in milk.”

He visits the Église Abbatiale, in Hautvillers, where the Benedictine monk Pierre Pérignon is reputed to have invented champagne. But McPhee says no: 

He was a skilled blender, according to the geologist James E. Wilson’s “Terroir: The Role of Geology, Climate, and Culture in the Making of French Wines,” but, contrary to Pérignon’s worldwide reputation, he did not add to the wines the magic bits of sugar and yeast that enhance carbonation in the second fermentation and result in champagne as we know it and he did not.

McPhee also visits the extensive storage tunnels of Moët & Chandon: 

Dimly lighted passages reach so far into a mournful and brooding gloom that the eye is stopped not by rock but by darkness. Along the sides, as in a catacomb, are vaults, crypts—a seemingly endless series of crypts, typically six feet by sixteen feet, like one-fifth of your one-room apartment. The tight space notwithstanding, in each crypt lie some twenty thousand bottles of champagne.

Segment 4 is a brief essay on the geology of the massive chalk landscape – the English downlands and white sea cliffs, the bottom of the Channel, and the Champagne region – that McPhee is exploring. The key geologic period is the Cretaceous, which began a hundred and forty-five million years ago and lasted for eighty million years. “Cretaceous” derives from the chalk that formed during that period. McPhee writes,

The chalk it is named for developed during roughly half of Cretaceous time—temporally the more recent half, stratigraphically the upper half. The chalk is made of the calcareous remains of microscopic marine plants and animals that lived in the water column and sank after death—slower than riddled yeast—in epicontinental seas. The chalk accumulated at the rate of about one millimetre in a century, and the thickness got past three hundred metres in some thirty-five million years.

McPhee visits the heavily chalked city of Maastricht – chalk basilicas, chalk churches. Where was all that chalk quarried? Answer: just five miles up the River Maas, in Sint Pietersberg. McPhee travels there by boat:

The breeze is cool on the open deck, and the boat is soon running past saturated fields that resemble the fens of Cambridgeshire which are also on the chalk. Jet Skis circle the boat, and weave Olympic rings around slow-moving barges full of crushed cars. Other barges, carrying ores and grains, are everywhere on the river, as are private cabin boats, nosing around the barges like pretentious tugs.

In Sint Pietersberg, McPhee tours the Grotten Sint Pietersberg – a chalk quarry:

In a group, you follow a guide with two electric lanterns, suspended from bails like railroad lanterns. He hands one to the last guidee in line, then leads the way into darkness, cracking jokes in English. His name is Leon Frissen. He is short, stocky, balding, and friendly. You follow him down and down through a gallery system, and if you’ve ever been in a salt mine the place reminds you of a salt mine. The constant temperature is ten degrees Celsius and you shiver. Now you are about thirty-five metres below the surface. The gallery walls are seven metres high. The lantern light is the only light. It throws awkward, lurching shadows. Seeing me struggle to write notes, Frissen takes a flashlight out of his pocket and gives it to me. Rounding a corner, we look down a straight corridor into a mournful and infinite gloom. Frissen says the corridor goes on for several kilometres before the next bend. He says there are three hundred and fifty kilometres of galleries in and beyond the mountain, hewn, by blokbrekers, with three tools: chisel, hammer, and saw. The quarrying resumed in the thirteenth century and continued until 1926.

In segment 5, McPhee writes about the Cretaceous Extinction, in which some two-thirds of all species on earth perished. What happened? McPhee appears to subscribe to the “bad luck theory” – a bunch of natural events like continental drift, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and glaciation piling up at once. He concludes, “While the earth moves on toward the first mass extinction caused by a living species, debates about earlier ones are really unresolved.”

Segment 6 cuts back to the English Downs. McPhee and Doyne-Ditmas are atop the chalk cliffs of Sussex – “Cuckmere Haven to Beachy Head—the whitest in the Cretaceous Terrain, fairly glaring in the sun when there’s a sun. Eroded in a rhythm of reëntrants and promontories, they call to mind a row of clerestory windows. Almost straight down them—hundreds of feet—are waves.” 

McPhee reports that the cliffs of Sussex are being eroded at an average rate of about thirty-five centimetres a year. He observes that close up, “the chalk cliffs appear to be studded, almost like formal shirts, with uniform black dots.” Those dots are chunks of flint, McPhee says. He describes them:

The shingle beaches below the white cliffs consist almost entirely of flint cobbles the size of ostrich eggs. If you stand next to a chalk cliff and lift your head, you look up a wall spiky with projecting flints. When they fall, they sometimes break. A cracked-open surface, opaque and light to dark gray, is smooth and shines like glass. The old structures of half of Sussex, not to mention Surrey, seem to be made of flint—flint churches, flint terraces, flint houses reinforced with bricks at the corners, flint retaining walls bordering sunken lanes. Doyne-Ditmas seems especially fond of the big flint prison in Lewes, its flints, black and gray, “giving it a sort of piebald aspect.” In some flint construction, the nodules were left whole. More often, they were hammered open—cracked like walnuts—so that their flat glassy surfaces would shine. The process is known as knapping and the results are knapped flints. Some flints were knapped so painstakingly that their outer surfaces were not only flat but also rectangular. In building walls they seem to be obsidian bricks.

In segment 7, the final section of the piece, McPhee visits Charles Darwin’s Down House, on the North Downs. He writes,

If you drive here from, say, the north side of the Thames, you move very slowly from stoplight to stoplight through the heavy density of South London, scarcely a patch of green, and then, suddenly, you’re in Darwin’s Downe, on swelling land among pony carts and open fields, horses, jodhpurred women perched in saddles, knapped flints like oyster shells up the wall of a country teahouse called Evolution 1.

In Newton Stacey, he walks through fields down to where the River Dever meets the River Test. He writes,

Coot are swimming on the River Test, two swans and four cygnets on the Dever. Over the junction pool, an ash ripe with ash keys spreads its canopy across the two rivers. They are surprisingly narrow and intimate, not much more than brooks—the Test, the mother stream, scarcely three feet deep and thirty wide. Its bank, squared off and shored with planking, is level and closely mowed so that anglers can walk beside the water unimpeded, dry shod, with no thought of stepping in. It just isn’t done, stepping in. The air is full of damselflies, midges, mayflies, swifts, and swallows, the sandy chalky bottom thick with cress and water crowfoot. The angler is wise to creep along the footpath, or, at least, to tiptoe. One unwary step and a two-pound brown explodes from cover under the lip of the bank and vanishes upstream. You sit down on a bench and think it over. Arctic grayling, which have even higher standards of water quality than trout do, share this sacred water, as does Esox lucius—the piscivorous Devil, the savage Fiend, the pike—known to grow as large as one stone three consuming trout. The underwater water crowfoot grows so fast that the waterkeeper mows it like the grass. In his fish garden, beside the Dever, the waterkeeper’s shed roofs are thatched, a bull trout is memorialized that was “killed August 1934,” and drying at the tops of posts are the heads of four huge pike.

A vivid ending to a wonderful trip. I enjoyed it immensely.