Why "The Pine Barrens" is New Jersey's One Book

Stuart Mitchner

John McPhee's The Pine Barrens is an excellent One Book New Jersey choice. From now through April readers all over the state will be vicariously exploring what the New Jersey Library Association's special bookmark calls "the largest essentially untouched wilderness east of the Mississipi."

I have only one criticism, which I will dismiss even as I state it. I sometimes wished for a map. Of course "map" and "wilderness" are a contradiction in terms. The beauty of the Pine Barrens as McPhee presents it is that it resists the very notion of a map and not merely because it's a wilderness.

In fact, it's something greater than a wilderness. To make a map showing all the places referred to in the text would require some special typeface or symbol for those sites and settlements that have come and gone. As you read the last chapter you realize that the beauty of the Pine Barrens is that it resists everything.

Set acres and acres of it on fire and two months later it's "a forest panoply of summer green." All attempts to speculate on or exploit its potential for submitting to civilization (like Huck Finn, it refuses to be "civilized") have come to nothing. Readers will find themselves hoping this will always be the case. No wonder the author calls the last chapter "Vision." Terms like "vision," "wonder," and "mystery" flourish in a place and a subject that transcends even so large a word as "wilderness."

Some of the pleasure to be found in this early work of a master of non-fiction prose comes from observing a young writer discovering a subject of these dimensions. In spite of having written three books in three years by 1968, the author still felt it necessary to acknowledge that the contents "were developed with the editorial counsel" of his editors at The New Yorker. Like most of his writing, The Pine Barrens was first presented to readers in the pages of that magazine, where Truman Capote had introduced his so-called "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood a few years earlier. At that time the New Yorker seemed to disdain anything like the brilliant but wildly personal pieces Norman Mailer was writing for Esquire, or the prose pyrotechnics of a Tom Wolfe. Like Capote, both these writers were attracting a great deal more attention at the time than McPhee. Both were, in the parlance of the sixties, "happening" because both were discovering novel ways to express the dynamics of the period.

Readers of The Pine Barrens will find themselves feeling a long way from the sixties. In addition to the scope and depth of its subject, what makes it a wise choice for One Book New Jersey is the prose, which often achieves the timeless quality of the nature writing of Henry David Thoreau. John McPhee was surely not unaware of the author of Cape Cod and The Maine Woods as he staked out his own territory.

After beginning with a literal overview of his subject from a fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill, Mr. McPhee simply drives into the landscape, finds a house that looks interesting, and walks inside to ask the owner if he might have some water from the pump in front. The author's persona is that of a quiet, companionable visitor/narrator who will not (to borrow a phrase that has been in the news from England lately) "sex up" his account. Tom Wolfe would have done an exclamatory song and dance about the eight old cars in front of Fred Brown's place. Mr. McPhee, however, keeps his muse at arm's length until he finds an analogy that seems native to the environment; after referring to the one "working vehicle," he writes that each of the seven others had at one time or another been Fred Brown's "best car," and "each, in turn, had lain down like a sick animal and had died right there in the yard."

Keep in mind what Mr. McPhee's original motive in visiting Fred Brown was. By the time he actually gets to the pump and drinks some Pine Barrens water, he has set the scene and taken us in so neatly that, after drinking from the well and telling us that the "water of the Pine Barrens" is "soft and pure," he can get away with spending the next five pages telling us in semi-scholarly detail why the Pine Barrens ranks (or did then) as "one of the greatest natural recharging areas in the world" containing water enough to easily supply all New York City with plenty held in reserve. This is the chemistry of McPhee: to develop that simple request for water into a fountain of information.

One of the lessons implicit in The Pine Barrens is that of selection. No doubt the author had material enough to make a much bigger book. A reviewer has to be selective, as well, so, I will mention only a few special pleasures. For instance, the description of a tree frog that one stalks by following the sound they make, which is not easy because they are "ventriloquists ... worth seeing, for their skins are a brilliant green, trimmed with white, and they have lavender stripes down the sides of their legs. They look like state troopers." That McPhee is so sparing of analogies makes you appreciate them when they come, especially when he pulls off so implausible a match as that one. In the same way, because he is careful not to overuse his store of "quaint and curious" data, you can enjoy the way he mentions in passing that the town of Berlin was originally named Long-a-Coming, or that in Leektown five of the six houses are occupied by people named Leek, or that shiploads of holly, laurel, mistletoe, and ground pine are still sent from the Pine Barrens to New York City every year to be sold as Christmas decorations.

Readers will come away from John McPhee's book thinking how much more there is to this state than the still-ridiculed stereotype, especially now that record fans and television viewers all over the world also know New Jersey as the habitat of Bruce Springsteen and Tony Soprano. Springsteen's born-to-run America is a short drive from the mapless landscape of the Pine Barrens. In fact, the Boss could write a song about Fred Brown's friend Bill who gets busted for speeding in his pick-up truck, spends 70 days in jail, sells his truck and catches a Greyhound for the pinelands of Georgia, where he becomes so lonely, he takes another Greyhound back to New Jersey ("I was never so glad to see anything as these woods").

As for The Sopranos, among the most memorable episodes is the one where two of the mob "captains," Paulie and Christopher, drive down to the Pine Barrens from the north with a body to dispose of and proceed to get lost there. Maybe they were reading McPhee ("From a gang land point of view, it makes more sense to put a body in the Pine Barrens than in the Hudson River"). Like so many of the show's situations, it's one you don't have to be in the mob to have experienced. The fact that the dead man wasn't dead after all and has escaped and is on the loose out there becomes a minor issue next to being cold and lost and hungry in the wilds of New Jersey.

Quite a state we live in.