The Pine Barrens

On a road map of New Jersey, the dense web of highways connecting New York City to Philadelphia -- and each to its hundreds of suburbs -- grows thin in the southeast; a satellite photograph of the area shows the grey of houses and sidewalks and roads giving way to the green of an enormous forest.  This is the New Jersey Pinelands, the strange and magical country of John McPhee’s 1967 masterpiece, The Pine Barrens.

            “The Pine Barrens are so close to New York that on a very clear night a bright light in the pines would be visible from the Empire State Building.”   Despite their proximity to the great cities of the East Coast, the Pinelands and their people – familiarly and sometimes disdainfully called “pineys” – were known to outsiders during the first half of the twentieth century only from scandalized reports of supposed inbreeding, mental weakness, and criminality set in a dark and primordial landscape.  Mobsters were rumored to visit the pines to dispose of bodies, but tourists were rare.  At the time the book was written, the pineys and the Pine Barrens had been by and large forgotten, and plans were being made to destroy the wilderness in favor of a model city and a super-sonic jet port.           

McPhee has a talent for exploring topics you don’t even realize you don’t know about -- like dirigibles and Alaskan bush pilots and the United States Merchant Marine – with such authority that the resulting books seem indispensable.  The Pine Barrens is no exception.  It is a concise attempt to document a world before it vanishes under the steamrollers of progress.  In nine chapters, McPhee introduces the geology and biology of the region, its people and their traditions, its history and the specter of its future destruction.  Throughout it all, the writing is so magisterial and flows so smoothly that reading about orchids that only grow on quaking bogs of sphagnum moss seems as natural as listening to any good story, and the thought of their imminent annihilation leaves you pained.

The thrill of reading McPhee is the thrill of realizing the possibility that adventure remains in the world.  He seeks out what is near but unknown, what hides in plain sight.  Without leaving the map or even venturing far from what he calls the “developing megalopolis” that stretches along the Atlantic coast from Boston to Richmond, he shows us that it is possible to find a separate and secluded kingdom, a place where fallen cedar needles dye the streams the color of strong tea, where the Devil might appear for fiddle and dance contests, where people still tell stories of the Italian prince who was born in the pines and the Mexican aviator who died there.  McPhee combines a worshipful attention to sensory detail with a deep understanding of the region.  With his help, we are like people standing among the dwarf pines that grow in one section of the Pinelands, only four or five feet tall: we are able to see far off, as though raised high above the ground, yet we can simultaneously contemplate every particular of the treetops, usually too high to see but now right at eyelevel, possessed of a beauty which had always been with us but which we had not noticed.

Happily, the dwarf pines and the orchids and the quaking bogs remain.  The Pine Barrens, an unlikely national best seller, raised a furor; a state environmental commission was shortly formed to consider the issue.  Largely due to McPhee’s carefully observed, lovingly crafted depiction, the state and federal governments did exactly as his final chapter had predicted they would not, cooperating in 1978 to declare the Pinelands National Reserve, a designation that both protects the land and allows the pineys to live on it.  Thanks to McPhee, it is still possible, almost forty years after the book’s publication, to slip the bonds of city life, to ease a canoe into a cedar-shaded river, and to glide downstream, over the same water sea captains once prized for its ability to stay sweet even on their longest voyages.