Marking the day: McPhee

 John McPhee, who turns 91 today, is an extraordinary writer.

If you are a writer, you ought to look at Draft No. 4. McPhee taught a writing course at Princeton. This book is the gist of it.

McPhee made a career writing nonfiction. I think fact is stranger than fiction. Take, for example, the jug taverns in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

Most people do not know that there is 650,000-acre area, about the size of Grand Canyon National Park, in New Jersey that acts as an aquifer for New York. It’s pine and sand, and the water is trapped in sand lenses above layers of clay. The characters who live there remind me of the characters I knew in East Texas. Those who live in the barrens do so because they want to be left alone.

Among the cultural features of the place were jug taverns. Here’s McPhee, taking a tour of a site with a local character named Fred Brown. Brown is doing the talking.

That hole in the ground was the cellar of an old jug tavern. That cellar was where they kept the jugs. There was a town here called Mount. That tavern is where my grandpop got drunk the last time he got drunk in his life. Grandmother went up to get him. When she came in, he said, ‘Mary, what are you doing here?” He was so ashamed to see her there — and his daughter with her. He left a jug of whiskey right on the table, and his wife took one of his hands and his daughter the other and they led him out of there and past Washington Field and home to Jenkins Neck. He lived 50 years. He lived 50 years, and growed cranberries. He lived 59 years more, and he was never drunk again. 

I’ve heard similar stories about abandoned watering holes in the woods of East Texas. Maybe that’s why I love McPhee. When I read his account of New Jersey, I feel as if I’d been there.

Source: John McPhee, The Pine Barrens; New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981, p. 20.