The Pine Barrens by John McPhee

The Pine Barrens Reviews

• 
  Tony

  When I drive to the New Jersey shore points as I did this past week - and for the last six years and many others previously - I have to make a right turn, though not a hard right turn, around Philadelphia and then follow a choice of roadways south to the beach of my choice. Regardless of my choice of road, I will travel fifty or so miles with nothing but trees on either side of the road. Pines mostly. And thick enough to prevent seeing beyond. Oh, there are exits, and you'd think you might see the occasional outpost, but you'd be wrong. I did spot a good-sized farmer's field on the way back, but it just seemed incongruous.
  
  And I've wondered about that all these years. Just car-steps away from some of the most densely populated pockets in America, and just trees. Yet, they form a curtain.
  
  I was more curious this year, but the trailheads were only in my mind. If I could only park the car, head west through the first pines, and on. Or maybe there's a book . . .
  
  ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
  
  So this year I took John McPhee with me, who did venture through those pines quite a few years ago:
  
  -- It's sandy soil, not good for agriculture. Folks have been trying for centuries but you have to ship the dirt in to be a right farmer. Which at least originally is the reason that the barrens have not been developed.
  
  -- It's good for cranberry bogs, though, and blueberries. More about the latter later.
  
  -- Because of that soil, the land holds a very pure water. Always has. Sea captains, back in the day, used to take the Pines' water, called cedar water, on long voyages because that water would remain sweet and potable longer.
  
  -- There are forest fires in the Pines Barrens. And fairly widespread ones. The type of pines there - pygmy pines - are quick to sprout anew. As are the abundant blueberry bushes. Indeed, the blueberry bushes do better after a burn. And so, although there is the occasional act of nature and the sometimes careless human act, the vast majority of wildfires in the Pine Barrens are arson, intentionally set by blueberry pickers.
  
  -- Tories fled to the Pine Barrens during the American Revolution, as did Quakers who were insufficiently Quakerly. Current last names reflect this.
  
  -- The first Indian reservation was in the Pines. It didn't last, but not (this time) because they were forced out.
  
  -- Marriages were pretty casual in the pines late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. For lawful weddings, people had to travel beyond the woods, to a place like Mt. Holly. Many went to "squires," who performed weddings for a fee of one dollar. No questions were asked, even if the squires recognized the brides and the grooms as people they had married to other people a week or a month before.
  
  -- Applejack is the laureate liquid of the pines. It is known as jack, and its effects are known as apple palsy.
  
  -- "Collier" is a fairly common last name here. I didn't know it meant "charcoal-maker." I do now.
  
  -- Whenever Fred Brown referred to a man's wife-including on one occasion, the wife of the President of the United States-he said "his woman." Fred says "spagnum" for sphagnum," "braken" for "bracken," and "fastly" for "quickly," and when he was telling me that he had never flown in a plane he said, "I could have flewn lots of times, but I never cared to."
  
  -- A woman named Elizabeth Kite wrote a paper about some inbred idiots she found in her research in the Pines. And there were genuine specimens. Superficial readers took that to mean that the incest and the resultant genetics were prevalent. They were not, yet the notion persisted.
  
  ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
  
  I read this book after getting to my beach spot. No one else seemed interested, although I offered a few pine combs. Perhaps there was nothing to disapprove, so why bother. That said, it was a much more interesting drive back through the Pines than it was coming down.
  
  I stopped long enough before writing this to check on some things since the book was written, after all, in 1967. But from the highway things seemed the same. And what I've learned since is that the Pines have been designated as a protected reserve by both the United States and the United Nations. 1.1 million acres. Which, I have to tell you, is a lot of blueberries.
• 
  HBalikov

  "As the last of the iron furnaces gradually blew out and the substitute industries failed, people either left the pines or began to lead self-sufficient backwoods lives, and while the rest of the State of New Jersey developed toward its twentieth-century aspect, the Pine Barrens all but returned to their pre-Colonial desolation, becoming, as they have remained, a distinct and separate world."
  
  McPhee wrote those words over 50 years ago, yet this substantial portion his New Jersey has stayed this “barren” in many ways and, thus, McPhee’s book still resonates. When people think of the United States and remote, isolated living they think of nooks and crannies of the Appalachian Mountains or of the solitary Idaho valleys or of portions of Alaska; not somewhere an hour or two from Philadelphia or New York City.
  
  McPhee has an affinity for geography and geology but that only augments his affinity for people. And it is the people that he chronicles and interacts with that takes this book to a higher level.
  
  And what is this book? I prefer to think of it as an ode to a particular geography and a chronicle of the kind of personality traits that allow a person of the 21st century to enjoy, and remain in a place so little changed. Yet, with respect to those who are “of the Pine Barrens,” he notes: "I have met Pine Barrens people who have, at one time or another, moved to other parts of the country. Most of them tried other lives for a while, only to return unreluctantly to the pines. One of them explained to me, “It’s a privilege to live in these woods.”"
  
  McPhee makes us aware on many levels as to why this area should continue to be treated as a national treasure. Though I want to dig further into the changes that have taken place since he published this book, I have no trouble giving him high marks for it.
• 
  Graychin

  The New Jersey Turnpike is not a highway. It’s a sleight of hand, a confidence trick. I drove it for the first time this past summer on a family vacation. In our rented car we entered the Turnpike at the Delaware River near Wilmington and followed it up the length of the state until we passed under the Hudson, by way of the Lincoln Tunnel, into Manhattan.
  
  The swindle of the Turnpike is that it leads you through the middle of New Jersey while denying you any evidence that New Jersey exists. You do not see it: no towns, no countryside. Trees and shrubs hem you in completely. When you want to stop for gas or lunch, you are channeled into service centers immediately alongside the highway. There are, I think, fewer than a dozen exits in more than one hundred miles of road. The point is to move you as efficiently as possible out of the state.
  
  Forbidden any real acquaintance with the place, I drove through the New Jersey of my imagination, humming Bruce Springsteen’s “State Trooper.” Somewhere to the left, in the direction of Philadelphia, one of my ancestors had settled, a yeoman farmer of the colonial period. Somewhere ahead was Princeton, where my brother had attended graduate school twenty years ago. Off to the right for mile after mile, vast and dim in my reverie, were the Pine Barrens.
  
  The name sounds like a doom, a place of exile. The Pine Barrens are a broad elevated tract of sparsely settled land, poor in soil, thick with woods, drained by slow molasses-colored rivers with strange names like Batsto and Mullica. In John McPhee’s telling it is a place of social isolation, ghost towns swallowed in undergrowth, dead industries, real-estate bubbles, anomalies of flora and geology, mafia murders, moonshiners, cranberry bogs, and mythological creatures like the Jersey Devil.
  
  When McPhee published his book in 1967, a new round of development was planned in the Pine Barrens, including an international air hub and a modern city of a quarter million people. A spur of the Turnpike was proposed that would have cut through the Pine Barrens from approximately Trenton to Atlantic City. Like the grandiose ambitions of planning committees in earlier generations, none of these has materialized, which I find gratifying.
  
  Himself a native of New Jersey, John McPhee found perfect subject matter in the Pine Barrens: a bit of wilderness, with a history and culture all its own, in the middle of the country’s most densely populated state. He does it justice. How much better it is to ride along with McPhee and his companions through the labyrinthine sand roads of the Pine Barrens than to find oneself dozing off, in need of coffee, on the featureless Turnpike of the mind.
• 
  sdw

  I lived in New Jersey for over a year without anyone mentioning this book. Although I had a long history with Encounters with the Archdruid I was somehow unaware that McPhee had written The Pine Barrens. This book about the Pine Barrens of New Jersey (written in 1967) examines the people and well as the forest. It is a portrait of a community within a diverse pine forest. He explains a history of prejudice against the inhabitants and shows the depth of dignity of a people countering any image of degeneracy. He mingles natural history with industrial history. He incorporates folk history with political history. The Pine Barrens shows that to write the story of a place is to write a story of the past as much as the present and the people as much as the ecology. On a side note, I had no idea that more blueberries were grown in New Jersey than in Michigan (at least in 1967). Also, in the chapter “Fire in the Pines,” McPhee mentions the glacier that stopped in Morristown (the edge of Drew University, actually) that I learned about from Drew’s geologist. I look forward to taking my students to the Pine Barrens next month, after we have read McPhee’s book.
• 
  Sarah

  Somewhere between 3-3.5
  
  I'll be honest, I was mostly attracted to this one by a) the pretty cover of the Daunt edition and b) that it brought to mind that
  classic Sopranos episode (which incidentally also includes one of the
  best lines in the show).
  
  But ugh I don't know. Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on McPhee: I thought
  The Patch was fantastic, and I even read a whole book about oranges (aptly titled
  Oranges) because he's so good at what he does. This was by no means bad, but some essays interested and engaged me much more than others. Interestingly - probably only just to me! - for someone who always preferred physical geography over human geography at school the ones about the people of the Pine Barrens were much more engaging and memorable than the ones about the local flora and fauna.
  
  Perhaps it just comes down to not being in quite the right mood when I picked this up. I'll still give his other work a try (maybe
  Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process is more up my street).
• 
  Michael Canoeist

  What fantastic fun! To think such a strange place as the Pine Barrens lies just 30-50 miles from Philadelphia and New York City. That we have canoed and orienteered through various parts of the Pine Barrens lent an extra level of pleasure to reading this, but it is still a quirky, fascinating piece of nonfiction that played a big part in catapulting author John McPhee into fame and fortune. Curious characters living alternative kinds of lives carefully and intentionally avoiding the ever-suburbanizing America give this a refreshing feeling of freedom. The Pinelands comprise a big chunk of New Jersey, but very few know much about them. You can see the pines from the Atlantic City Expressway, but no one on that road is stopping there, believe me! With the two major highways, Turnpike and Parkway, passing by on either side of the Pinelands, even those traveling through New Jersey have no idea what lies under those thousands and thousands of acres of pine trees. This short book tells you and charms you.
• 
  Peter Landau

  Every region has its weirdos. Upstate New York could be the setting for a remake of DELIVERANCE. But, as usual, New Jersey beats them all. THE PINE BARRENS by John McPhee notes the anomaly of a vast wilderness stuck between the megacities of the Eastern Seaboard, inhabited by the mysterious backwoods Pineys and thick with legions. But this in New Jersey, a state where anything is possible. I learned about the Pine Barrens when I dated a girl from Atlantic City and the cheap casino bus that ferried me to her would cut through the endless woods. She was the one who first told me about the Jersey Devil, who is given a couple of pages here, but that's not even the weirdest thing about this geographic and sociological wonderland. Beneath its sandy soil is one of the largest fresh water reserves in the world, the Mexican Lindbergh crashed and died there, but like most dark forests it conjures visions. It continues to play in the imagination, at least mine, and McPhee’s.
• 
  Bud Smith

  I read things about New Jersey all the time written by idiots. John McPhee knows what’s up. I grew up on the edge of the pine barrens, this book rings true.
• 
  Doug

  It is rare that I would pick up a nonfiction book from 1968 and read it. But this book is a quick 155 pages and while there is valuable information on history and botany and geography, the real life characters who populate the book are what drives it and makes it valuable fifty years later. In addition to bringing to life local legends like Carranza, the ghost stories and yes, even the Jersey Devil are great fictional (or are they?) diversions. I taught high school on the eastern and western edges of the pine barrens and finished my career deep in the pine lands, so the family names are familiar. The great John Mathis is discussed in the first chapter and my family descended from his. If you have driven through the sweet smell of the pines to get to your favorite beach you have passed through the lands where rogues have smuggled goods from pirate ships through the Mullica and up hidden roads. It’s all here in this fantastic book.
• 
  Claire

  3.5
• 
  Dave

  Lovely picture of a part of New Jersey I never knew anything about (and which, I’m glad to see, is mostly still there, 50 years later). McPhee describes the unpainted nature of the people and the land without caricature. Simpler than some of his books, but welcoming in its simplicity.
• 
  Lindsay

  What a great book. I enjoyed it much more than, say, Desert Solitaire -- not sure if that's because I am from the area or because McPhee's writing is engaging and the stories are unusual and interesting. Probably a little bit of both. I also love the way this "man out in the wilderness" book subverts the ego. This book is really not at all about McPhee or his experience...he dedicates himself to listening, and I think that technique works much better for the genre than Thoreau-esque self-centered ravings.
  
  The context of the book (published in 1968 or 69), before the Pine Barrens National Reserve in the late 1970s, is a little bit outdated, but it's interesting to see the kinds of ecological concerns for those who lived in the Pine Barrens at that time. Now, the forests are more protected fro industrialization -- although still at risk in new ways. I wonder how influential this book was in raising awareness about the Pines?
  
  I visited Batsto recently, and I was really hurt to find that they don't even carry this book in the gift shop. What a shame.
  
  A great find. In the future, I am sure this book will be entirely important to my work as a writer.
• 
  Carin

  I had meant to read this book while I lived in New Jersey but better just a year later than never.
  
  It turns out an enormous part of the Southern half of the state is this huge titular pine barrens. While the vast majority of the state is heavily populated and fairly industrial, there is a mostly unknown and unrecognized wilderness filled with pine trees, some kooky locals, and forest fires. As usual, McPhee is a delight in his open wonder at nature, and also his acceptance and lack of judgment when it comes to the locals.
  
  I did worry a bit about reading a book published in 1968 if I was reading about an area that doesn't even exist anymore (it does although it might be a touch smaller). And instead of it feeling out of date, I felt like I somehow knew the future (no, supersonic jets won't be the only way we fly! In fact, we'll pretty much get rid of them! And we certainly won't blast a supersonic jet airport bigger then LaGuardia, Kennedy, and Newark put together in the middle of the pine barrens.)
  
  As always with a McPhee, the book was quiet and relaxing and makes me feel I understand the world better.
• 
  Derek

  I’m which I learned that New Jersey isn’t all suburb.
• 
  Sarah Paolantonio

  I discovered John McPhee long before I started reading his books. His book on Alaska, 'Coming Into The Country', from the 1970s was my first. Born and raised in South Jersey, this book had to be my second. It's a brief snap of 150 pages and there is a lot to learn about the lands, its ecosystems, the folks who live there, and who have studied it. It made me want to drive by and through them (I have once long ago and just remember fields of trees). It's fun to learn where The Jersey Devil got its origins from, especially as a kid who grew up with those rumors--essentially the Bigfoot of NJ--and how big cranberries are there (for the most part it's all blueberries, but McPhee discusses berries all around!). I wonder how much of the ecosystem has changed over the years. This book was published in 1967 and a lot has burned down, flooded, and dried up since then. Either way: a great study in focused, sharp writing. More list and informational than narrative. 'Coming Into The Country' would come out a decade later and is about five times the length (Alaska is, after all, so big it spans the space from FL to NY) but I can feel McPhee working out some ideas, or so I tell myself I can. Recommended for anyone native to NJ or anyone interested in ecological writing.
• 
  Fred

  John McPhee has given us a delightful series of essays about the beauty, history and unique world of the NJ Pine Barrens. As a life-long NJ resident, and having spent the summer of '84 living in the land of sandy soil and cedar lakes, I loved this book. It did a good job of explaining the changing and unchanging life of the Pines over the last 150 years, dispelling myths while still retaining the wonder of this one of a kind forest. I only wish it were updated. It was originally written in 1969 and, while the Pine Barrens are pretty timeless, I am sure a few things have changed. Fortunately some of John McPhee worst fears of expansive development have not come to pass in the last 50 years.
• 
  Anna Smithhhhhhh

  This is the best book I have read in a while. I loved learning about the ecology of the NJ pine barrens as well as the people that inhabit them (or at least inhabited them in the 1960s) as well as the folklore! Fred and bill, as well as the more transient "characters" in the book, are brilliantly described. The author is a wonderful, insightful writer. I would recommend this to everyone! It's very heartwarming but also realistic and eye opening about issues surrounding the pine barrens. It has definitely helped me understand the value of the pine barrens.
• 
  Sharon Rose

  I liked this a lot—it was a quick easy read, and as someone who has lived on the edge of the Pine Barrens almost my entire life, it was cool to see a little deeper into this mysterious world. I’ll need to see if any more recent books have been written and see how things have changed in the past fifty years since this book was written.
• 
  Pat

  A lot of people know about the Pine Barrens from Season 3, Episode 11 of the Sopranos titled "Pine Barrens" in which Christopher and Pauly bring who they think to be a dead man out to the woods to bury. The man is actually still alive, eventually escapes, and Christoper and Pauly are left lost in the woods. It is a kind of dark comedic relief episode for the whole series. Yet it is one most well received pieces of television. Anyway, the episode isn't even filmed in the Pine Barrens. It is filmed in Harriman State Park, NY. The two locations look nothing alike! All this to say that the Pine Barrens is a misunderstood place. But to me, it is an amazing part of NJ and this book does them a great justice. The author goes beyond the natural environment and delves into the historical and social issues of the Pines. Great read. Loved it.
• 
  John Brouwer

  I've never thought anything good about New Jersey until now. And now I wouldn't mind going to visit.
• 
  Don S

  Moderately interesting only because I grew up near the pine barrens.
• 
  Cora

  i love John McPhee. never thought there was anything of much interest to me in new jersey. boy was i wrong!
• 
  Jamie Zaccaria

  A great natural history read about a region I love.
• 
  Lgordo

  Delightful read. Went down like a fluffy sponge cake covered in whipped cream, but was more than fluff. Almost every page had something I wanted to look into further. This may be because I'm driving distance to the Pine Barrens; for those who aren't, it's still a lovingly honest social history of a mostly unknown place in America.