What do oranges, deep time, and the Swiss Army have in common? Very little, I would think, except John McPhee, who has written about all of them, along with Wimbledon, family doctors, and nuclear physics. A nonfiction generalist of extraordinarily wide-ranging taste, there seems to be little that McPhee hasn’t covered, or at least contemplated, during his decades-long career (he turns 95 this year) producing stories for The New Yorker, which were then repackaged into several dozen books by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Still, there is at least one area McPhee has returned to multiple times in his work: the nature and fate of American wilderness. Several of his most popular books recount adventures off the beaten track (near Glacier Peak in Washington, through the North Woods of Maine, down the Salmon River in Alaska) and follow characters who are trying to eke out an existence in the kind of untamed places (the Pine Barrens of New Jersey) that most readers might drive past, preferring the comforts of civilization. Four of these books—The Pine Barrens (1968), Encounters With the Archdruid (1971), The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975), and what is arguably McPhee’s masterpiece, Coming Into the Country (1977)—have just been collected by the Library of America in a single volume with the fitting title John McPhee: Encounters in Wild America.
McPhee has rejected the label of “environmental writer.” He once told The Paris Review: “I’m a writer who writes about real people in real places. End of story.” But this canonizing collection shows him as a significant contributor to the environmental literature that has piled up since the modern environmental movement began in the 1960s.
The dominant tone of such writing is elegiac. Something vital has been lost, is still being lost, in a terminal process of impoverishment, and we’re urged to wake up and act before it’s too late. This tone is certainly present in McPhee’s “wild America” books, in which people he speaks with make grim prognostications about a blighted future “fifty or more years hence”—meaning now—as dams and jetports threaten to efface entire landscapes. McPhee went to the Pine Barrens, he wrote, “because I found it hard to believe that so much unbroken forest could still exist so near the big Eastern cities, and I wanted to see it while it was still there.” As it happened, the supersonic jetport planned for that location never materialized. There was no such twist of fate for Alaska: As a reader today, it is impossible to go through the three sections of Coming Into the Country, originally published as a book in 1977, without fixating on references to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The pipeline only started pumping oil from Prudhoe Bay to the Valdez Marine Terminal that same year (on June 20, 1977), meaning McPhee’s book is a final dispatch from a place that was about to irrevocably change.
Coming Into the Country and its companion volumes stand as environmental history, offering insight into how we’ve come to inherit our patchwork of faltering ecosystems. But his books hold up as more than just history, because they illuminate underlying attitudes that remain prevalent and politically influential today. With remarkable clarity, McPhee shows us how “wild America” is contested territory—the subject of an ongoing and possibly unsolvable disagreement. What even is the wilderness? What is it good for? These questions have never been more fraught than they are right now.
McPhee has often attributed his own interest in wild places to childhood summers spent at Keewaydin, a canoe-tripping camp in Salisbury, Vermont. He started going there in 1937 at the age of 6, “and to this day,” he wrote in an essay more than 60 years later, “I do not feel complete or safe unless I am surrounded by the protective shape of a canoe.” Keewaydin sparked a lifelong appreciation for fishing and backcountry river journeys. (McPhee is less keen on hiking, though he has done his fair share of that too.) He quotes Thoreau in his books—another avid canoer—and has confessed to admiring Edward Abbey’s feral classic Desert Solitaire “very much.” In Coming Into the Country, McPhee explains to a woman that he likes “places that are wild” and has been “quickened all my days just by the sound of the word.”
Here, for example, is McPhee reflecting on a region of Arctic Alaska, in what is now the Kobuk Valley National Park:
What had struck me most in the isolation of this wilderness was an abiding sense of paradox. In its raw, convincing emphasis on the irrelevance of the visitor, it was forcefully, importantly repellent. It was no less strongly attractive—with a beauty of nowhere else, composed in turning circles. If the wild land was indifferent, it gave a sense of difference. If at moments it was frightening, requiring an effort to put down the conflagrationary imagination, it also augmented the touch of life. This was not a dare with nature. This was nature.
If there’s a better description of the ambivalence that wild places can invoke—the fluttering feelings of repulsion and attraction, fear, exhilaration, even awe—I’m yet to read it anywhere. Whether McPhee intended to or not, he earned a place alongside the likes of Rachel Carson, Peter Matthiessen, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez, writers who, in scrutinizing our relationship with the natural world, have helped us to better understand ourselves.
Despite his affinity for nature, he is committed to journalistic objectivity. He might have a personal “bias,” he told The Paris Review, in favor of the environmental movement, but as a reporter he aspires to be scrupulously impartial. This means holding his opinions close to his chest (except in rare asides about, say, lazy tourists who dare to use a float plane to breach the Maine woods with aluminum canoes), and it also means “struggling to present both sides.”
Those “sides” are rendered with notable vividness in McPhee’s books. On the one side are people who are variously categorized, either by McPhee himself or by the characters he speaks with, as conservationists, ecocentrics, ecophiles, and “druids.” They love nature as it is, advocate for the listing of more protected land under the Wilderness Act, and say things like: “We’re going to have to live in close harmony with the Earth. There’s a lot we don’t know. We need places where we can learn how.” That judgment is uttered in Coming Into the Country by John Kaufmann, a National Parks Service planner with a passion for wilderness (and McPhee’s good friend). Another outspoken representative is David Brower, first executive director of the Sierra Club. McPhee describes Brower as “the sacramentarian of ecologia americana,” and he is the titular figure in Encounters With the Archdruid.
On the other side, then, is the Bureau of Reclamation, planning new dams along the Colorado River. And the Kennecott Copper Corporation, patenting claims in the Cascades. And any other business interest led by “the drill and the bulldozer.” The people on this side speak a language of economic utility and resource extraction. They say things like: “You can’t avoid change. You can direct it, but you can’t avoid it.” Some of them affirm to McPhee that it is they who are the real conservationists, with conservation, in their understanding, based on the concept of “maximum use.” A memorable representative would be the developer who accompanies McPhee on a tour through the Pine Barrens, fantasizing a central business district to replace all the trees. “I hope I don’t start to cry,” he says. “This is a planner’s dream.”
This might seem like an obvious binary, even a crude one. But McPhee is too skilled a writer to reduce anyone to stereotypes. No perspective is presented as unreservedly right or irredeemably wrong. There is not even really a split into two clear sides: It is more like a spectrum. The final part of Coming Into the Country profiles off-grid homesteaders near the outpost of Eagle, Alaska. While many of these loners want the wild to be left wild—it is why they moved there in the first place: “I get so high being out in the woods it is like doing acid,” one man says—they also want a kind of libertarian freedom to mine, trap, and build private dwellings as they see fit.
Coming Into the Country is a
compendium of conversations and arguments about wilderness. In Encounters With the Archdruid, this discourse is baked into the book’s structure: The three sections show David Brower sparring, in turn, with a mineral engineer,
a property developer, and a cattle rancher who also happens to be the commissioner of reclamation. These sparring matches take place against a
backdrop of wild landscapes, and they concern a potential mine site, a real
estate plan for an untrammeled island off Georgia, and one of those dams slated
for the Colorado. As McPhee makes clear, though, what is being discussed each
time is the same fundamental conflict. Every argument in any of his nature
books is, at heart, an argument over opposing worldviews. Should the wild be
left intact, both as a safety net for us and as an inviolable birthright for
future generations? Or is every corner of the country a valid source of materials,
to be harvested or extracted for potential gain right now?
We live in a moment of overwhelming noise. The Trump administration operates with a strategy of flooding the zone. A proposal for sulfide-ore copper mining in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota. Plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. A rollback, by the (ironically named) Environmental Protection Agency, of the landmark “endangerment finding,” which had concluded greenhouse gases pose a serious threat and require federal regulation. It can be difficult to focus on any one thing. But to read McPhee is to be reminded of the bigger picture. What is happening in all these cases, and countless more at the moment, is an aggressive assertion of one extreme interpretation of wilderness—the wild as a bonanza of resources up for grabs—over all others.
There is another way in which McPhee’s books hold up too, and it has to do with style. A great deal has been written over the years about the “extreme lucidity,” as Robert Macfarlane once put it, of McPhee’s sentences, his spare and unshowy use of language: “The lake is smooth. The far shore is indistinct in rising mist.” He is celebrated for his story structure, known for producing narratives that loop around on themselves in unexpected ways. He is also obsessed with detail. So many details. It is not uncommon for McPhee to spend hundreds of words analyzing the behavior of the loon, for instance, or thousands of words—page after page—on the involved process of constructing bark canoes from scratch. “He carves their thwarts from hardwood and their ribs from cedar. He sews them and lashes them with the split roots of white pine. There are no nails, screws, or rivets keeping his canoes together ...” And so on.
To a modern audience with ever-diminishing attention spans, there is something almost radical about McPhee’s level of detail. His pace is deliberate, unhurried. His patience is inexhaustible as he artfully arranges his collection of facts. I recognize how a reader might find the writing dull in parts, even boring; and yet I find it very moving.
One of the roles of a writer is to pay close attention to the world. In doing so, a writer sees patterns that others might otherwise miss. McPhee’s attention is so close that it borders on devotional. Nothing escapes his notice. Nothing is too small or too big for consideration, from a cranberry bog to Denali. For its comprehensive vision, its meticulous accuracy (every line fact-checked), his work is virtually unrivaled. It harkens back to a type of slow, immersive journalism that barely exists anymore—to our detriment. What writer today would move to backcountry Alaska for months at a time just to take the measure of local life? What magazine or publisher would fund it? Coming Into the Country remains a benchmark for what nonfiction writing can achieve when a master craftsman is given the luxury of space and time and support.
A man in the book tells McPhee, “When you are writing about nature, you are writing about God, and it cannot be put into words.” There is truth in that, I think: Language has its limits. But perhaps McPhee comes as close as anybody has in the past half-century of writing about wild America.
