Book Review: The Pine Barrens

The Pine Barrens, by John McPhee

Reading this 52-year-old book is not a step back in time. Rather, it's like reading Wendell Berry writing about his beloved Kentucky, showing how the land centers us in a place, and how that place helps to define us.

Joxer the Mighty says he could be a Piney, too

McPhee's 1967 book helped bring attention to the diverse environment of the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey. Partly as a result, Congress designated more than one million acres as the Pinelands National Reserve, strictly limiting development in the fragile area.

The Pinelands is a forest of sandy land flanked by the populous East Coast and the Philadelphia metropolis. Its soil also is acidic and nutrient poor, so early settlers passed it over in favor of richer land in other directions. Small industries developed here and there, but by the time of the civil war, larger factories could do the work cheaper and closer to the markets. The Pinelands mostly reverted to its natural state.

Small crossroads towns popped up where a few independent families stayed on. The population shrunk to a few hardy settlers who remained.

McPhee captures them in a beautifully written narrative. His eye for detail, his ear for language, and his sense of culture is extraordinary. He wrote not as a native of the barrens, but as one who had taken the time to learn and understand the people who live there. He gained the trust and respect of a enigmatic people who, for good reason, are normally suspicious of outsiders.

Some of the gentlest of people -- botanists, canoemen, campers -- spend a great deal of time in the pines, but their influence has not been sufficient to correct an impression, vivid in some parts of the state for fifty years, that the pineys are weird and sometimes dangerous barefoot people who live in caves, marry their sisters, and eat snakes. Pineys are, for the most part, mild and shy, but their resentment is deep, and they will readily and forcefully express it.

Later, McPhee brings us to the largest crossroads town in the Pinelands, where the natives show disdain for the image outsiders have of them. The owner of the local grocery store shared her thoughts.

Live in caves and intermarry, hah. No one ever lived in caves that I heard of. I don't know anyone around here except one family that's intermarried, and I've lived here all my life. 

The book is full of little tidbits like that.  It's historical, folk-lorical, and metaphorical. It intersperses interviews with and descriptions of the Pineys with details of the Pinelands ecology, history, and geography. It's a little book -- barely 150 pages -- but it packs a lot of detail.