In the first episode, the camera pauses on a shot of the phone and prominently features its video capabilities for more than 20 seconds. Nice phone. The wonderfully discomforting Kristen Schaal co-starred in the pilot and her character over to the series as a regular.
McPhee is obsessed with structure. He sweats and frets over the arrangement of a composition before he can begin writing. The payoff of that labor is enormous. What a more ordinary writer might say directly, McPhee will express through the white space between chapters or an odd juxtaposition of sentences. It is like Morse code: a message communicated by gaps. I wanted razzle-dazzle, jokes, aphorisms, fireworks displays.
McPhee, I thought, had wasted his chance. To the north, forest land reaches to the horizon. The trees are mainly oaks and pines, and the pines predominate. Occasionally, there are long, dark, serrated stands of Atlantic white cedars. Why start there? McPhee can do razzle-dazzle.
Come in. McPhee stands there, this time, with a city planner, who fantasizes aloud about a thrilling future in which the Pine Barrens will be paved over, replaced not only with a city but also with the largest airport in the world. Supersonic jets will whisk people away to everywhere else on earth.
The region, in other words, is under threat, and McPhee, by introducing us to its creatures and lore, has made us care. What had seemed dry was now poignant and rich with meaning. In fact, the qualities I had objected to — the quietness, the numbing distance, the sense of taking inventory — had actually, slyly, been the point. The very large quietness of the Pine Barrens, which took such patience and focus to appreciate, was exactly what was under attack. Our modern minds, too, had been paved, and McPhee was peeling that pavement back.
It hit me like the end of a great work of fiction. The razzle-dazzle, I realized, had been there all along — it was just suppressed, and there was no way to feel it until you finished the book. This imposes a rigid structure on his life. During a semester when he teaches, McPhee does no writing at all. When he is writing, he does not teach. The poster is so old that its color has faded. It was all about technique. In the same spirit that a medical student, in gross anatomy, would learn what a spleen is and what it does, we would learn how stuff works in a piece of writing.
Much of that stuff, of course, was structure. One looked like a nautilus shell, with thick dots marking points along its swirl. McPhee creates them for everything he writes. Some of the shapes make almost no sense — they look like the late-stage wall sketches of a hermit stuck in a cave. Others are radically simple.
After years of writing traditional profiles, McPhee was bored of the form, so he decided to write a quadruple portrait: one character D as revealed through separate interactions with three other characters A, B and C. He came up with the structure first, then spent months trying to come up with the right people.
He finally settled on the pugnacious conservationist David Brower, and set him against three unapologetic developers. After this, McPhee was tempted to experiment even further. However, I backed away from this chimerical construction. He told me it was because his high school English teacher, Olive McKee, made him outline all of his papers before he wrote them. But lots of people, I said, had to outline papers in school. Not many ended up devoting the meat of their adult lives to scribbling byzantine diagrams all over the place.
Perhaps there was a deeper psychological cause — something about childhood, maps, his father, anatomy? John McPhee lives, and has almost always lived, in Princeton.
I met him there in a large parking lot on the edge of campus, next to a lacrosse field, where he stood waiting next to his blue minivan. McPhee knew he was writing at a pivotal period of Alaskan history. Kaufmann, the wilderness-loving federal assessor who is central to the first section, knows that vast change is coming to the region.
We need places where we can learn how. Four decades on, we are in a position to offer some answers. Prudhoe Bay is now the largest oil field in North America, covering more than 86, hectares , acres of Arctic Ocean coastline. The Trans-Alaska pipeline has shipped more than 16bn barrels of oil. The population of Alaska has almost doubled, to just over , people. The biggest zinc mine in the world has been established in the west of the Brooks Range.
Climate change, brought about in part by the oil of the North Slope, is causing the melting of permafrost and the dwindling of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Among the consequences of the sea-ice loss are the opening of the Northwest Passage to shipping and new oil frontiers, and a calamitous reduction in the polar bear population.
The Kobuk has no roads leading into or through it, and is thought to be among the least visited national parks in North America. Coming into the Country now reads like a combination of prophecy and elegy. Rereading Science and nature books. Of course, this glaring error helps George Will make his case that global warming is nothing to worry about. But it is not true, and two seconds of fact-checking by the Post could have discovered that. Details here. All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Go Further.
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