I’m proud of New Jersey because Philip Roth is from New Jersey. He taught here [at Princeton University] once long ago, and I met him. I can’t say I know him at all, but I’ve had a little bit of correspondence with him. One time about five years ago I was way up the Delaware River, and on the riverbank at a place where we launched our canoes I found lying in the mud a T-shirt that said Weequahic [Roth’s childhood Newark neighborhood]. So I brought the T-shirt home, and I washed it, and I mailed it to him. And I got a note back saying, “But what happened to the kid?”
I was born in Princeton and grew up here on the campus. My father was a doctor whose field was sports medicine, and he was the physician of the Princeton football, basketball, and baseball teams. When I was first married we lived in an apartment in New York for about five years. But when our family was growing, we felt we wanted to live outside the city, and we looked at various communities. What eventually caused us to come here was the library at the university. We also have a fantastic town library. If I was going to do the kind of work I hoped to do, that library would be indispensable. Then I got into teaching [at the university] when a writing teacher quit and I was asked, “Will you fill in for him?” That was the fall of 1974, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I never expected that. Now I’m totally soaked in the campus and the students and so forth.
I find comical and also irritating the attitude that, say, some people in New York have. They have this idea there’s a very big fault running down the middle of the Hudson River, and there is a great difference on either side. In fact, there is such a fault—right down the river—and the rock on the New York side is many hundreds of millions of years older than the rock on the New Jersey side. So New Jersey is a much more up to date place.
New Jersey is a spectacularly varied state in terms of its landscapes and its physiographic provinces. Most places don’t have the variety that we do. In New Jersey the first physiographic province is the coastal plain, which includes the Pine Barrens. Then there’s a bit of piedmont, then you have the Newark basin, which formed about 200 million years ago. Then you get to pre-Cambrian rock, which is more than 570 million years old. Then you get to a different thing, not as old as that, the so-called deformed Appalachians. And we aren’t even in the Delaware River yet. So there’s a lot crunched in in New Jersey.
Back in the ’60s I was interested in writing about the bears of New Jersey, and I went down to Trenton to interview, I think it was, the fish and game commissioner. He was from the San Joaquin Valley in California, under the Sierra [foothills]. And he told me that New Jersey had more interesting wildlife and wild places than his home.
There were a couple people here many years ago from the Sierra Club in San Francisco. They went around with me between Pennington and the Delaware River. Just that country in there. On back roads. And they were overwhelmed, those Sierra Club people, by the gorgeous beauty of this state.
John McPhee, a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965, is the author of 28 books, including The Pine Barrens and Annals of the Former World, a tetralogy about the geology of the North American continent. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he teaches non-fiction writing.
As told to Eric Levin.