This weekend, read John McPhee’s “Atchafalaya.” It was published in February, 1987, and it’s about the Herculean effort of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to control the flow of the Mississippi River, the fourth-longest river in the world. “Atchafalaya” is the name of the “distributary waterscape” that threatens to capture and redirect the flow of the Mississippi. If that happens, the cities and industrial centers of Southern Louisiana could find themselves sitting, uselessly, next to a “tidal creek,” and economic ruin would be the inevitable result. To prevent that, the Corps of Engineers embarks on a vast project to artificially freeze the naturally shifting landscape. McPhee meets the engineers and explores the structures they’ve built to “preserve 1950 … in perpetuity.”
McPhee’s first story for The New Yorker was published more than fifty years ago; it was about a basketball game between the Cambridge University team, of which McPhee was a member, and the soldiers who guarded the Tower of London. Since then, he’s become a genre unto himself. He takes on huge subjects and addresses them without simplification; instead, he includes every detail, or seems to. The stories are immersive, and by the end of a piece like “A Fleet of One,” which is about a long-distance trucker, you feel like you’ve lived a second life as a truck driver. The sense of a second life is everywhere in his writing. In “North of the C.P. Line,” from 1984, McPhee went so far as to write about another man, also named John McPhee, who’s a game-warden pilot for the State of Maine. This other McPhee, McPhee writes, was also an author: he had “written magazine pieces about the North Maine Woods—its terrain, its wild-life, and related subjects—as had I.” The two McPhees meet on a lake in Maine, writer-McPhee in a canoe, pilot-McPhee in his plane. Later, McPhee flies McPhee around Maine, exploring its woods and lakes from the air. “There is a lot of identification, even transformation, in the work I do,” McPhee writes, “trying to sense another existence and in some ways to share it. Never had that been more true than now, in part because he was sitting there with my life in his hands while placing (in another way) his life in mine.”
In 1989, McPhee incorporated “Atchafalaya” into a book called “The Control of Nature.” (He’d been passing by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, and had been struck by its inscription: “STRIVE ON—THE CONTROL OF NATURE IS WON, NOT GIVEN.”) Like the Mississippi, “Atchafalaya” is long—around twenty-seven thousand words. But it’s all available online, and it gives you a real sense of what it’s like not just to live and work beside one of the world’s great rivers but actually to struggle with it. Meanwhile, if you’re curious about how McPhee himself manages the streams of details that make up his pieces, you can read his series “The Writing Life,” which is about the habits, tools, and processes he’s developed during his years at The New Yorker.
Joshua Rothman is the magazine’s archive editor.
