by John McPhee
Pottersville is in Hunterdon County, and Hunterdon is the next county to Mercer, and Mercer is where I am. In 1980, a bear came through Hunterdon and into Mercer, skirted Princeton, and somehow crossed U.S. 1 and I-195, five miles from the center of Trenton. In Yardville, a cop shot and killed it. New Jersey’s bear biologists would have preferred to get there first, shoot the bear with Ketaset, put it in a pickup after it conked out, and take it to the Kittatinny before it woke up.
So please note: my ambition to see a bear in my backyard has not been completely insane. By the latest estimate, there are about twenty-five hundred bears in New Jersey now. Wild bears. Black bears. And perhaps not a few that have emigrated from Pennsylvania in search of a better life. In recent years, bears have been spotted in every New Jersey county.
Nassau Street is the main street of Princeton—town on one side, university on the other—and a bear has been seen on Nassau Street, close by the so-called “tree streets” (Chestnut, Walnut, Linden, Maple, Spruce, and Pine). I grew up on Maple Street. If I wanted to see a bear, I should have stayed put. Marshall Provost, a longtime friend of mine who recently left the Princeton police force to become a federal police officer in the District of Columbia, has told me that Princeton’s official attitude toward bears is “Just leave them alone.” He nonetheless investigated the Tree Street Bear. “I walked within ten feet of it. It was leaning against a tree.” Of another bear, he said, “It was all over Princeton. That guy travelled.” As did still another bear. Nick Sutter, the town’s police chief, told me that it was seen at the Hun School and all over Princeton’s Ascot-class neighborhoods—Elm Road, Constitution Hill—and on Chambers Street in the middle of town. Princeton’s benign and respectful disposition toward wild bears is not in any way unusual or special in this exemplary state, whose municipalities, counties, and state agencies come on in choral unison about what to do when they show up in your backyard.
“Just let ’em go.”
“Just leave ’em alone.”
“Be cautious,” said an online article from Lawrence Township (Mercer County). “A black bear was spotted Sunday on Surrey Drive.” In Laurel Run Village, a development in Bordentown (Burlington County), a bear stood up six feet tall, looked around, and went off into the woodlot next door.
Essex, New Jersey’s second-densest county, with a population per square mile that outdenses the Netherlands, has had a number of recent sightings of wild black bears. On Memorial Day weekend, 2016, in West Caldwell, a bear was seen “in the area of Herbert Place and Eastern Parkway,” according to a piece by Eric Kiefer on the website Patch. The bear, or another bear, next played Verona, “on Crestmont Road in the area of Claremont Ave.” This was fourteen miles from the editorial offices of The New Yorker, which look out across the Hudson, over the Meadowlands, and far into Essex County.
In May, 2017, in Middletown Township (Monmouth County), bears were sighted on Nut Swamp Road and, a day later, on Packard Drive. In Manchester Township (Ocean County), a wild black bear went up a backyard tree in the neighborhood called Holly Oaks, where it tried to look like a black burl weighing two hundred and fifty pounds. According to a piece by Rob Spahr, of NJ Advance Media, “officers used sirens, air horns and water hoses to move the bear.” The bear moved. Because it might return, police told residents, “Be vigilant.” They also recommended that citizens review the bear-safety advice of, as it is called now, the state’s Division of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Environmental Protection:
Never feed or approach a bear! Remain calm if you encounter a bear. Make the bear aware of your presence by speaking in an assertive voice, singing, clapping your hands, or making other noises. Make sure the bear has an escape route. If a bear enters your home, provide it with an escape route by propping all doors open. Avoid direct eye contact, which may be perceived by a bear as a challenge. Never run from a bear. Instead, slowly back away. To scare the bear away, make loud noises by yelling, banging on pans or using an air horn. Make yourself look as big as possible by waving your arms. If you are with someone else, stand close together with your arms raised above your head.
In the past three years, twenty-one bears have entered New Jersey homes, with no human fatalities. For example, Diane Eriksen, of West Milford (Passaic County), was under the impression that she was alone in her house. Hearing a sound in her living room, she went and had a look. A bear looked back. She beat a retreat and called 911. The bear, at the coffee table, helped itself to half a bowl of peppermint patties, scattered the wrappers all over the floor, and took off. The 911 call resulted in its death.
The state’s advisory continues:
The bear may utter a series of huffs, make popping jaw sounds by snapping its jaws and swat the ground. These are warning signs that you are too close. Slowly back away, avoid direct eye contact and do not run. If a bear stands on its hind legs or moves closer, it may be trying to get a better view or detect scents in the air. It is usually not a threatening behavior. Black bears will sometimes “bluff charge” when cornered, threatened or attempting to steal food. Stand your ground, avoid direct eye contact, then slowly back away and do not run. If the bear does not leave, move to a secure area. Report black bear damage or nuisance behavior to the DEP’s 24-hour, toll-free hotline at 1-877-WARN DEP (1-877-927-6337). Families who live in areas frequented by black bears should have a “Bear Plan” in place for children, with an escape route and planned use of whistles and air horns. Black bear attacks are extremely rare. If a black bear does attack, fight back.
To be sure, they are dangerous. Mistakenly described as “sedentary,” even “harmless,” they can be every bit as lethal as grizzlies. Years ago, a geologist I know lost both her arms to a black bear in Alaska’s Yukon-Tanana terrain. In 2002, a bear in Sullivan County, New York, removed an infant from a stroller, carried her into the woods, and killed her. In 2014, a Rutgers student was killed by a bear in Passaic County, New Jersey. Horrible as such events are, bear stories gathering in the mind across time tend to exaggerate their own frequency. In the past twenty years, fourteen people in the United States have been killed by black bears. In 2012, one person killed twenty children in Connecticut. In 2018 …
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POLICE IN THE Borough of Middlesex (Middlesex County) posted a Nixle notification: “Be alert, secure garbage and NEVER feed or approach bears.” Lawrence Township told Lawrentians to bring garbage cans and bird feeders inside. Bordentown police went on Facebook to face down bears.
Evidently, there are fewer bears to face down than there were a year ago. Statewide, reported bear sightings dropped from seven hundred and twenty-two in 2016 to two hundred and sixty-three in 2017. Why this is so is not definitively known. With increased hunting, they have surely become warier. They could also have seen enough and gone back to the Poconos. But New Jersey bears are, of course, almost all native, and they are reproductively more fruitful than the nine hundred thousand black bears elsewhere in North America, whose average number of cubs per birth is a bit above two. The New Jersey average is 2.9. New Jersey sows have dropped as many as six cubs in a litter, and five, and four. New Jersey bears have a more concentrated forage of acorns, hazelnuts, beechnuts, and so forth—items that build fat. Fat equals health, and, in winter, nourishment for the mother making milk for her cubs, which are born in the den.
In 2003, New Jersey decided that its bear population had increased to a size that needed “management.” Bear hunting, banned in 1971, was “reintroduced” and took place in early December, during deer season. In 2015, the bear-hunting season was greatly increased, with a new “segment,” in October, when black bears are much more active, and the licensee was permitted to use a bow and arrow or a muzzleloader, the gun that fired the shot heard round the world. There are more muzzleloaders in the United States today than there were people in colonial America in 1775. In the late twentieth century, a muzzleloader in California ignited a fire that burned three thousand eight hundred and sixty acres. If something like that were not
enough to make a bear wary, New Jersey’s over-all “harvest” surely has been. In fifteen years, New Jersey hunters have killed four thousand bears. Among conjectures about the cause of the decline in bear sightings, that one seems prominent. The fact that New Jersey bears are “crepuscular”—that is, they move about before sunrise and after sunset, and spend the rest of the day in a swamp—has more to do with sheer intelligence than it does with nature. New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy (Monmouth County), came into office declaring that he was going to ban the bear hunt once more.
In the past several decades, I have done most of my shad fishing on the upper Delaware River in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, opposite Sullivan County, New York. Pennsylvania estimates its population of black bears at twenty thousand, and a lot of them are in Wayne County, where I have never seen one, but they are around us all the time. In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, enough bear shit was around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show. But nary a bear. A neighbor, though, went around a corner of his cabin one day and almost bumped into a bear coming the other way. The bear was so afraid of this neighbor that it turned, ran down the bank to the river, jumped in, and swam to New York. Black bears are strong swimmers.
My ambition to see one in my own backyard came extremely close to success on the eleventh of August, 2016. My wife, Yolanda Whitman, was sitting in the living room and happened to look up. A bear came out of the trees and started across the meadow. And where was I at this milestone of a moment? I was in a basement recording studio in a new building on the Princeton campus, making a podcast about Princeton basketball with Mitch Henderson, the head coach.
My résumé remains empty. Looking down from our windows, I have never seen a bear. Mitch Henderson will have to do. Meanwhile, as Yolanda watched, the bear reached mid-meadow and sat down. This was not before sunrise or after sunset. This was late morning. This bear was not afraid of anything. Rolling its shoulders, flexing, shrugging, soaking up the sun, it groomed itself. It sat there and groomed itself (!!!), while I, talking to Mitch, was in a cellar designed by Frank Gehry, and Yolanda, whose mind is full of presence, was taking pictures of the bear.
Part II
An Album Quilt
In an album quilt, the blocks differ, each from all the others. The passages that follow here seem to call for such a title. They are taken from writing I have done that has not previously appeared in any book. Getting this project under way, I looked through pieces written for both public and private occasions through the years, and selected a passage here and there. These included a number of short New Yorker pieces, and stories of varied length from other magazines and from Time, where I worked before I joined The New Yorker. I looked through some dozens of things I wrote when I was in college, and threw them all out. In aggregate, I sifted about two hundred and fifty thousand words and got rid of seventy-five per cent. I didn’t aim to reprint the whole of anything. Instead, I was looking for blocks to add to the quilt, and not without new touches, internal deletions, or changed tenses—trying to make something, not just preserve it, and hoping the result would be engaging to read.
With fifty-six three-by-five cards on a large smooth table, I reached an arrangement of passages in an intentionally various, random, and subjective manner. I meant that they should be read that way—all at once, or, say, half a dozen pages after a crack of the book.
DESIGNER’S NOTE: The crossed-canoe blocks on this and the following pages are from a paper pieced quilt made by Cass Garner, of Stockton, New Jersey, as a gift to John McPhee.
An Album Quilt
Cary Grant has virtually every nickel he has ever earned. He was once seen handing a few coins to his wife and counting them first. After the Plaza Hotel sent him one and a half English muffins for breakfast, he called the head of room service and the manager and even threatened to call Conrad Hilton, the owner, claiming that the menu said “muffins” and a measly one and a half did not live up to the plural.
Lean, suave, incomparably tanned, he never wears makeup and, across time, has become steadily better-looking. More or less successfully, he spends his real life pretending he is Cary Grant. Open Paris Match, for example, and there, in all likelihood, will be a picture of him in an Italian car, zooming east of Nice on the Moyenne Corniche—the route he followed with Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief. He is the darling of the internationals, a janissary in Kelly’s Monegasque toy palace, a captive treasure among the potentates and popinjays of the Onassis floating salon.
Being Cary Grant is such a gilded role that all sorts of other people think they are Cary Grant, too. Tony Curtis, for example, seems to caricature Grant in everything he does. He dresses like Grant, but with tighter trousers; his accent seems to be an attempt to sound like Grant; and he imitates Grant on the screen. When Curtis bought a Rolls-Royce, he made sure he got a better one than Grant’s.
Grant has many apes but few friends. In Hollywood—he has a mansion in Beverly Hills—he runs with no pack and is rarely seen at parties or premieres. The director Billy Wilder recently said, “I don’t know anyone who has been to Grant’s house in the last ten years.” Grant steadfastly insists that he has as much right to privacy as a plumber or a municipal clerk. When people ask for his autograph, he gives them an incredulous look as if they are trying to crash a party, and if some jolly clod says, “Put your John Hancock right here, Cary,” he says, “My name is not John Hancock, and I have no intention of putting it anywhere.” On one occasion, a rebuffed fan snapped, “Who the hell do you think you are?” Cool as the north wind, Grant answered, “I know who I am. I haven’t the vaguest idea who you are, and furthermore I don’t care to know.”
Cary Grant, of course, is Archibald Alexander Leach (“My name will give you an idea what kind of family I came from”), son of a textile worker in provincial Britain. When Archie was twelve, his father deserted his mother, a tall and commanding woman who for a time went to pieces under the shock of rejection. Little Archie, essentially homeless, turned to show business and ran away to join a troupe of acrobats.
Perhaps reacting to his dark-haired, dark-eyed mother, he has had three blond, blue-eyed wives. The first was Virginia Cherrill, the flower girl in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights; the second was the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton (unlike her other husbands, Grant did not ask for alimony); the third was the actress Betsy Drake, whose grandfather built the Drake and Blackstone hotels in Chicago. An accomplished hypnotist, Drake put Grant to sleep at various times and helped him to stop smoking and drinking. Together they explored Asian religions, transcendentalism, mysticism, and yoga. Grant claims that through her he learned how to put one side of his jaw to sleep when a dentist happened to be drilling there. For years, they were intimately estranged, living apart, dating each other frequently, taking trips together. Once, at a Broadway show, Cary saw her come in with another man. “There’s my wife,” he said to his own companion. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
Grant and his psychiatrist tried using LSD to help uproot Cary’s deepest psychological problems. Often called instant analysis, LSD is said to clean out the subconscious like lye in a septic tank. Impressed by his own progress under its influence, Grant delivered a confessional lecture at U.C.L.A. “I was a self-centered boor,” he told the fascinated students. “I was masochistic and only thought I was happy. When I woke up and said, ‘There must be something wrong with me,’ I grew up.” In a subsequent interview, he went on to say, “Because I never understood myself, how could I have hoped to understand anyone else? That’s why I say that now I can truly give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her.” Last week, Betsy Drake filed for divorce.
On a set, he drives directors and fellow actors round the bend with his fussy attention to
minutiae. He once went over the scalps of innumerable extras to see if their hair had been properly dyed. While filming That Touch of Mink, with Doris Day, he went shopping with her and supervised her purchase of shoes, skirts, and blouses to wear in the picture. On the movie lot, he was so disturbed when he saw the paintings on a set wall that he held up production while he went home and returned with better ones from his private collection. “A thousand details add up to one impression,” he explained.
In his studio office are very large photographs of all his wives, and numberless mementos of his long and lofty career. “The good old days are now,” he says, grinning amiably. An editor, checking facts, recently sent a telegram to him, asking, “HOW OLD CARY GRANT?” He wired back, “OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?”
IN THE SPORT AND CAMPING SHOW at the New York Coliseum, a former Ping-Pong champion of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and South America played Ping-Pong with Mrs. John Lindsay, the First Lady of the City of New York, who bobbed gracefully about, hitting sweeping ground strokes in response to the champion’s steady game. “Hi, Mrs. Lindsay!” a voice called from the crowd outside the picket fence surrounding the playing area. “Call me Mary,” said Mary, without taking her eye off the ball. The professional sent up a high, dizzy lob that seemed to come down like a falling leaf. “Ooo!” said Mary. “Show me that one again. I want to try it on my children.” After offering another lob, the pro, with some insolence, began to answer her volleys by raising one leg and hitting the ball with the bottom of his foot. Mrs. Lindsay watched for her chance, and sent a baseline drive whistling past him while his leg waved absurdly in the air.
