General Interest Review 00020

Travels in Georgia

"Travels in Georgia" is a magazine profile of Atlanta-based ecologist Carol Ruckdeschel, written by John McPhee. The New Yorker first published the piece in 1973. The piece simultaneously makes time stand still and seems to speed it mercilessly forward at breakneck pace.

The main narrative freezes time in its tracks, forcing the modern reader to look back and ponder what it might've been like. In following Ruckdeschel and her colleague, Sam Candler, McPhee provides an account of a final moment when parts of the area surrounding Atlanta, and even the city itself, remained wild. This was a time before most wetlands were drained to make way for Sun Belt expansion. Ruckdeschel and Candler filter the transition through their own lens. Roadkill is for dinner, and the shack-like house is full of wild animals. The swamp is hallowed ground. Perhaps the wetlands and wild areas will be a shadow of their former selves, but somehow nature and the people who are intertwined with it will remain as they ever were.

All the while, the story pushes quickly forward, having no trouble keeping the reader's eyes locked into the page. McPhee employs a masterful voice throughout that illuminates what makes the subject matter so dynamic without elevating it to mythic proportions. In his prose, there is room for both the morbid details of cooking up roadkill, and the philosophical points of the struggle to balance development with preservation of thriving ecosystems. Pine trees and birds speak, and so does Jimmy Carter's missed jump shot. McPhee spent countless hours traveling for the piece, and he seems to have left nothing out. And all of it is symbolic, telling, or at the very least elegantly described. If only the rest of life was so interesting, all of the stinking time.