A million acres of sand and pitch pine in the middle of the most crowded state in the country, sitting on an aquifer holding trillions of gallons of clean water, with almost nobody living in it. McPhee spent months out there in the sixties with the people who did — the Pineys, families going back generations, gathering sphagnum moss, cutting cedar, running a gas station, telling him about the place while a plan sat on a desk in Trenton to put a jetport and a city of a quarter million people in the middle of it. The book is a big reason that never happened.
The Pine Barrens