Word: mcphee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ARCHDRUID by John McPhee. 245 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Charles Mohr, Reporters Israel Shenker and John Noble Wilford, to name only a few, are former TIME correspondents or writers. So are Editor T George Harris of Psychology Today, syndicated Newsday Columnist Nick Thimmesch, Michael Demarest, an editorial executive at Playboy, New Yorker Writers Calvin Trillin and John McPhee, Alvin M. Josephy of American Heritage. The pseudonymous financial analyst "Adam Smith," author of the bestselling The Money Game, wrote for our Business section under his real name, George J.W. Goodman, before becoming editor of The Institutional Investor. Syndicated Hollywood Columnist Joyce Haber is a former TIME researcher and correspondent...
...Garvard's got a bucket in him, he can be a pest of hell"), struggling to make a living from the land and the edges of the sea, engulfed in a romantic sense of the past that curls over and around the island like a North Sea fog. McPhee settled down in a cottage sublet from a crofter named Donald Gibbie to watch and listen. The result is a small masterpiece of penetrating warmth and perception...
Though Colonsay boasts only one store and a pub, McPhee writes, "things amplify. It may be the light." The mountains seem bigger than they are, the cairns like fortresses, the people like characters out of sagas, even though they are cattle farmers, shepherds, dock keepers, postmen, laborers-sometimes a little of each. The past, running easily into the present, gives it a special meaning. Donald Gibbie, for example, worked ceaselessly to earn the equivalent of $1,500 a year. Nevertheless, being a blood-proud descendant of the island's ancient chiefs, when he happens to walk past a particular...
...with the responsibility to maintain at his own expense a broad range of social and economic services. At that time the island cost ? 10,000 a year to keep going. Through economies, the island produce, including cattle and sea kale, is now just about able to support the inhabitants. McPhee likes Strathcona (rather better than his tenants do) and sympathizes with his problems. But he notes that Strathcona's cutbacks in coal and electricity, plus lack of economic opportunity, promise to reduce the population still further. Soon there may be no more than 70 living people among the countless...