From the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill, in Washington Township, Burlington Country, New Jersey, the view usually extends about twelve miles. To the north, forest land reaches to the horizon. The trees are mainly oaks and pines and the pine predominate.
The opening lines of the book set the stage for the central subject and concern of the book. The Pine Barrens—the book—is a narrative of the age old conflict between progress and conservation. The Pine Barrens—which here are described as though to stumble across it is to stumble into life-threatening isolation from civilization—are actually “so close to New York that on a very clear night a bright light in the pines would be visible from the Empire State Building. This is the real focus of the narrative: how wildlands and the city can co-exist in peaceful harmony for only so long before eventually the tension between progress and conservation begins to tighten to a dangerous degree.
They are apparently a tolerant people, with an attractive spirit of live and let live. They seem to like hard work, if not steady work, and they like to brag about working hard. When they say they will do something, they do it. They seem shy, like the people who went before them, but when they get to know an outsider they are not shy and will generously share their tables, which often include new-potato stews and cranberry potpies.
The tension between progress and conservation does not exist within a void in which the conflict is simply between business interests and so-called “tree huggers.” People call the pines home. And what would people who call the pines home naturally come to be called? Pineys, of course. Pineys play a significant role in the narrative and the reader comes to learn the true nature of their “strange ways” and to understand the fundamental call of their self-imposed exilic isolationism. The author seems to take them under his wing a little, offering a sort of literary protection as well as offering a greater understanding, but there is more to this than meets the eye. It is not just that the people calling the pines home are underdogs, but they also suffer a tragic legacy in which misunderstanding of their ways by others transformed into a belief that they were inbred mental defectives.
…the Pine Barrens are not likely to be the subject of dramatic decrees or acts of legislation. They seem to be headed slowly toward extinction.
After all is said done, as the book draws to a close, the author turns melancholic and pessimistic. The narrative has successfully situated the Pine Barrens as almost another world, a place that is certainly within America and part of America, but in another sense a place that is alien. The foreign quality is deemed worthy of protection, but the author predicts that those who know of it and aware of it will be able to recall the moment of realization that the remaining undeveloped land was a social necessity rather than merely an opportunity to increase individual wealth. And this was in the late 1960’s.
