As I prepared to leave Princeton, I stacked my John McPhee books on the passenger seat of my car, and there were so many of them that the car thought it was a person and frantically beeped at me to buckle the seatbelt. Before McPhee said goodbye, he started to give me driving directions. Then he remembered about my phone. This reminded him of my trip down. How, he wondered, had I gotten to Princeton? What route did I take? What roads did I drive? He was curious to know how my phone had solved the problem of orientation, how its machine directions had differed from his human directions.
Unfortunately, I told him, I had no idea. I had hardly been paying attention. I just trusted the computer, followed its instructions turn by turn and spent my time daydreaming about this and that.
This answer did not satisfy John McPhee. He wanted to know the roads I took. Didn’t I remember anything?
I told him I remembered passing a water tower. At some point, there was maybe a reservoir. I searched my memory. There had been a sign that said “Fog Area,” after which everything got foggy immediately, as if the sign had summoned the fog. I remembered, on the radio, a D.J. named Clay Pigeon saying that scientists had successfully encoded a 19th-century film of a running horse into a living cell. At some point I hit traffic, and my phone rerouted me onto back roads. I remembered a very old stone house, the Johnson & Johnson headquarters, a park called “Sourland.”
Based on those scraps of information, McPhee was able to reverse-engineer my route.
“Very interesting,” he said. “That’s not the way I would have told you to go.”
Sam Anderson, The Mind of John McPhee.
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