March 8, 1931

It's John McPhee's birthday: he was born March 8, 1931. Long may he reign as a non-fiction writer at The New Yorker magazine.We read, in a blurb:

'John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.'

And with a closer look:

Colonsay is a tiny Hebridean island in the Atlantic, 25 miles west of the Scottish mainland. About it McPhee wrote, in Croft and Laird  “When the ocean is blue, the air is as pure as a lens, and the other islands seem imminent and almost encroaching, although they are at least 10 or 15 miles away — Mull, for example, ...the Isles of the Sea,”

His book, originally a New Yorker article in 1969, Crofter and Laird: recounts his staying there, where his ancesters had lived. He recounts staying with his family in a croft, which was a stone, 2 room house) . There a container served several purposes; one is containing garbage. McPhee writes:

'A cat and a rooster are always near the drum. If ashes go into it, they don't move. If garbage goes into it, the cat jumps in first and spends ten minutes inside. Then he jumps out, half gray with ash, and the rooster jumps in.'

McPhee was the one who alerted me (Basin and Range, 1982) to the existence of an alloy--electrum, which happens to be gold and silver mixed together. Something I love to know.