In the weeks leading up to John McPhee’s visit, our Fellows class had been searching for a link that would connect all of the prolific writer's varied works. Yes, he was interested in geology, he seemed to like camping, and he tended to be drawn to people who lived outside mainstream society... but was there something else?

Two weeks before his arrival, Al suggested that the uniting element in McPhee was an interest in language. We were skeptical at first - as McPhee is notorious for his distrust of what he considers academia's relentless quest for higher meanings that often, in his opinion, just aren't there.

But Al followed up his hypothesis with evidence from that week's book - the collection of essays, Irons in the Fire. He pointed to the first essay, in which McPhee goes to Nevada to follow around a brand inspector and learn about cattle rustling. The pages are marked with the replications of various brands, below which McPhee writes briefly about their significance. "It's a busy brand that might tend to blotch," he might say of one, or, "Brands are like fish in river - visible to the accomplished eye." It is as if McPhee is translating into modern English some hieroglyphs found on the wall of an ancient cave.

Upon examination, other essays in Irons in the Fire also revealed an overwhelming interest in language. In "Rinard at Manheim," McPhee literally transcribes the voice of a dealer at an exotic car show, turning the piece into a kind of dramatic monologue and leaving out his own voice except for, essentially, stage directions. In "The Gravel Page" (its title revealing), McPhee follows a forensic geologist on a murder case, decoding for us what the scientist read in rocks and pebbles into a crime story. Throughout the book, McPhee interprets the vernacular of his subject into a language we can attempt to understand.

Mara Gordon went into reading the next week's book, Uncommon Carriers, with the goal of answering this question of McPhee and language. She decided, in the end, that Al was right. She wrote:

"The whole collection of essays reads like a dictionary of sorts, and once I started looking for them I saw definitions everywhere. Bears are cops, CTSBT is a train, getting set means your boat is moving sideways with the current. McPhee writes about a wide variety of people, and the way he shows them to us is through their own words. "The sun never sets on the languages spoken by American truck drivers," McPhee writes about his trip with Don Ainsworth. McPhee has learned to speak these new languages on his journey with these uncommon carriers, so he uses those languages to prove to us he knows his stuff."

The evidence for McPhee's preoccupation with language was mounting. However, we were nervous about presenting our theory to him, knowing his wariness of English classes and their allegedly trivial pursuits.

As predicted, when we posed our theory to McPhee, he at first shot us down. He teased Al for being too professorial, and he assured us that his interest lay in people, not language.

However, as we worked hard to convince him, McPhee began to come around. Perhaps the most climactic moment came when Jeff Greenwald was about to read a passage from Annals of the Former World, McPhee's leviathan treatise on geology—a passage that Jeff considered to be proof of McPhee's interest in language. But before Jeff could begin reading, McPhee stole his thunder.

He jumped up from his chair, walked across the seminar circle and took the book from Jeff's hands. "I already know what passage you're talking about," he said to us, turning to the page and beginning to read:

"I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes. Geology was called a descriptive science, and with its pitted outwash plains and drowned rivers, its hanging tributaries and starved coastlines, it was nothing if not descriptive. It was a fountain of metaphor—of isostatic adjustments and degraded channels, of angular unconformities and shifting divides, of rootless mountains and bitter lakes…There seemed, indeed, to be more than a little of the humanities in this subject. Geologists communicated in English; and they could name things in a manner that sent shivers through the bones" (31, Annals of a Former World).

It seemed to us that if this passage did not reveal an interest, indeed a delight, in language, then nothing in the world could make sense anymore. And though McPhee never fully conceded our hypothesis, he did acknowledge our point. As Al said, "He insisted that this wasn't conscious or intended, but that it made sense."

Perhaps it's arrogant to say this, but I want to believe that in this way, McPhee also learned from us. Perhaps this is a way that his visit became an exchange, rather than a lecture.

Ben Crair, in his introduction to the reading on Monday night, acknowledged the conclusion we had reached on John McPhee’s writing:

"It is only right, given the themes of this introduction, that I acknowledge its content not as my own but rather a shared conclusion that I have reached over the past four weeks with my classmates. I invite them to join me in thanking Mr. McPhee for showing us that it is not the sounds of our own voices that distinguish us as writers, but rather the acuteness and patience with which we listen to the voices of others."