3 for the Road: Details

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their quality of observation – their details.

What an astonishing density of detail there is in these three books! Everything is noted, named, and particularized. For example, in Notes From the Century Before, Hoagland, roaming around the town of Wrangell, meets totem-pole carver Tom Ukas. Ukas takes Hoagland to a shed in back of his house and shows him a totem pole he’s created. Hoagland describes it in detail: 

The totem is made of a fresh, beautiful, pale yellow wood. I’m amazed by it. Completely filling the shed, lying on several supports, it thrusts like a rocket, many times taller than me. Carving from the bottom upwards, he has finished all but the hat at the top, even the long Raven beaks which attach separately. The little tools rest on a bench. He walks back and forth, touching the segments with a certain humility, this probably being the last totem pole he will have enough energy for and the last anybody in Wrangell will carve. He is delaying finishing – an hour’s chipping at the hat would take care of it. The wood is red cedar, and it will stand in front of the post office, a marvellous huge piece with six succinct figures. At the top sits the hatted, ruling Raven. At his feet is the Power Box (like a box), holding the Tide Control and the Daylight Control for the moon and the sun. Under the box is the Raven again, though only his head, with a bright halo disk around it – this representing the Raven in his special capacity as Creator. Below the Creator Raven, scrunched up, is a kewpie-doll Man, and underneath Man is the Raven Mother, whose beak is carved to lie on her chest, not stick out grandly like the Raven Creator’s. At the bottom, under the Raven Mother, sits the Tide Control, who escaped from his box and triggered the flood and is personified by a big beaver. It’s all magnificently bright and incisive, as I try to tell him mainly by my excitement.

Details accrete and a marvellous totem pole is bodied forth. McPhee, in his Coming into the Country, works the same way, adding detail after animate detail until a bear or a river or a cabin or a mountain is re-created on the page. Here’s his memorable depiction of prospector Joe Vogler’s truck: 

Vogler travels the mining district in a big three-axle truck so much the worse for wear it appears to have been recently salvaged after a very long stay at the bottom of the Yukon. He drives it on what roads there are and, where roads do not exist, directly up the beds of rushing streams. Lurching, ungainly, it is a collage of vehicular components – running gear from one source, transmission from another – that Vogler selected and assembled to be “good in the brush.” The front wheels are directly under the cab, and the engine mount (high off the ground) is cantilevered a full eight feet forward to become a projecting snout, probing the way toward gold. The cab and engine are military fragments, artifacts of the Second World War. The frame was taken from a twenty-five-year-old tractor trailer. The long flatbed reaches out behind and is towered over by a winch and boom. There are no fenders. Much of the engine’s cowling is gone. The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes. Enfeebled as the rig looks, it has six-wheel drive and, thunking up ledges and over boulders, is much at home in a stream.

That “The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes” is pure McPhee. No one could've thought of that analogy but him.

Many of McPhee’s details are inspired! This one, for example:

We collected a marten that had climbed up a pole-set for a grouse wing and was now hanging by a leg in a life-like pose, frozen stiffer than taxidermy, its forepaws stretched as if leaping for prey, its eyes, at fifteen below zero, like white chick-peas.

And this:

On his head was a brown Stetson – the only Stetson I’ve ever seen that was made of hard plastic. It had a crack in it that was patched with grout. 

And this:

On the stove is a tin can full of simmering tea, under a sheet-metal lid that is a piece of a fuel can with a scorched clothespin clipped to it as a handle.

One of the most memorable details in Frazier’s Great Plains is the tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick that he finds in the front yard of an abandoned house near Wellington, Texas, a house that figures in the legend of Bonnie and Clyde:

In front of the house was an old slippery-elm tree – once a friendly tree in a yard, now just a tree – with big roots knuckling up through te ground. The roots were skinned and smooth from people sitting on them, and on the bare dirt in between I spotted a silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick. The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges, of a shade of reddish-pink which its manufacturer calls Fuchsias Pearl. I thought about the kids who dropped it. They probably come here sometimes to park and make-out. Bonnie Parker would have been happy to find this lipstick. She would have opened it and sniffed it and tried the color on the back of her hand. As I examined it, my own hand seemed for a moment as ghostly as hers. I made a mark on a page of my notebook with the lipstick, recapped the tube, and put it back on the ground.

That “The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges” is brilliant! The whole book is like that – an extraordinary feat of attention. 

In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books.