February 14 & 21, 2022 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. This may be just me, but Miriam Toews’ personal history piece, “The Way She Closed the Door,” in this week’s issue, seems unreal. The device of recounting her life as if she were talking to that youth in the Paris café seems just that – a device. And that river walk is too much, too patterned, too dreamlike to be believable. The same goes for the river cracking up and the cracked window and the piece of glass lodging in her forehead. I’m not saying these events didn’t happen, but the whole thing just seems too shaped, too artful to be a chronicle of real experience. 

2. Michaelangelo Matos’s “Goings On About Town” note on the Black Dog’s new EP “Brutal Minimalism” contains these delightful lines:

The grainy, gray-toned percussion, redolent of cracked concrete walls, and the low-mixed chimes, like faraway train signals, add to the verisimilitude. Even when the beats come forward, they amplify the background details.

3. Perhaps the most beautiful sentence in this week’s issue appears in Anthony Lane’s “Living for the City,” a review of Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World”: “Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle.” 

February 7, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three.” It’s another one of the Master’s “reminiscent montages.” This one consists of six segments. They flash back and forth in time. The first is set in 1972; McPhee takes nature writer Edward Abbey on a walking tour of Princeton. The second section travels back to 1948; McPhee is a night watchman at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In the third segment, it’s June 21, 2006; McPhee is on the McKenzie River with one of America’s great fly fishermen, Dr. Lenox Dick. In the fourth, it’s 1960; McPhee has dinner with Henry Luce. The fifth is a double; one part describing a weekend in 2004 that McPhee spent driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries; the other telling about a 1982 trip he and his wife, Yolanda, took to the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, to visit a Bing cherry orchard. In the final segment, McPhee goes way back to when he was ten, and tells about the time he broke into Joe Brown’s sculpture studio in Princeton to steal some clay. 

The piece is quite a mash-up of images – the literary equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine or a Cornell box. I devoured it. The pleasure of it, for me, flows from its wonderful sentences. This one for example: 

Sitting back in the armchair with his legs at full stretch, one boot across the other, he seemed to be aiming through a kind of gun sight formed by his toes. 

And this:

With its haystacks and standing waves and boulder-field eddies below pools of fast flat water, its rhythmic curves, it has the shape of a downhill ski run. 

And this:

In Speyside, on Isla, on Skye, I later interviewed the distillers, including Captain Smith Grant, whose artesian spring, called Josie’s Well, was out in the middle of a field of oats near Ballindalloch, Banffshire, and was providing thirty-five hundred gallons an hour to the stills of The Glenlivet.

“Tabula Rasa 3” is an excellent addition to McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa” series. I enjoyed it immensely. 

January 31, 2022 Issue

Once again John Seabrook’s beloved Ford F-150 pickup appears in his writing. You’ll recall that’s what he was driving when he hit black ice, in his superb “Six Skittles” (April 9, 2018). Now, in “Green Giants,” in this week’s issue, he considers replacing it with an electric version, a Ford F-150 Lightning. And once again, it’s his personal experience of the product that makes his piece so engaging. He attends a car show in Austin, Texas, where the Lightning is on display. He notes, among other things, that the new truck has a “frunk” (“Instead of a hunk of throbbing, greasy metal up front, there’s a lockable storage space large enough to fit two sets of golf clubs, and equipped with a drain so that the frunk can be filled with ice and drinks”). 

He tours the Rouge Electric Vehicle Centre, in Dearborn, Michigan, where the Lightning is assembled:

We came to the largest of the robots, a Fanuc M-2000iA, which can lift a vehicle frame at least thirteen feet into the air. The robot deftly picked up the truck’s eighteen-hundred-pound Korean-made lithium-ion battery, which looked like a rooftop cargo-carrying case. The reinforced high-strength plastic shell contained hundreds of AA-battery-size cells filled with chemicals. The Fanuc placed the battery on the truck’s chassis, and the skillet floated farther down the line.

Most interestingly, he takes one of Ford’s new electric vehicles – a Mustang Mach-E – for a two-hundred-and-sixty-mile test-drive. His description of this trip is, for me, the highlight of the piece. And, as was the case in his wonderful “Scooter City” (April 26 & May 3, 2021), in which he a tries out an e-scooter, the experience is mixed. It starts well. He and his son, Harry, set out from Brooklyn. He notes that the car “can deliver microbursts of acceleration, without cycling through gears, in the way that an electric egg beater can go directly to the high-speed setting, skipping low and medium.” Seabrook enjoys these “microbursts of acceleration.” He says, 

My driver’s brain was far more engaged by these torquey sprints than by a steady rate of high speed. I’m pretty sure Cousin Charlie would have dug it. But the torque wasn’t truly satisfying until I turned on the “propulsion sound” in the “unbridled” mode (it’s a Mustang, remember), so that I heard the speed. Harry shook his head. O.K., Vroomer.

One thing they have to be mindful of is that the car needs to be recharged. At first, their search for a charging station goes smoothly. He writes,

The navigation system correctly calculated that if we drove to the Electrify America direct-current chargers in the Chicopee Marketplace mall, in western Massachusetts, we would have twenty-four per cent of battery life remaining. We arrived after nine, so the vast parking lot was mostly empty. The Mach-E’s G.P.S. led us to the chargers—four plugs in green-glowing, gas-pump-like stations next to a Home Depot. Could this be right? No one else was using them.

They plug in and walk to a restaurant. While they eat, Seabrook monitors the battery’s charging progress on his phone. That's a very cool detail. 

But as they drive north the temperature drops, and, as it does, the projected range of the vehicle keeps diminishing. Range anxiety sets in. Seabrook says, 

The navigation system apparently hadn’t figured this change in weather in its original calculation, which, at least to me, seemed neither seamless nor delightful. It began to rain. We were both showing signs of range anxiety by the time we arrived, at 11:30 p.m., nearing empty. We plugged into a regular outlet in the barn, in the dark.

The next day doesn’t go well. Seabrook writes,

The Mustang didn’t charge much overnight on my 120-volt outlet. The car’s navigation system—or the spotty rural cell coverage—failed to route me to the closest Electrify America chargers, across the state border in New Hampshire, and, for safety reasons, I couldn’t use the FordPass app on my phone to navigate while the car was moving. Ford’s charging infrastructure will inevitably improve as more E.V.s hit the road. Today wasn’t my day. I finally found the charging stations in the West Lebanon Walmart parking lot, but they weren’t working properly, and angry drivers were on the phone with customer service. It was still raining; puddles had formed in the depressions around the chargers, and my feet got wet while I was trying to get a hundred and fifty kilowatts flowing into my car, which isn’t as unsafe as it sounds.

Will Seabrook replace his old gas-fed F-150 with a new electric Lightning? He might not. Towards the end of the piece, he road-tests another electric pickup – Rivian’s futuristically designed R1T. He says, “Still, from my first glimpse of the truck’s front end I was smitten.” Smitten! Oh, oh, that doesn’t bode well for the Lightning. 

“Green Giants” provides an illuminating glimpse of the impending rise of the electric vehicle. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Acts of Attention

Alec Soth, "Tim and Vanessa's, Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania"

Vince Aletti, in his absorbing “Alec Soth’s Obsessive Ode to Image-Making” (newyorker.com, February 1, 2022), quotes Soth on his creative process: “Soth said in the course of a recent walk-through at Sean Kelly, he felt that he could ‘liberate’ himself simply by ‘paying attention to what I see.’ ” I love this comment. “Paying attention to what I see” is, for me, the essence of photography – the essence of art, for that matter. Robert Hass, in his What Light Can Do (2012), writes, 

One of the things I love about the essay as a form – both as a reader and as a writer – is that it is an act of attention. An essay, like a photograph, is an inquiry, a search. It implies attention to and sustained concentration on some subject.

One more corroborative quote – my favourite in all of art writing – Peter Schjeldahl on Vermeer: “Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look” (Let’s See, 2008).

3 for the Sea: Jonathan Raban's "Passage to Juneau"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Passage to Juneau. 

Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau chronicles his 1996 trip through the Inside Passage, from Seattle to Juneau and back, traveling solo aboard his thirty-five-foot sailboat Penelope.

It’s an unforgettable journey through a thousand-mile obstacle course, and what makes it unforgettable is Raban’s tremendous descriptive power. He puts us squarely there, in the cockpit with him, as he steers his boat through the Inside Passage’s maze-like world of channels, islands, inlets, rapids, whirlpools, deadheads, fogbanks, and fishing fleets. For example, here’s his description of sailing down Saratoga Passage’s “long reach of growling water”:

The sea in Saratoga Passage frosted over, as the forecast wind began to fill in from the south. The wrinkled skin of the water became ridged with breaking wavelets; in less than half an hour, the waves were steep, regular, well-formed, hard-driven by the building wind. With the headsail out to starboard, the boat skidded through the sea – the winched sheet bar-taut, the sail molded into a white parabola as rigid as one of Frank Gehry’s curved concrete walls. The wind keened in the steel rigging. At my back, I could hear the forward rush of each new wave, then its sudden, violent collapse in a crackling bonfire of foam. Hauling on the wheel, driving the boat downwind as it tried to slew broadside-on, I was on a jittery high. I hadn’t had such sailing in many months. The three-step waltzing motion of the boat, the throbbing, strings-and-percussion sound of wind and water on the move, came back to me as an old, deep pleasure. But a pleasure tinged, as always, with an edge of incipient panic.

And here’s his depiction of Deception Pass’s chaotic sea:

In the dwindling afternoon light, the water looked as black and thick as tar, its surface lumpy with boils and cratered with eddies. At ten past five, with 55 minutes to go before slack water, I fed the boat gingerly into the stream, running the engine full blast to give it maximum steerageway through the turbulence. It was like driving a car on ice. Each time the boat’s head met a swirl, it went into a sideways skid, and I had to spin the wheel violently to maintain any semblance of control.

And here’s his description of inching through the dense fog of Haro Strait:

A moving blip resolved into the shadow of a fishing boat, faintly imprinted on the fog, but at a reassuring distance of about a hundred yards. Watching the depth-sounder, checking the radar, I felt my way cautiously inside the sheltering arm of Sidney Spit – a mile-long drying sandbar that ran out from the northern end of Sidney Island. Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water, where I let go the anchor, switched off the engine, and found that my hands were incapable of striking a match to light a cigarette. They blundered about in the air, a pair of shaky fists, obstinately declining to take orders from the brain.

That “Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water” is inspired!

One of my favourite passages is this beauty, a description of the water in Cordero Channel:

The only motion was that of the incoming tide, stealing smoothly through the forest at one knot. Where fallen branches obstructed the current near the shore, they sprouted whiskers of turbulence that were steadily maturing into braided beards. The water was moving just fast enough to feel the abrasion of the air against it, and its surface was altering from glassy to stippled with the strengthening flood. Soon the false wind, brushing against the tide, created a trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.

How I relish that “just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.” 

Passage to Juneau is structured chronologically, beginning in Seattle on April 1, 1996, ending back in Seattle on or about August 14, 1996. But the narrative is anything but linear. Woven into its intricate fabric is the history of Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 exploration of the Inside Passage. Raban follows Vancouver’s tracks (e.g., “Following Discovery, I ran up Clarence Strait, close to the mountainous and rock-strewn shore of the Cleveland Peninsula”). He evokes Captain Van’s ships Discovery and Chatham so realistically, it’s almost like they’re right there on the water with him; in a sense, they are.  

Midway in Raban’s voyage, at Potts Lagoon, he takes a break and flies back to Seattle to spend a couple of weeks with his wife and daughter. Here the book takes a fascinating turn. In Seattle, Raban learns that his father is dying of cancer. He flies to England to be with him. Suddenly, we’re plunged into the intimate details of Raban’s personal life – his relationship with his father, mother, and brothers, his father’s death (“No more indignities now. I was glad for him”), the funeral and cremation (“Now began the surreal administrative business of death, ‘the arrangements’ ”). This is the messy stuff of real life. I think most travel writers would likely omit it; Raban includes it, and his narrative is the richer for it. After the cremation, Raban flies back to Potts Lagoon and resumes his trip. But his father’s ghost is with him now, haunting the rest of the voyage (“There was no avoiding my father now”).

From Potts Lagoon, he sails through Baronet Passage, stops in Port McNeill, on Vancouver Island, to buy groceries, continues on through Queen Charlotte Strait, shelters in Miles Inlet, heads for Egg Island, then Whirlwind Bay, passes the entrance to Burke Channel, and then joins a convoy of small boats that sail past Bella Bella Island, Spirit Island, and Whiskey Cove, making landfall at Shearwater, a fishing resort on Kliktsoatli Harbour, where there’s a party going on. Next day, out Seaforth Channel into Milbanke Sound:

After twenty minutes of roller-coasting sailing, there was no more than a brisk one-foot chop on a flat sea. Running before the wind, under the clearing sky, I sat back and listened to the twiggy sibilance of the bow-wave as it broke from the hull – air and water getting mashed together like egg whites in a blender. By noon, in fitful sunshine, I was in the riverine steep-sided corridor between Cone and Swindler islands, looking out for the Indian village of Klemtu on its hook-shaped bay.

Then a visit to Klemtu, and, next day, up the Finlayson Channel, past the ruins of Swanson Bay and Butedale, at the southern end of Fraser Reach, then through Grenville Channel, anchoring in Nettle Basin for the night (“The Inside Passage had more wild and empty stretches than anywhere I’d ever been, but Nettle Basin was a sharp reminder that I was a tourist among tourists”). Next day, on to Prince Rupert (“I liked Prince Rupert. The city laundromat, full of fishermen and yacht-tourists, was like a big rowdy bar on Saturday night; the liquor store sold Laphroaig whiskey, though at a fearful price”). Next day, past the rocks of Venn Passage, into the lagoon of Metlalkatla, sheltering in Port Simpson for the night. Next day: Dixon Entrance (“In Dixon Entrance at first light, I had white fingers and a hangover”) and Revillagigedo Channel, packed with fishing boats:

The nets were laid across the grain of the new flood tide, and each boat was making constant small maneuvers to keep itself aligned with its own pearl-string of floats. These American nets were longer than Canadian ones – 300 fathoms, more than a third of a mile – and they bulged and kinked in the turbulence of the current. I was playing a game with shifting goalposts: one promising gap abruptly closed while another line of corks swung open like a door. Biting hard on my lower lip, I veered this way and that, sliding past the colored marker-buoys at walking pace.

Revillagigedo Channel leads to the tight bottleneck of Tongass Narrows, “where the long, thin, jerry-built city of Ketchikan stretched out on a ledge dynamited out of the north shore.” Raban spends a couple of days in Ketchikan (“Across the boardwalk was the Potlatch Bar, a raucous cave into which I unwisely stepped for a beer”). From there, he sails through Clarence Strait, then Zimovia Strait, then past the mouth of the Stikine River (“The water here was a milky soapstone green”), to Wrangell. Then through Wrangell Narrows to Petersburg:

The straggle of sheds and houses along the bank at last thickened into the low, pale, floating city of Petersburg, whose canneries and bunkhouses, built out on stilts over the water, were doubled by their reflections in the oily calm. Boats greatly outnumbered buildings. In the half-mile narrows, Petersburg need no sheltering harbor wall, so the boats were scattered piecemeal along a mile of pilings, moorings, piers, and floating decks, making the town look more like a fleet at anchor than a permanent settlement. The whole place rippled and shimmered.

Then up Frederick Sound, through Stephens Passage to Hobart Bay. Then Gastineau Channel to Juneau (“Even in cruise-ship hours – from ten to five – I liked to walk the fringes of old Juneau”). Raban’s wife and daughter fly there to meet him. The reunion doesn’t go well. Raban’s wife tells him she wants a separation (“My stomach went south”). His joyless voyage back to Seattle is covered in just eleven pages. It includes this bleak observation: “If you want a mirror for your own existence, you need look no further than the tumbling rapids or the strings of dying whirlpools downtide of a piling.”

Passage to Juneau describes Raban’s personal experience of the vast, complex world of the Inside Passage in all its smell-taste-touch-sound-sight-thought-emotion-scoop-of-light magnificence. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Passage to Juneau, including its action, structure, imagery, detail, point of view, and humour. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Redmond O’Hanlon’s superb Trawler.