June 27, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ed Caesar’s absorbing "Sanctuary," a chronicle of refugee reality as experienced by a Ukrainian mother and her two daughters. The mother’s name is Inna Blahonravina; her daughters are Sasha, age seven, and Oliviia, age five. Caesar first encounters them on a mini-bus traveling from Lviv to Shehyni, just east of the Polish border. Here’s the scene:

Outside the station, bus drivers advertised trips to various locations on the border. A minibus driver named Pavlo offered passage to Shehyni, just east of the Polish border, for the equivalent of ten dollars. He was leaving immediately, and, because there were still a few free seats, my translator and I got on. Sitting across the aisle from me was a slim woman wearing a beige puffer jacket. She had wavy auburn hair and ice-blue eyes, and she held two cats in a carrier on her lap. In the row behind her were two young girls, both dressed in bright ski jackets and pants. The woman was looking out the window at a tall man with a birdlike face, who wore a charcoal-colored hat. He returned her gaze.

Pavlo started the engine. The man placed his hand on the glass. The woman placed her palm on the other side of the windowpane. The man removed his hand as the bus drove off. After a few yards, some pedestrians walked in front of the bus, forcing it to stop. The man ran to catch up with the bus and waved. The woman waved back, as did the older girl, but the younger one was facing the other way and missed the moment.

The woman let out a long breath, closed her eyes, and gathered herself. Then she opened her eyes, turned to me, and said, in English, “Here we go.”

Caesar recounts Inna’s personal history, and the chain of events culminating in her desperate departure from Ukraine with her daughters. He describes her life as a refugee in Germany. He also tells about Inna’s fight to save the family she left behind – her husband (Maksym), mother (Svetlana), aunt (Lyuda), and her aunt’s son (Oleksandr) – all of whom were uprooted by the Russian invasion. Caesar writes,

From Ladenburg, Inna attempted to find a group that could evacuate a bed-bound woman from a seventh-floor apartment in a city under siege. After two weeks of searching, she learned of Fight for Right, an organization that supports Ukrainians with disabilities. Svetlana called the group, and it agreed to help—it would transport Svetlana, Lyuda, and Oleksandr all the way to Ladenburg. (Oleksandr was of fighting age, but, because he was Lyuda’s caregiver, he could legally leave Ukraine.) Svetlana asked Inna whether Fight for Right might evacuate them to Russia instead. No, Inna said.

Evacuate them to Russia? Good god, Svetlana, give your head a shake! 

Caesar’s “Sanctuary” tells the story of one family’s fight to save itself from destruction at the hands of the Russian army. Multiply it by thirteen million, and what do you have? The worst humanitarian catastrophe in Europe since the end of World War II. 

June 20, 2022 Issue

The only piece in this week's issue that appeals to me is Steve Futterman’s delightful “Goings On About Town” note on jazz pianist Alan Broadbent:

The pianist Alan Broadbent is likely known to a wider audience as the astute arranger who helped finesse popular recordings by Natalie Cole and Diana Krall. But he was also the not-so-secret weapon behind Charlie Haden’s “Quartet West,” providing both bopping and rhapsodic keyboard work and offering such romantic, noir-inspired originals as “Hello My Lovely” and “Lady in the Lake.” A trio that joins him with the bassist Don Falzone and the hypersensitive drummer Billy Mintz is a textbook vehicle for Broadbent to display his multifarious gifts as an improviser.

Postscript: Please, no more blurry photos by Ioulex. Looking at them is like looking through a lens smeared with butter. Seek clarity and sharpness, e.g., that extraordinary black-and-white image of the horse by Vanessa Winship, illustrating André Alexis’s short story “Houyhnhnn.”

Photo by Vanessa Winship

June 13, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Peter Schjeldahl’s “Scaling Up,” a review of two art shows. It’s opening line made me smile: “I relish the abundance of relatively—and poignantly—dud paintings in ‘At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism,’ at the Whitney Museum.” It’s both a devastating judgment (the Whitney show is full of duds) and an aesthetic revelation (Schjeldahl has a taste for such things). What constitutes a dud? Schjeldahl tells us:

The distinguishing test, for me, is scale, irrespective of size: all a work’s elements and qualities (even including negative space) must be snugged into its framing edges to consolidate a specific, integral object—present to us, making us present to itself—rather than a more or less diverting handmade picture.

Who are the “dud” artists? Schjeldahl names them: Manierre Dawson, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Patrick Henry Bruce, Max Weber, Elie Nadelman, Gaston Lachaise, Joseph Stella, Oscar Bluemner, Ben Benn, Agnes Pelton.

Wait a minute! Elie Nadelman? I recognize that name. John Updike wrote a wonderful essay on him, “Logic Is Beautiful” (The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003; included in his 2007 essay collection Still Looking), in which he says of Nadelman’s bronze Suppliant (c. 1908-9), “How could one not love her?” But rereading this piece today, I see that Updike wasn’t a Nadelman fan. He wrote,

There is a hermetic quality to his statues, as if they have been sealed against infestations of illogical detail. In his later work, the layer of sealant gets thicker and thicker, and toward the end his figures, fingerless and all but faceless, seem wrapped in veils as thick as blankets.

So I guess Schjeldahl is right; Nadelman is a dud. But he’s an instructive dud. His featureless sculptures show the value of detail. As Updike said, “Beauty lives, surely, in a harmonious excitement of particulars.”

On the Terror of Shell Fire

Photo by Tyler Hicks, from The New York Times

Joshua Yaffa, in his recent “The Fight to Survive Russia’s Onslaught in Eastern Ukraine” (newyorker.com, June 7, 2022), writes, “The war has become, as one soldier told me, a game of ‘artillery Ping-Pong.’ ” This line is used as the piece’s tagline: “The war has become, as one Ukrainian soldier put it, a game of ‘artillery Ping-Pong.’ ” To me, this is a woefully inadequate description of eastern Ukraine reality right now. According to The New York Times, “Russian forces are firing about 60,000 artillery shells and rockets each day in the Donbas fighting” (“Shortage of Artillery Ammunition Saps Ukrainian Frontline Morale," June 10, 2022). I know what Yaffa is trying to get at by using the image: the constant back-and-forth exchange of fire. But “artillery Ping-Pong” belies even that, because what Russia is using for a paddle is about the size of an iron skillet, and what Ukraine is using is the equivalent of a plastic spoon.  

To be shelled by massed artillery is absolutely terrifying. E. B. Sledge, in his classic WWII memoir With the Old Breed (1981), wrote,

To be under heavy shell fire was to me by far the most terrifying of combat experiences. Each time it left me feeling more forlorn and helpless, more fatalistic, and with less confidence that I could escape the dreadful law of averages that inexorably reduced our numbers. Fear is many-faceted and has many subtle nuances, but the terror and desperation endured under heavy shelling are by far the most unbearable.

Yaffa, in his piece, conveys this terror when he recounts the experience of a young Ukrainian paratrooper named Vladislav, who’d fought in a battle near Sievierodonetsk:

It was eleven at night when the Russian barrage started. Vladislav was lying in a trench he had dug in the forest floor. Shells from a 152-millimetre artillery gun started to land around him—large-calibre munitions meant to destroy armored vehicles and groupings of infantry. Vladislav described the experience of finding himself under a cloud of fiery metal. “It starts with a loud whistle and you feel something fly past. Then comes the explosion, followed by the blast wave. Last is the shrapnel, which swarms through the air like flies: thpht thpht thpht,” he said, mimicking the sound. “All you want to do is hide, not breathe, dig deeper in the ground.” The earth heaved and branches snapped as shrapnel ripped through the forest. A tree fell and covered Vladislav in his trench. The blast knocked him unconscious. When he came to, he was plagued by nausea and dizziness, which only got worse when he ate his Canadian-supplied M.R.E.s. After two days, he was evacuated to the hospital and treated for a concussion.

“All you want to do is hide, not breathe, dig deeper in the ground” – this, to me, gets us closer to the hellish reality of shell fire. “Artillery Ping-Pong” doesn’t cut it, unless you’re attempting irony. Maybe that’s the effect Yaffa was aiming for. 

June 6, 2022 Issue

Best sentence in this week’s issue is Andrea K. Scott’s “In the densely collaged, billboard-size ‘LODA,’ a cartoon image of a Black astronaut reading Jet magazine underscores that Halsey is building both a time capsule and a long-range plan, the latter realized here, to exuberantly funked-up effect, in ‘My Hope,’ an eighteen-foot-long model of a teeming block, in which low-rider cars cruise a South Central dreamscape of golden palm trees and Nubian pyramids” (“At the Galleries: Lauren Halsey”). That "exuberantly funked-up effect" is inspired!

Roger Angell's Elegiac Impulse - Part 2

Photo by Sylvia Plachy, from Roger Angell's "Here Below"

Roger Angell had an exquisite sense of life’s transience. I’ve written about this before in relation to his baseball writings (see here). But on the occasion of his recent death, I want to note it again, this time in connection with his two wonderful “cemetery” pieces – “Here Below” (The New Yorker, January 16, 2006; included in his 2006 collection Let Me Finish) and “Over the Wall” (The New Yorker, November 19, 2012; included in his 2015 collection This Old Man).

In “Here Below,” Angell and his wife, Carol, visit three cemeteries: the Palisades, New York, Cemetery; the Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Cemetery; and the Brooklin, Maine, Cemetery. He says of the Palisades Cemetery,

It was a quiet, foggy morning, and once there I felt as if we’d walked into a green and gray room furnished with leaning stones. Many had surfaces thickened with lichen and decay, where inscriptions had become indistinct, with some words missing. It was like a half-heard conversation…. Now, near the western fringe of bushes in the cemetery, Carol found one of the markers we were looking for: a tipping-forward silvery granite oblong, with letters fading into invisibility…. Another eloquent marker nearby was a tall and faded pinkish-brown slab – perhaps it’s brownstone – with a scalloped top and the pleasing old willow-tree-and-stone-urn drawing, barely visible here, that you find in this part of the country.

“Indistinct,” “half-heard,” “fading into invisibility,” “barely visible” – these are descriptions of time’s erasure. Angell repeats the motif in his depiction of the Brooklin Cemetery, where his mother, Katherine Angell, and his stepfather, E. B. White, are buried:

The gravestones are mid-sized with a classic curve along the top and elegant shoulders, but the years have demonstrated that slate – or this slate, at least – ages poorly. A corrective metal sheath or splint now covers the top of both slabs, to check the fine-cracks that have appeared along the sides and front. The fading slate, now silvered to a happier tone, has almost smoothed away the names and dates. Soon the Whites’ wish for privacy, well known to everyone in town, will be complete.

Describing the Brooklin Cemetery, Angell casually mentions that fifteen years ago he and Carol purchased burial plots there for themselves. He says,

Fifteen years ago, Carol and I met here with the friendly cemetery representative (a sign on his pickup truck advertised his other line of work, taxidermy) and for two hundred and twenty dollars signed on for a nice double, close to an oak tree in the northeast corner.

Note that “nice double”; Angell seems comfortable with death.

In “Over the Wall,” written six years later, Angell is back in the Brooklin Cemetery. This time he’s visiting not only the graves of his mother and stepfather, but Carol’s as well. He tells us she died last April. He writes,

My visits to Carol didn’t last long. I’d perk up the flowers in the vase we had there, and pick deadheads off a pot of yellow daisies; if there had been rain overnight, I’d pick up any pieces of the sea glass that had fallen and replace them on the gentle curve and small shoulders of her stone.

He mentions that he and Carol both have gravestones: 

My decision to have my gravestone put in at the same time as Carol’s, in early August – it only lacks the final numbers – wasn’t easy, but has turned out to be comforting, not creepy. Broklin is much too far away just now – I live in New York – but the notion that before long my familiar June trip back there will be for good is only keeping a promise.

The piece concludes with Angell walking in the oldest part of Brooklin Cemetery. He says of the graves there,

These are marble or granite headstones, for the most part, but all are worn to an almost identical whiteness. Some of the lettering has been blackened by lichen, and some washed almost to invisibility.

Worn to an almost identical whiteness … washed almost to invisibility. Angell seemed at home in cemeteries. They confirmed his acute sense of life’s ephemerality. 

May 30, 2022 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Lauren Collins’s “Soaking It In” and William Finnegan’s “Big Breaks.” In “Soaking It In," Collins visits the Thermes les Dômes, one of several spa facilities in Vichy, France. She takes the mud treatment:

I was two minutes late for my treatment. “Oh là,” the therapist clucked, looking at her watch. She instructed me to undress—the spa provided a disposable G-string—and to sit on a table covered with a plastic sheet. Without further discussion, she began daubing my back at strategic points with steaming, tawny mud. When she had finished, she eased me into a reclining position and folded the sheet around me, forming a sort of Hot Pocket in which the mud was the cheese and I was the ham.

She drinks the spring water:

I filled a cup and tried it. Rotten eggs and cabbage soup—yes. But chalky, too. I felt like I had licked a blackboard.

And, most memorably, she undergoes the douche à jet:

Later that morning, I visited the hydrotherapy rooms, where I was greeted by a therapist in a black T-shirt and pants, topped with a black plastic apron. I went into a changing stall to hang up my robe.

“Should I leave my bathing suit on?” I called, over the door.

“You can, but it’s better without.”

Soon I was standing stark naked at the far end of a narrow, gray-tiled room, clutching the side bars of a waist-high metal support. About ten feet away, the therapist was unfurling a thick hose from a wall mount.

“Turn to the right,” she said. “Ready?”

I braced myself. The water pressure was intense—almost strong enough to clean a sidewalk. I could taste the salt. The therapist was yelling instructions, but I could hardly hear them over the roar of the spray. She started with my ankles, working methodically up the line: calves, thighs, butt, triceps, shoulders. As she power-washed my back, I fixated on a single thought: Please don’t hit a mole!

“Lift up your feet,” she said.

She hosed down my soles. Then my palms. My whole body was being spray-painted, and she was determined not to miss a spot.

At the end of the treatment, the therapist had me turn toward her. Here it was: the full-on douche à jet, straight to the gut. I closed my eyes and thought of the circulatory benefits.

When she asked if I’d like a final blast of cold water, I surprised myself by saying yes.

Wow! What a great scene! That “I could taste the salt” is pure Collins. Her style is both factual and sensuous. 

Finnegan’s “Big Breaks” profiles extraordinary big-wave surfer Kai Lenny. What makes him extraordinary? Finnegan shows us. He describes a video of Lenny surfing at Nazaré, one of the main arenas of big-wave surfing:

He starts by fading left on an absolutely massive black wall of water, and then reverses direction, driving hard against the grain. The wave is a solid seventy feet by the time he reaches the bottom, but it isn’t the height that stops your eye. It’s the concentrated power of the ocean behind him: probably the hardest-breaking wave ever photographed at Nazaré. Then Kai, turning sharply and slicing cleanly up the face, changes rails and gives it a little downcarve. If you don’t know that he’s surfing straight at a cliff, it probably seems less insane. Still, the nonchalance on a seventy-foot death wave is indelible, which is why they’re playing it over and over in an ad.

At Nazaré, Finnegan watches Lenny attempt a super-dangerous, near-fatal surfing move:

And yet Kai ended up going right. He later said that he had misjudged the takeoff, and let the left get away from him. But it was breathtaking, seeing him run against the grain of the swell on a very large wave. He accelerated, now low in the face, then hit a stack of small wavelets coming off the cliff. It was like running over speed bumps while going eighty on a highway. His fins began to cavitate. His board flipped in the air, bucking him off, and the whole wave landed on him from a considerable height. He later said that his jersey was pulled over his head, so that he couldn’t get to the rip cords for his inflation vest. He was underwater for quite a while.

I was at the lighthouse, looking down on the action. Chumbo was running the ski behind the wave, and when Kai didn’t appear on his board he swerved left toward the turbulence. Kai’s head finally popped up. Chumbo raced to him, slung him onto the rubber sled that rides behind the ski, and gunned it. The next wave was a foamy mess, and Chumbo hit it sideways. The ski went up on its side, and Chumbo tumbled into the water. Kai hung on to the driverless ski for another second or two, before it flipped over and the whole contraption went over the falls. It was a yard sale, with intensely swirling currents, but the two surfers seemed unruffled. Chumbo was mostly concerned that he had lost his phone. He yelled something to Kai, who turned and swam seaward until he found it. Then they were both thrown on the sand by the shore break, along with their tumbling, eight-hundred-pound vehicle.

Again, wow! That is a superb piece of descriptive writing! “Big Breaks” contains other lines equally as good. This one for example:

All the takeoffs were elevator drops, but the faces, some as big as fifty feet, were unusually clean. Kai was taking off extremely deep, chipping in early with crazy paddling power, and then turning hard as the waves spat clouds of trapped air. 

And this:

The only time the waves seem to have any heft at all is when the rider gets deeply barrelled. Suddenly, we’re in a blue room with walls of rushing water, and we’re being pursued by a horizontal waterfall and a fire hose of mist.

Collins and Finnegan are two of The New Yorker’s best writers. These two pieces – “Soaking It In” and “Big Breaks” – exemplify their art at its finest.

3 for the Sea: Place

This is the sixth 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 focus on their description of place.

Charleston, Cartagena, Valparaiso, Balboa, Lima, Guayaquil, Jacksonville, Savannah – just some of the places that figure in McPhee’s Looking for a Ship. McPhee beautifully sketches some of them. For example: 

Glimpses of Guayaquil: Heavy construction, bamboo scaffolding … Rubber trees in the medians of streets … Shrimp cocktails in double goblets – the cooked shrimp in a glass sphere, surrounded by live, swimming fish … A checkerboard on a bicycle seat – a game being played with bottle caps, half of them upside down … In the heart of the city, the perched iguanas high in the branches of trees … The four clocks of the cathedral towers, each agreeing with the others, all correct twice a day. In the broad savannas across the Guayas, dark beans drying in the sun, green bananas beside the road. Papayas. Pineapples. Mangoes. Cane. The shrubs of coffee. The evergreen cacao. Billboards warning of “DROGADDICCIÓN.” A clear-plastic bag of what appears to be gazpacho hanging from the handlebars of a policeman’s motocycle. Since the ship sails in two hours, it is time to return to the ship.

I devour such descriptions. I wish there were more of them. But Guayaquil and the other destinations on Stella’s itinerary aren’t McPhee’s focal point. That “time to return to the ship” tells the story. The place at the heart of this narrative is the ship itself.

Here are some of the things that McPhee tells us about Stella:

“This ship is very strongly built,” Washburn says. “She’s sturdy and reliable. There’s lots of horsepower down there. She will answer the rudder. She will respond. She’s a capable and trustworthy ship. You know what she’ll do and you know her limitations. They aren’t crucial, but you can’t expect her to do things where you know she’s a little short. You can’t suddenly demand that of her and expect to get it. It isn’t there. She’s American-built. There’s good steel in the hull. Those frames are close together. She’ll roll on a following sea, but she’s got a high-raised fo’c’sle head and a sharp bow. She’s built for rough weather. She’s built for rough handling. She’s built to take seas and fight back. You cannot overpower seas. But she can deal with what’s out there. She was built to go to Scandinavia in the middle of winter. 

There is a lot of pentimento on the bows of the Stella Lykes. Former names are visible, even in fading light. The ship was built in 1964 and stretched in 1982. When she belonged to Moore-McCormack, she was called the Mormacargo. After Moore-McCormack died and United States Lines bought her, she became the American Argo. After United States Lines died, Lykes Brothers chartered her from financial receivers.

Understand: this ship is about the length of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Rockefeller Center, Pennsylvania Station, Union Square. To berth her you need almost three city blocks. With her piled-high containers divided by canyons under the jumbo boom, she is, if nothing else, labyrinthine.

McPhee roams Stella’s decks and compartments, talking to crew members, describing what he sees. Here he’s in the lookout station:

Sometimes I go on lookout with Peewee, Mac, or Calvin – go forward with a flashlight on the main deck at four, up the ladder to the fo’c’sle deck, around the windlasses and the anchor chains, and past the hawsepipes to the absolute point of the bow, where the lookout station conforms to the requirements of admiralty court, being “as far forward and as lowdown as conditions allow.” The lookout stands in a roofless cupboard. A sheet of clear plastic deflects the wind. He is not quite like a fly on a bowsprit, but somewhere near it – projected far over the water, over the nose bulb, and riding up and down the Pacific swells. He stands there, and stays there, in rain and lightning.

And here he’s in the officers’ dining room:

I remember the first time I appeared in the officers’ dining room for dinner. The captain was there, and Andy Chase, and Bernie Tibbotts. All three had been served and were eating. No one else was present. Tibbotts sat alone at a table, facing the opposite wall. The captain, at his table, sat with his back to a third wall, looking into the room, and into the space between the turned backs of Chase and Tibbotts. Franz Kafka was up in the ceiling, crawling on a fluorescent tube. No one spoke. No one so much as nodded when I came in. I sat down where I was supposed to: at a fourth table, across the room from the captain, I looked at him through the slot between the other men’s backs. I did not have – I’m here to tell you – the temerity to speak.

That “Franz Kafka was up in the ceiling, crawling on a fluorescent tube” makes me smile every time I read it. 

The first two chapters of O’Hanlon’s Trawler take place mostly on land; the rest of it happens on the ship. Our first view of the Norlantean is at the quay in Scrabster harbour:

“Another layer,” said Luke, opening the hatchback. “And oilskins.” So we pulled on our second sweaters (naval blue), took off our shoes in the slush, clambered into our oilskin trousers (his: yellow; mine: bright orange; and Luke showed me that it was possible to not to strangle yourself in the curl of rubberized braces), put on our yellow sea-boots. To our left, the sixteen wheeler articulated trucks, the giant refrigerated transports, waited in their loading bays. To our right, on the edge of the quay, a line of Herring gulls stood, at strict gull-personal-space intervals, between the big mooring-bollards, disconsolate, not in talking mode, staring out to sea, their feathers puffed up against the cold. Along to our left one of those derelict trawlers was berthed: her upper hull had once been painted orange, her wheelhouse and decking white; but she was now so streaked and stained and patterned with rust, her steel plates so bobbled with layers of paint and rust, that she seemed alive, to be herself and no one else, to have grown old and used and wrinkled, and was now, where she lay, close to death. To my surprise, I saw that the diesel-tanker truck parked on the quay beside her actually had its fuel hose extended over her stern; that men in the back of a container lorry were lobbing empty white plastic fish-boxes on to her deck.

“The Norlantean!” said Luke, quickening his pace. “Isn’t she beautiful? What a conversion! Look at that! Wow! Redmond! You’d never guess she was the old Dorothy Gray!”

We go aboard with O’Hanlon and Luke; immediately the world shrinks to the dimensions of the Norlantean’s steel decks and compartments: bridge, cabins, fish-room, galley, hold. This is where the rest of the book takes place (except for an evening ashore in Stromness before the ship heads out). Here, for example, is O’Hanlon and Luke’s cabin: 

Four bunks, in two tiers, filled the dark airless cabin. Luke said, as one practised in such matters, “Lights? Lockers? Toilets? Showers?” He threw a heavy metal switch by the door and a lamp (in industrial protective casing) came on: by its small glow we could see that the mattresses on the two lower bunks were piled high with discarded clothes, sleeping-bags, rammed-in cardboard boxes and the ship’s supply of lavatory rolls.

“A shower!” said Luke, stepping between the beds towards a cubby-hole in the bows. The door of the makeshift shower-room, crumpled in the middle as if it had taken a heavy blow to the stomach, had come off its bottom hinge and was tied back with string. In the left-hand corner of the room was a lavatory; Luke pushed down the flush-lever. “It works!” he said, delighted. And then, looking around, “Christ!” he said. And we stared at huge, inward bulge on the outward-slanting plates of the bow. “Big style!” said Luke. “Sean told me that Charlie Simpson, the second skipper, had had a ding, He hit something. But no one seems bothered … And anyway, Redmond, we’ll be fine. She’s double-hulled.”

And here, in one of the book’s most beautiful passages, is the fish-room:

“Come on, we’ll set up here.” He stepped across to the flat steel shelf beside a conveyor belt which divided the cavernous fish-room into two: a steel-sided, steel-grilled trackway that led from a tall, round, stainless-steel table (down to our left) to a closed hatch at my feet. A slosh of seawater, shin-high, washed across the dark brown swollen slippery wooden floorboards with each roll and, as the ship bent shuddering over to port, a part of the wave of slush and foam ladled itself out via the half-open drop-gate of the port scupper. As she rolled further over and down, fresh white seawater powered in, to toss and curl, as the ship righted herself, straight across to starboard, to repeat the process. “Grand!” said Luke, switching on his scales (a red light appeared to the left of the long calibrated dial). “Magic! It works – even in seas like this!” The steel ceiling of the fish-room was a confusion of pipes and cables (some encased in steel tubes, some simply slung and looped); strip lights; fuse boxes. The stainless-steel sides of the hopper occupied about one-fifth of the space, down in the left-hand corner, and from it another shorter conveyor belt led up to the circular rimmed table. To our right, to the right of the bulkhead door to the galley, lay a wide-diameter ribbed tube, an augur of sorts, a length of giant gut. Directly aft, at the end of the rectangular cavern, another open bulkhead door let dimly through to the net-deck, where the big winches for the bridle stood back-lit by the early morning light streaming in from the stern-ramp, from the bright surface of the heaped-up, following sea.

O’Hanlon’s capture of the light in that last line is ravishing!

Raban’s Passage to Juneau differs from Looking for a Ship and Trawler; it has a broader canvas. The world it describes is nothing less than the entire one-thousand-mile Inside Passage – its myriad channels, bays, and seaports. I relish Raban’s flâneurial approach: after a day on the water, he docks his boat and goes ashore for a drink or a meal or just to nose around. 

In Sidney, he has supper at a Chinese restaurant called the Phoenix, and then walks the town’s main street. At the grocery store, he buys “three grizzly-bear postcards,” and mails them to his daughter Julia at the post office.

At the Dockside Motel-Pub-Café, in Crofton, he ploughs happily through the $8.95 turkey dinner while reading a volume of Captain George Vancouver’s journal: “Vancouver was propped open between the ketchup bottle, verso, and the mustard- squirt, recto.”

In Shearwater, he attends a Saturday-night party at the recently rebuilt fishing resort: “I had to fight my way through the dancers to get to the bar, where I stood in the crush trying to signal two whiskeys. While waiting, I saw the band’s name on the face of the bass drum: the Charred Remains.” 

Vananda, Minstrel Island, Potts Lagoon, Port McNeill, Klemtu, Prince Rupert, Port Simpson, Ketchikan, Meyers Chuck, Wrangell, Petersburg, Juneau – all places that Raban visits. He has a particular fondness for the jumble of sheds, wharves and canneries lining the eastern shore of Wrangell Narrows. He writes,

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 needed no sheltering harbour wall, so the boats were scattered piecemeal along a mile of pilings, moorings, piers, and floating docks, making the town more like a fleet at anchor than a permanent settlement. The whole place rippled and shimmered. I felt faintly dizzy as I tied up among the reflections, then went to report to the harbormaster’s office. 

All three of these books are exceptional, not just in terms of their site-specificity, but in terms of their description of people. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.