Toward My Own Theory of Description: Refrigerant and Relieving

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Dora Zhang’s absorbing Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (2020) inspires me to formulate my own theory of description – one that applies to factual writing. Over the next couple of months, I’ll post a series of notes, in which I’ll analyze a particular passage of description that I relish. What are its elements? How does it work? Why am I drawn to it? These are the some of the questions I’ll address. In the process, I’m hoping that my own theory of description will emerge. 

Today, I’ll start with one of my favorite passages of description – the opening paragraph of John McPhee’s great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; included in his 1977 masterwork Coming into the Country): 

My bandanna is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head and now and again dip it into the river. The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving. This has done away with the headaches that the sun caused in days before. The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good. Meanwhile, the river – the clearest, purest water I have ever seen flowing over rocks – breaks the light into flashes and sends them upward into my eyes. The headaches have reminded me of the kind that are sometimes caused by altitude, but for all the fact that we have come down through mountains, we have not been higher than a few hundred feet above the level of the sea. Drifting now – a canoe, two kayaks – and thanking God it is not my turn in either of the kayaks, I lift my fish rod from the tines of a caribou rack (lashed there in mid-canoe to the duffel) and send a line flying toward a wall of bedrock by the edge of the stream. A grayling comes up and, after some hesitation, takes the lure and runs with it for a time. I disengage the lure and let the grayling go, being mindful not to wipe my hands on my shirt. Several days in use, the shirt is approaching filthy, but here among grizzly bears, I would prefer to stink of humanity than of fish.

Note the use of the present tense. Note the first-person perspective. Note the extraordinary specificity – bandanna “rolled on the diagonal,” the water “refrigerant and relieving,” the sun, “penetrating, intense,” the fishing rod, lifted “from the tines of a caribou rack (lashed there in mid-canoe to the duffel),” the filthy shirt, stinking of humanity. We are there with McPhee, in that canoe, paddling through grizzly bear country, the Arctic light striking our eyes. This is total immersion. And I am hooked (just like that grayling). 

I love the way temperature in this passage is tangibly indicated. McPhee not only tells us the river is cold (“The water is forty-six degrees”); he puts us in physical contact with it (“Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving.... Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good”). We feel its coldness. This is what I call sensory description. The most common form of it is visual. Zhang, in her Strange Likeness, defines description as “a form of textual visualizing.” But it’s more than just visual, as the above passage shows. It’s also textual touching, smelling, hearing, and tasting. In my next post in this series, I’ll look at a wonderful description of aroma.