3 for the Sea: Nature

This is the ninth 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 wonderful nature descriptions.

Part of the deep pleasure these books provide is a thrilling contact with first nature:

Albatrosses

Albatrosses flew beside us, motionless to the point of impudence, their eyes on our necks, their great wings fixed, their iron momentum matching the ship’s. At bridge level, sixty-five feet above the water, an albatross flew beside us with his right leg up scratching his ear. [Looking for a Ship]

Plankton

A teaspoonful of Puget Sound water yielded a whole world of Hollywood monsters: copepods; rotifiers; flagellates, their whips flailing on the glass. Each time I dipped the slide in the bucket, the cast changed: new wrigglies waved spiky antennae, inflated their balloon-like luminescent torsos, flexed their cilia, flapped rubbery watery wings, or gazed up at me with vacant soccer-ball eyes. [Passage to Juneau]

Porpoises

A new sound entered the orchestra: the explosive chuff! of a Dall’s porpoise surfacing along side the boat. Chuff! Chuff! Chuff! Six black-and-white torpedoes, in close formation, went scissoring under the bow, came up to exhale, then shot astern, where they wheeled around in unison before launching another mock attack. Bantam weight, pure muscle, they whizzed past on the beam, just a few inches below the surface, in a show-off wriggle of exultant flesh. [Passage to Juneau]

Kittiwakes and Gannets

The kittiwakes and the gannets rose into the wind, banking round towards the cod-end. The Kittiwakes alighted alongside the line of net (and they seemed so light, so delicate, so out of place in all this unremitting violence); they rode the small waves on the big swell with ease; they flicked up their wings as they pecked at the mesh. The gannets, 60 or 70 feet above the surface-hills of the sea, would flip over to one side, half close their 6-foot expanse of wing, and, elbows out, streak down towards the cod-end in one long low oblique-angled dive, folding their wings tight against their bodies, a second before impact, to become a white underwater trace of bird and bubbles. [Trawler]

Waves

Dawn came. The air, Fahrenheit, was sixty-two. There was a head wind at Force 7. The sea was heaping up, and there were whitecaps everywhere, and high spray, and the foam of breaking waves made streaks in the direction of the wind. [Looking for a Ship]

Boils and Eddies

Deception Pass was like a lava lamp on a heroic scale. As the tide entered the funnel, it felt the tightening constraint of the land; the bottom shallowed, and house-sized boulders tripped the water up and made it tumble. With far too much sea trying to escape through far too small an aperture, liquid panic broke out in the pass. The obstructed tide welled up vertically in mushroom-topped boils a dozen yards across or spun impotently around in great saucer-shaped eddies. The surface of the water was pitted with small, traveling whirlpools. Everything was on the move on its own eccentric curvilinear track. [Passage to Juneau]

Rabbit Fish

The monstrous chimera, the mythical freak, two or three feet long, was on its back, its creamy underside shiny with slime, its pectoral fins like wings, and where its neck should have been was a small oval of a mouth set with teeth like a rabbit’s. [Trawler]

Anglerfish

Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complementary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials … And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something – it wanted to eat. And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste, haute cuisine, no, that was not its thing. Not at all … [Trawler]

Octopus

At the centre of my field of vision, at the bottom of the steep, inward-angled, stainless-steel panels of the tall container, to the right of four Greenland halibut which lay where they’d slid (just below the lower lip of the open drop-gate to the conveyor), there spread across the slopes of the floor, there swirled around Luke’s yellow sea-boots, a semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through, a something from another world, a dead creature which, as I stared, resolved itself into far too many long viscid arms studded with white boils, eruptions, suckers to hold you fast … [Trawler]

Snotfish

In his right palm he held a 6-inch-long fat little brown glob of a fish: its small black eyes sat on top of its head, and such a big head, an upward tilted mouth, a huge double chin; yes, a fat-old-man of a head, a glutton of an old man, dribbling a fork-load of spaghetti which had slipped from his lower lip and stuck to his protruding neck. [Trawler]

Glaucous Gulls

The light was thin and white and pure and, somehow, directed upwards – and there, right above us, in this light I had never seen before, hung three gulls from the Arctic ice-cliffs, but their heavy barrel-bodies, their broad wings, their butch heads (they were looking down, straight at me, mildly interested, suspended in this extreme northern world of theirs, a hundred feet above us), seemed to be pink, a dull pink. [Trawler]

Herring Gulls

Out in the middle, a slovenly army of herring gulls was snacking on tidbits thrown up by the flux. They yelled and jostled, fighting over whatever loose body parts had been left behind by such submarine scavengers as the dogfish and squid: an old anemone tubercle, half a flatworm, a bit of decayed starfish arm, a fibrous morsel of rancid crabmeat. [Passage to Juneau]

Rapids

Off Big Bay, great curds of yeasty scum marked the sites of rips and whirlpools that were now nearly extinct. A few logs and uprooted kelp stems continued to revolve in patches of broken water. But the surviving eddies were flaccid, and there was no real heart in their attempts to wrench the steering from my hands. The boat sauntered at eight knots going on nine, through Gillard Passage and Dent Rapids – a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks. [Passage to Juneau]

Tide

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. [Passage to Juneau]

More Waves

The waves came hissing at the transom. Only a few minutes old, born as wrinkles 800 yards away across the channel, already they were mature and grizzle-bearded. Blocklike, lumpy, they packed a big wallop for their size. Pale ribbons of dissolving foam streaked the inky water, and the boat was being jostled with sufficient force to make me double-up the mooring ropes. [Passage to Juneau]

Wind

I’d just stowed my bucket when a sudden rush of wind came down the funnel of the strait, like an unprovoked punch delivered out of nowhere. The boat corkscrewed. The genoa-sheet, bar-tight, groaned on the drum of the winch. I feared for the stitching of the sail as the fabric swelled under the impact of the wind, which had begun to yodel nastily in the rigging. In no time at all, the ruffled water changed to a short, steep, breaking sea. [Passage to Juneau]

Roundnose Grenadier

And at last, for us, the haul was over … When Luke – so thin, young, wiry, so manic and committed – bent down, quick as a cat-strike, and came up with a yard-long fish of sorts (where had he stored that? Aye, as he might have said, of course, under his stand-on fish-box …): a fish that, in its bulk, was all head, with a short and rounded snout tipped with horny plates, a large underslung mouth – and a thin following body which tapered down to a real look-alike rat-tail, which was all the more convincing because its muscly last few inches were young-rat pink. [Trawler]

Hagfish

Light brown, a foot long, three-quarters of an inch thick, muscular, cylindrical, it appeared to have no fins – unless that narrow keel of wrinkled flesh snaking down the centre of its underside and vertically folded into hundreds of little flags – unless that was a fin? And what were those white pimples – two lines of them, one to either side of the fin, the central fringe of flesh? There were two regular rows of tiny white raised roundels – as if the animal had been-doubled slashed with a razor all the way along the underneath of its bendy shaft of a body, and the twin slits stitched, and it now bore the scars: the entry and exit holes of a fine needle … [Trawler]

Note the many brilliant figures of speech: the lower jaw of an anglerfish “set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting”; a snotfish with “a fat-old-man of a head, a glutton of an old man, dribbling a fork-load of spaghetti which had slipped from his lower lip and stuck to his protruding neck”; rapids – “a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks”; on and on. McPhee, Raban, and O’Hanlon create inspired figuration. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.