3 for the Sea: Conclusion

This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts on my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), and Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003). Today, I’ll try to sum up my reading experience.

One of my main purposes in launching this series was that I wanted to get to know these books better. I wanted to see how they’re put together, how they work. I feel I’ve accomplished that. But in focusing on their formal aspects – structure, perspective, description, etc. – I see that I’ve neglected their meaning. All three are about vivid personal experience – that’s obvious. But each has a specific meaning, too. Looking for a Ship is about the decline of the U.S. Merchant Marine. It ends, symbolically, with Stella “dead in the water.” Passage to Juneau is about turbulence: “If you want a mirror for your own existence, you need look no further than tumbling rapids or the strings of dying whirlpools downtide of a piling.” Trawler is about fish – the fascinating variety of strange species that live in the wild North Atlantic ((“By the tail, which was not a fish-tail as you might imagine it, but several inches of raw-hide whip, I hoisted the 2-foot-long, huge-headed, slender-bodied, grey-silver, big-scaled, armour-plated, snub-snouted, underslung-mouthed pre-human fish to eye-level – and eye-to-eye it was truly disturbing, because its eyeball was three times the size of mine”).

But to reduce these great books to a single message does them serious injustice. For me, their true meaning resides in their splendid art of description. This, for example:

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]

And this:

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]

And this:

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]

On and on – these books are endlessly quotable. I love them. I don’t want to let go of them. What is the key to their art? What draws me to them? I think it’s their glorious specificity. Not just an albatross, but an albatross flying by “with his right leg up scratching his ear”; not just waves, but 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”; not just an octopus, but a “semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through.” Every word and line is definite, specific, evocative. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three wonderful books. I picture it like this: ropes, nets, red and yellow oilskins; the Norlantean (searchlights blazing in the black winter night); a Greenland halibut; a red Jacobs biscuit-box; a wooden-handled gutting knife; a map of the North Atlantic; a Rabbit fish; a green nylon sleeping bag; a kittiwake; W. D. Hamilton; a Nikon FM2 camera; a thick dry biscuit; a blue rubber glove; a Merchant Marine license; the Stella Lykes (piled high with containers); an albatross; a bunch of bananas; Charles Darwin; the pentimento on Stella’s bows; a pirogue full of pirates; a monocular on a nylon cord; a map of South America’s Pacific coast; Franz Kafka; a red plastic jug; two black balls flying from a mast; a map of the Inside Passage; the Penelope (mainsail up, headsail out to starboard); Franz Boas, a red-and-black-painted Haida canoe; Captain George Vancouver; a whirlpool, a Dall’s porpoise; a lava lamp; a cormorant; HMS Discovery under full sail; a hand compass; an elderly wooden purse-seiner; a tugboat pulling a raft of logs; an orange helicopter lifting a sling containing a log; a painting of a raven’s eye inside an ovoid frame; a Venetian glass trade-bead (the color of a kumquat); a floathouse; a razor-slashed barstool; a cannery built out on stilts over the water; a chum salmon. Overlap these images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and randomly across its surface paint three zigzag blue lines representing the waves of the Pacific, North Atlantic, and Inside Passage. I call my collage “O’Pheeban.”