Taking a Break

Humber Bay Arch Bridge, Toronto (Photo by Tanya Mok, from blogto.com)

Today, Lorna and I travel to Toronto to do some cycling. I’m taking the April 15 New Yorker with me. I’ll post my review when I return. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about April 28. 

On James Wood: Fact v. Fiction

James Wood (Photo by Hans Glave)

Warning: this is a rant. But I'll try to keep it brief.

Can a novel be relied on as biography? To me, the obvious answer is no. A novel is by definition fiction. Therefore, it’s inherently unreliable. James Wood, in his “A Life More Ordinary” (The New Yorker, April 8, 2024) seems to have a different view. He refers to V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. He says that in writing it, Naipaul was “essentially writing the life of his own father, Seepersad Naipaul.” The key word is “essentially.” I take it to mean that, in Wood’s view, Biswas embodies the core of Seepersad’s character, but not every detail. He’s a reasonable facsimile, but not a clone. Is this true? I don’t think so. Wood, in his 1999 essay “The Real Mr. Biswas” (included in his great 2005 collection The Irresponsible Self), points out that Seepersad’s letters to his son Vidia “show that Naipaul’s father was less naïve, much less unlettered, and more worldly than Mr. Biswas.” To me, these are fundamental differences. Seepersad Naipaul is not Mr. Biswas. A House for Mr. Biswas should not be read as his biography. Novelists alter, heighten, and omit facts. In “A Life More Ordinary,” Wood praises Amitava Kumar’s new novel My Beloved Life for its “autobiographical power.” Okay, but novels aren’t autobiography. Or put it this way: they aren’t reliable autobiography. Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because it bugs me to see a great critic like Wood (one of my heroes, actually) seemingly oblivious of the slippery ground he’s on when he blurs the line between fact and fiction. 

Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (Part I)

This is the first in my series “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists,” a celebration of Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023), in which I’ll select four of my favorite pieces from each collection (one per month) and try to say why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Thurman’s wonderful “First Impressions” (June 23, 2008). 

In this piece, Thurman explores the fascinating world of cave paintings. She visits, in the Ardèche region of south-central France, the base camp of a group of researchers dedicated to the study of the Chauvet Cave. She describes the layout and contents of the Chauvet Cave. She discusses the meaning of cave art. And, in my favorite part, she goes with a guide inside the Niaux Cave and describes her experience:

The floor near the mouth was fairly flat, but as we went deeper it listed and swelled unpredictably. Water was dripping, and sometimes it sounded like a sinister whispered conversation. The caves are full of eerie noises that gurgle up from the bowels of the earth, yet I had a feeling of traversing a space that wasn’t terrestrial. We were, in fact, walking on the bed of a primordial river. Where the passage narrowed, we squeezed between two rocks, like a turnstile, marked with four lines. They were swipes of a finger dipped in red pigment that resembled a bar code, or symbolic flames. Further along, there was a large panel of dots, lines, and arrows, some red, some black. I felt their power without understanding it until I recalled what Norbert Aujoulat had told me about the signs at Cussac. He was the second modern human to explore the cave, in 2000, the year it was unearthed, some twenty-two thousand years after the painters had departed. (The first was Cussac’s discoverer, Marc Delluc.) “As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper, noting where they’d broken off stalagmites to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say, ‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”

They make their way to “one of the grandest bestiaries in Paleolithic art” – the Black Salon, a rotunda a hundred and thirty feet in diameter:

Scores of animals were painted in sheltered spots on the floor, or etched in charcoal on the soaring walls: bison, stags, ibex, aurochs, and, what is rarer, fish (salmon), and Niaux’s famous “bearded horses”—a shaggy, short-legged species that, Clottes writes in his new book, has been reintroduced from their native habitat, in Central Asia, to French wildlife parks. All these creatures are drawn in profile with a fine point, and some of their silhouettes have been filled in with a brush or a stumping cloth. I looked for a little ibex, twenty-one inches long, that Clottes had described to me as the work of a perfectionist, and one of the most beautiful animals in a cave. When I found him, he looked so perky that I couldn’t help laughing. Alard was patient, and, since time loses its contours underground, I didn’t know how long we had spent there. “I imagine that you want to see more,” he said after a while, so we moved along.

“First Impressions” is an absorbing tour of some of the world’s most spectacular prehistoric art. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man" Revisited

O. J. Simpson (Photo by Vince Bucci)

“If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit,” Johnnie Cochran told the jury, in O. J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial. And that’s what they did – they acquitted. It’s one of the most breathtaking verdicts in the history of criminal law, flying in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming evidence of guilt. Simpson’s death this week brought back memories of that riveting trial. It also reminded me of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s New Yorker essay on the case – “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” (October 23, 1995). Last night, I reread it. What an extraordinary piece of writing! It begins brilliantly:

“Every day, in every way, we are getting meta and meta,” the philosopher John Wisdom used to say, venturing a cultural counterpart to Émile Coué’s famous mantra of self-improvement. So it makes sense that in the aftermath of the Simpson trial the focus of attention has been swiftly displaced from the verdict to the reaction to the verdict, and then to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict, and, finally, to the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict—which is to say, black indignation at white anger at black jubilation at Simpson’s acquittal. It’s a spiral made possible by the relay circuit of race. Only in America.

Gates looks at the case from many angles. He sees it as counternarrative: “To believe that Simpson is innocent is to believe that a terrible injustice has been averted, and this is precisely what many black Americans, including many prominent ones, do believe.” He sees it as blacks’ distrust of the justice system: “Wynton Marsalis says, ‘My worst fear is to have to go before the criminal justice system.’ Absurdly enough, it’s mine, too.” He sees it as soap opera: “So there you have it: the Simpson trial – black entertainment television at its finest.” He sees it as black prowess in the courtroom: “By the same token, the display of black prowess in the courtroom was heartening for many black viewers.” I found it heartening, too. And inspiring. Johnnie Cochran became one of my heroes. 

Most compellingly, Gates sees it as “racial reduction” and argues strongly against it. He says,

Yet to accept the racial reduction (“WHITES V. BLACKS,” as last week’s Newsweek headline had it) is to miss the fact that the black community itself is riven, and in ways invisible to most whites.

He goes on to say that he himself was convinced of Simpson’s guilt and was “stunned” by the verdict. 

I think it’s fair to say that many people reacted the same way. I remember being at the Merchantman Pub, in Charlottetown, when the verdict came down. The place was packed. All eyes were on the TV screen above the bar. There were four other lawyers at my table. We took bets on whether the verdict would be guilty or not guilty. I was the only one who bet not guilty. Why? It had nothing to do with race. I’d been following the trial and I was impressed with the way Simpson’s defence team had shredded the prosecution’s case – no search warrant, improperly stored DNA, and so on, not to mention that bloody glove found at the murder scene that didn’t fit Simpson’s hand. I felt there was a good chance the jury would throw the case out. 

One aspect of the trial that Gates doesn’t discuss is Simpson’s wealth, which enabled him to hire some of the best defence attorneys in America. That’s an advantage most of us don’t have. I’m not downplaying the so-called “race divide.” It was surely a major factor in Simpson’s case. But his trial also illustrates a wealth divide. People who can afford to hire top notch lawyers to defend them are more likely to avoid being found guilty than people who can’t.

Gates concludes his piece by likening OJ’s trial to an “empty vessel” into which each of us pours our own meanings. I agree. The verdict is endlessly interpretable.

April 8, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Robert Sullivan’s delightful “Talk” story “Find a Grave." It’s about three members of Dervish, a band from Ireland’s County Sligo, and their search for the grave of Michael Coleman, a Sligo fiddler. Coleman is buried in St. Raymond’s Cemetery, in the Bronx. The trio rent a vehicle and use GPS to find St. Raymond’s. The process isn’t straightforward. Sullivan writes, “Kelly was busy with his phone. The cemetery offices, he discovered, were closed, and the precise location of Coleman’s grave was inscrutable.” But they persist and eventually find Coleman’s grave. They gather around it and play a tune in Coleman’s honor:

Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called “Sligo Maid.” Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. “That’s Coleman!” Kelly said. Tunes started up again as a plane departed LaGuardia.

Kelly smiled. “This is a big moment for us.”

“It’s practically spiritual,” Mitchell said.

After a while, they packed up their instruments. Clouds had covered the sun. Mitchell put his hands in his pockets and shivered. “It’s cold, lads,” he said.

The piece is practically a prose poem. I love it. Sullivan is a master “Talk” story writer. This is one of his best.

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #7 "George V. Higgins's Profane Style"

George V. Higgins (Photo by Benno Friedman)

This is the fourth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “George V. Higgins’s Profane Style” (August 29, 2014):

My favorite part of James Wood’s superb "Away Thinking About Things" (The New Yorker, August 25, 2014), a review of James Kelman’s new story collection If It Is Your Life, is his consideration of the way Kelman “repeats and refines ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ ”:

A single sentence will deploy the same word differently. “If it was me I’d just tell them to fuck off; away and fuck I’d tell them, that’s what I’d say if it was me,” the narrator thinks in “The One with the Dog.” There is also “fucking” as a kind of midsentence punctuation (functioning like “but”): “She would just fucking, she would laugh at him.” And also as impacted repetition: “Fuck sake, of course she would; what was the fucking point of fucking, trying to fucking keep it away, of course she’d be fucking worrying about him,” Ronnie thinks in the story “Greyhound for Breakfast.”

Reading that, I immediately thought of my favorite novelist, George V. Higgins, and the resonant way he deployed “fuckin’ ”:

The Digger leaned on the bar. “Lemme tell you something, Harrington,” he said, “you take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life. I went out to Vegas there and I said, ‘Fuck me, fuck me.’ And they fucked me. Then I get that gaff job. I got unfucked.” [The Digger’s Game, 1973]

"You take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life" is a very powerful line. Its use of “fuckin’” to modify “smooth” is what powers it.

Higgins also used the contraction “fuck’re” to great effect. “Where the fuck’re you taking me?” Jackie Brown says in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1971). In The Rat on Fire (1981), Don says to Mickey, “The fuck’re you doin’ there?”

One of Higgins’s most memorable uses of “fuckin’ ” occurs near the end of his brilliant Cogan’s Trade (1975):

“There’s all kinds of reasons for things,” Cogan said. “Guys get whacked for doing things, guys get whacked for not doing things, it doesn’t matter. The only thing matters is if you’re the guy that’s gonna get whacked. That’s the only fuckin’ thing.”

That’s the only fuckin’ thing. Higgins/Cogan is talking about impending violent death. “Fuckin’ ” is used here to underscore the brute reality of being “the guy that’s gonna get whacked.” “Fuckin’ ” gives the line its existential hardness. The passage is a memento mori delivered Boston underworld style.

5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #1 "The Survival of the Bark Canoe"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy's Blog

This is the first post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” (The New Yorker, February 24 & March 3, 1975).

This superb piece chronicles McPhee’s one-hundred-and-fifty-mile canoe trip through the North Maine Woods in August, 1974. He travels with four others – Henri Vaillancourt, Vaillancourt’s friends Rick and Mike Blanchette, and McPhee’s friend Warren Elmer – in two bark canoes. The canoes were made by Vaillancourt, a young man in his mid-twenties, who is a master builder of bark canoes. 

The piece unfolds in twelve sections. In the first two, McPhee visits Vaillancourt at his home in Greenville, New Hampshire, and observes him building a canoe. Here’s his description of Vaillancourt shaping the stempiece, the part that establishes the profile of the bow or the stern:

He plunged the laminated end of the piece into a bucket of water and left it there for a while, and then he built up the fire with scraps from the floor. In a coffee can he brought water to a boil. He poured it slowly over the laminations, bathing them, bathing them again. Then he lifted the steaming cedar in two hands and bent it. The laminations slid upon one another and formed a curve. He pondered the curve. It was not enough of a curve, he decided. So he bent the piece a little more. “There’s an awful lot of it that’s just whim,” he said. “You vary the stempiece by whim.” He liked what he saw now, so he reached for a strip of basswood bark, tightly wound it around the curve in the cedar, and tied it off. The basswood bark was not temporary. It would stay there, and go into the canoe. Bow or stern, the straight and solid part of the stempiece would run down from the tip, them the laminated curve would sweep inward, establishing the character of the end – and thus, in large part, of the canoe itself.

I relish descriptions like that – descriptions of process. McPhee is a master of them. In his hands, they’re like prose poems. This piece features several of them.

In Vaillancourt’s yard, McPhee sees two completed canoes. He writes,

Their bark, smooth and taut, was of differing shades of brown, trellised with dark seams. I guess I had expected something a little rough, rippled, crude, asymmetrical. Their color was pleasing. Turn them over – their ribs, thwarts, and planking suggested cabinetwork. Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable. In the sunlight of that cold November morning, they were the two most beautiful canoes I had ever seen. 

Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable – I love that line. As McPhee points out, Vaillancourt’s canoes are modeled on the canoes of the Malecites: 

So Henri Vaillancourt builds Malecite canoes. Before all other design factors, he cares most about the artistic appearance of the canoes he builds, and he thinks the best-looking were the canoes of the Malecites. The Malecites lived in New Brunswick and parts of Maine. Vaillancourt builds the Malecite St. John River Canoe and the Malecite St. Lawrence Canoe. He builds them with modifications though.

At the end of section two, Vaillancourt mentions that he’s planning a canoe trip in Maine – down the Penobscot River and on to the Allagash lakes. McPhee asks if he can go with him. Vaillancourt agrees, but adds a condition: “Bring your own food.” It’s a hint of another side of Vaillancourt, an unattractive side, one that emerges more fully on the trip and nearly ruins it.

True to form, McPhee doesn’t start his account of the canoe trip at the beginning. Instead, he plunges in, in medias res: “It is five-fifteen in the morning, August 12th, and Henri is up splitting wood.”

Incidentally, that mention of the date (August 12) is the only indication in the piece of when this trip occurred. There’s no mention of the year. The piece appeared in The New Yorker in two parts – February 24 and March 3, 1975. My guess is that the trip occurred in August of the previous year. This is consistent with what McPhee says about Vaillancourt’s age. He says that Vaillancourt built his first canoe in 1965, when he was fifteen, and that he’s “in his mid-twenties now.”

The crew put their canoes into the West Branch of the Penobscot River. They paddle down the Penobscot to Chesuncook Lake. They camp on Gero Island. The move north on the northernmost arm of Chesuncook Lake. They go up Umbazooksus Stream. They cross Umbazooksus Lake. They portage at Mud Pond Carry. They paddle the Allagash Lakes – Chamberlain, Eagle, Churchill – fighting the north wind all the way. 

Here's a taste of the group’s growing frustration with Vaillancourt, particularly with his insistence on pushing onward even though neither canoe is very good in heavy wind: 

We dig into the lake. We paddle and bail, bail and paddle – draining the bilge with drinking cups. We are struggling to get to the north end, about three miles away, and gambling that the wind will not rise to an even higher level before we are in the lee of the north-end woods. Why do we need these miles now? Why does Henri have this compulsion to move? Is he Patton? Sherman? Hannibal? How could he be, when the only regimentation he can tolerate is the kind he creates as he goes along? These are thoughts not composed in tranquility but driven into the mind by the frontal wind. Why do we defer to him? Why do we look to his decisions? Is it only because he made the canoes, because the assumption is that he knows what is best for them and knows what they can do and ought not to do? His judgment draws attention to itself, right enough. On the Penobscot River, he went “out for a spin” in heavy, gray dusk and was gone long after dark – much longer than he wished or intended. What was he doing? He was struggling to pick his way through boulders and up a set of minor rapids he could not see. A camper on the riverbank, that same day, asked him if his canoe was not too low in the freeboard for paddling on open lakes, and he said, “Not really. They don’t really ride low. You can design a canoe to do anything.” But here he is on Chamberlain Lake, bailing six inches of water from between his knees and whisking with his paddle, while Warren, like a tractor, pulls the canoe. A suspicion that has been growing comes out in the wind: Henri’s expertise stops in “the yard”; out here he is as green as his jerky.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. McPhee has a caustic side; it seldom appears in his writing. But once it’s triggered, as it is in this piece, watch out!  

Notice, in the above passage, McPhee’s use of the present tense (“We dig into the lake. We paddle and bail, bail and paddle – draining the bilge with drinking cups”) – one of his favorite techniques for conveying immediacy. It’s one of my favorite aspects of his writing.

The five men make it to the end of Chamberlain Lake. They portage half a mile to Eagle Lake. The wind and the white caps are even worse there than they were on Chamberlain. Their shore location is an ugly one – the junk-littered site of a former logging track. McPhee describes it:

Unfortunately, this is a bad place to spend a night, because the mechanized loggers gave it a century’s fouling and the century isn’t over yet. Rust is everywhere – rusty spikes, rusty hunks of the conveyor. To accommodate incoming logs, landfill was shoved into the lake, so the shore is artificial and swampy and strewn with boulders and still jagged with the corpses of water-killed trees.

They stay there and wait for the wind to decline. Three hours later, the wind seems to calm down. Vaillancourt decides it’s time to move. It’s at this point that disaster strikes. McPhee vividly describes the moment:

With everything aboard, the three of us prepare to step in. We do not know that two iron spikes set in timber, stand upright underwater, the tip of each less than an inch from the underside of the floating canoe. We step in, one at a time, and we give the canoe a shove. It does not move. Water spurts upward in fountains, fast enough to swamp us instantly. 

Jumping out, we shout to Henri. We unload the canoe, lift it ashore, and roll it over. Rick is struggling to his distress. His canoe, a treasure to him, has two ugly holes in it, large enough and ragged enough to make one wonder how it can continue the trip. Henri, examining the wounds, curses Rick for negligence, for irresponsibility, for failure as custodian of a bark canoe. Rick does not try to demur.

Now, all at once, Henri stops his harangue and changes utterly. The man who has been pouting, sucking grass, and cursing the wind all afternoon is suddenly someone else – is now, in a sense, back in his yard, his hands on a torn canoe. The lacerations are broad., and the bark around them is in flaps with separating layers. “Make a fire,” he says, and Warren and I off move off for wood. “Rick, Mike, get bark. Get strips of bark. A cut a green stick.”

Vaillancourt performs remarkable surgery on the canoe. McPhee describes his performance in detail. Here’s a sample:

It was now too dark for him to see. He calls for the flashlight, and I get it from my pack and shine it on the canoe as he works. He removes the pot from the fire and – with a flat stick – paints the entire damaged area with pitch while the Blanchettes, one at each end, hold the canoe level. Henri pulls out the tail of his shirt and cuts it off. It is broadcloth, and he cuts out of it a circular piece, which he presses down onto the pitch. Calling for the pot again, he paints on more pitch, until the cloth is completely covered. Then, as the pitch cools, he presses it repeatedly with his thumb, licking his thumb as he goes along to keep it from sticking. The finished patch is a black circle, about six inches in diameter. It is in the center of the bottom of the canoe. “At home I’ll cut an eye of bark and put a rim around it,” Henri says. “Then the patch, you know, will look better.”

The next morning, the men load their canoes and head out. The lake is calm. They’re almost across when the wind suddenly reappears. Waves rise quickly. McPhee writes,

Henri has begun to bail with exceptional vigor. His canoe is showing trouble – taking in more water than before. The land widens again to either side, and we move onto Churchill Lake, where the waves are as high and the wind as strong as they were at any time on Chamberlain. The lake inclines to the northeast, and the wind is quartering on us now. A thousand yards out, Henri turns to face it. He cannot take even the small amount of extra water that comes with quartering waves. His canoe is filling up. Racing a serious leak, he and Warren cut straight through the wind. Ahead of them is a strip of sand-and-pebble beach. Bailing as they go, they make it. We are two and a half hours, and nine miles, from breakfast – not bad against a rising head wind and with another sick canoe.

The leak is due to a flaw in the canoe’s construction: 

A longitudinal seam connecting two pieces of bark below the waterline has broken its sewing, and a gap has opened. When he made the canoe, he sewed that area too close to the edge of the bark, and the root stitching has now broken through to the edge. It is a wonder the canoe did not founder.

Again, Vaillancourt is able to make the repair. McPhee describes his procedure beautifully. Here’s an excerpt:

Henri takes a close look at the position of the break in the seam and is pleased to find that it is directly under a rib. “Good,” he says. “The repair won’t show.” And he taps the rib aside. His awls are at home, but he has picked up a nail somewhere, and he uses it now to bore holes through the planking and the bark. The root is soon moving through the planking and out through the bark and back again in a set of cobbler’s stitches – Henri reaching around the canoe, hugging it, to draw the sewing tight. He is sewing not only bark to bark (near the original seam) but also bark to planking, to give the repair increased authority. When the sewing is finished and tied off, bright sutures mar the planking, but Henri taps the rib back in, and – as he said it would – it completely hides the job.

The expedition continues via lake, portage, and stream to remote Allagash Lake. They paddle toward the lake’s south end. In one of my favorite passages of the piece, McPhee describes the scene:

On the water, in the post-dawn light, the canoes slide across a mirror so nearly perfect that the image could be inverted without loss of detail. The lake is absolutely still, and mist thickens its distance and subdues in gray its islands and circumvallate hills. Warren and Henri are perhaps a hundred feet farther out than we are, and appear to be gliding through the sky: Henri’s back straight, his hand moving forward on the grip of his paddle, his dark knitted cap on his head, his profile French and aquiline; Warren under the bright tumble of hair, his back bending. Their canoe was alive in the forest only months ago, and now on the lake it is a miracle of beauty, of form and symmetry, of dark interstitial seams in mottled abstractions of bark.

We’re in the final chapter of the piece now. It’s been quite a trip! And it’s not over yet. From Allagash Lake, the group has to go another twenty miles to get to the roadhead at Caucomgomoc Lake. Three of the twenty miles are grueling portage. Henri behaves miserably. He falls in the mud. He curses McPhee for failing to guide him. He’s terse and angry. On Caucomgomoc Lake, he plows his canoe directly into the waves. McPhee writes,

We round the last bend and swing into Caucomgomoc. It is two miles wide, and we have about six miles to go – to its far, northwestern corner. Coming directly at us across the lake are the highest waves we have seen yet, driven by a western wind. Henri, in his own drive for the finish, moves straight out onto the water and begins to plow headlong for the farther shore. His caution – what there was of it on Eagle and Chamberlain – is gone. To me, it seems a certainty that we are going to swamp, that we will complete the day with a long, slow swim, dragging the canoes to shore. I check my boots, my pack, to make sure they are firmly tied. I am ready to shrug and see what happens. Warren, however, is not. Having absorbed Henri in silence for something like a hundred and fifty miles, he now turns suddenly and shouts at the top of his lungs, “You God-damned lunatic, head for shore!” The canoes turn, and head for shore.

It's an unforgettable scene. Writing about it thirty-seven years later, in a piece titled “Editors & Publishers” (The New Yorker, July 2, 2012), McPhee discloses that his description of the incident isn’t quite accurate. What Warren Elmer really said was “You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!” For the 1975 piece, to get it published in The New Yorker, edited at that time by the finicky William Shawn, McPhee had to tone down the profanity slightly.

My summary of “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” outlines the main stages of its journey, but fails to do justice to its artistry. The piece is structured like a bark canoe. The center thwart is the trip; the ribs are the many topics that McPhee touches on along the way, e.g., loons, Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, birch bark, the history of the fur trade, voyageurs, James Dickey’s Deliverance, deer, log-driving, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm’s The Penobscot Man, freeze-dried food. Here, for example, is his wonderful description of the cry of the loon:

But it is with another sound – a long cry in the still of the night – that the loon authenticates the northern lake. The cry is made with the neck stretched forward, and it is a sound that seems to have come up a tube from an unimaginably deep source – hardly from a floating bird. It is a high, resonant, single unvaried tone that fades at the end toward a lower register. It has caused panic, because it has been mistaken for the cry of a wolf, but it is far too ghostly for that. It is detached from the earth. The Crees believed that it was the cry of a dead warrior forbidden entry to Heaven. The Chipewyans heard it as an augury of death. Whatever it may portend, it is the predominant sound in this country. Every time the loon cry comes, it sketches its own surroundings – a remote lake under stars so bright they whiten clouds, a horizon jagged with spruce.

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of McPhee’s best. 

Apri 1, 2024 Issue

I’m not a fan of classical music. But I love piano. Anytime Alex Ross reviews a piano concert, I pay attention. In this week’s issue, he assesses a recent Carnegie Hall performance by the thirty-seven-year-old German pianist Igor Levit. Here’s what he has to say:

Extreme virtuosity is required to play the “Eroica” transcription, and Levit supplied it. The rapid-fire sotto-voce chords that launch the Scherzo went off with purring finesse; the coda of the first movement became an exuberant one-man stampede. Just as impressive was Levit’s ability to sustain tension across spare textures, as at the desolate end of the Funeral March. Acoustical mirages beguiled the ears: in the trio of the Scherzo, brassy E-flat-major triads evoked a trio of hunting horns. Most of all, Levit demonstrated a comprehensive, from-the-gut understanding of a work that even the most gifted conductors struggle to grasp whole. You felt that you were listening not to a symphony in reduced form but to the greatest of all Beethoven sonatas.

Wow! “Extreme virtuosity,” “purring finesse,” “exuberant one-man stampede,” “comprehensive, from-the-gut understanding” – praise doesn’t get much better than that. I think I’ll have to give Igor Levit a listen. 

3 for the River: Structure

This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their structure.

All three of these books are structured chronologically. Patterson’s Dangerous River consists of two narratives: the solo 1927 trip, and the 1928-29 trip with Gordon Matthews. The first trip is chronicled in the first three chapters (“The Legend,” “South Nahanni River,” and “The Trail South”). The second one is covered in the remaining four chapters (“Deadman’s Valley,” “Fall of the Leaf,” “Winter Trails,” and “Awakening of the River”). Both narratives flow through time and space in classic sequential fashion – one day after another: “Next morning it was cold and misty ...”; “The next morning I was up at four ...”; “The following morning, just to make tracking difficult, there was a northwest wind ...”; “I woke at four to a lovely morning ...”; “As I poled up the river next morning ...”; “Mist hid the Flat River that last morning at Faille’s cabin ...”; “The following afternoon we came to the foot of the Falls ...”; “There was one more day’s work to be done on the cabin, so we were up at five ...”; “Next morning I cached some heavy stuff back in the bush....” There are no flashbacks or flashforwards. The book unfolds like a magnificent journal. It is a magnificent journal, with passages from Patterson’s actual diary embedded within it. For example,

I wrote up my diary that night by the light of the fire, in camp about thirteen miles above Fort Liard: “A day of amazing beauty, utterly clear. Long reaches of quiet water with much gabbling of wildfowl. Fresh mountains coming into view, snow capped; a sky of bronze with clouds like goose feathers and a ring around the sun – a winter sky and yet warm and soft.” As I wrote a great harvest moon climbed up over the mountains, lighting up the distant snow and throwing into relief the eddying swirls of the river. Moths came fluttering out of the darkness in to the firelight, and the twin scents of autumn lay heavy on the camp – wood smoke and dead leaves.

Raban’s Old Glory moves day by day down the Mississippi, starting in Minneapolis, September 3, 1979, and ending three-and-a-half months later in the river delta near Morgan City, Louisiana. The book is divided into eleven chapters. The first chapter (“The River”) describes Raban’s obsession with the Mississippi, sourced in his reading of Huckleberry Finn, when he was seven. The remaining ten chapters each describe a leg of the journey. For example, Chapter 2 (“Casting Off”) runs from the slip at Minneapolis to the lock at the Falls of St. Anthony. It contains this vivid passage:

The lock had seemed huge when I’d stood above it four days ago. Inside the chamber, it felt twice as big. I clung to my pair of ropes. The water began to bubble and boil as the lock emptied. The boat edged down the slimy wall, and the faces above my head grew smaller and vaguer. As I dropped to thirty, then forty, then fifty feet down, it was like entering a new element in which the air was dank and cellarlike; I was far out of earshot of the people I had left back up there in the city daylight, their voices lost in the gurgling and sluicing of Mississippi water. The boat tugged and swung on the ropes, and even in a sweater I was shivering. Looking up at the pale pink blotches of Herb, the King and the lockmaster, I felt that this descent was a kind of symbolic induction, a rite of passage into my new state as a river traveler.

Two of Old Glory’s chapters chronicle Raban’s extended visits in St. Louis and Memphis. In Chapter 7 (“Marriage à la Mode”), he moves in with a St. Louis woman named Sally. In Chapter 9 (“A Sleep Too Long”), he gets involved in the Memphis mayoral election campaign of Reverend Judge Otis Higgs. These chapters are absorbing. But I was happy when Raban returned to the river and his journey downstream. That’s where his heart is. That’s where his descriptive power is strongest.

Tim Butcher’s Blood River is a chronological account of his three-thousand-kilometer journey through the Congo in 2004, following the historic route of journalist-explorer Henry Morton Stanley. It’s structured in twelve chapters, plus Preface and Epilogue. Like the other two books, each chapter recounts a stage of the journey. For instance, Chapter 5 (“Walked to Death”) describes Butcher’s harrowing five-hundred-kilometer motorbike ride through the jungle from Kalemie to Kasongo. Here’s a sample:

For tens of kilometres we saw no villages or signs of life, slowing only when the track crossed a stream or river. These crossings became the curse of the journey because no sooner had we picked up speed than we had to slow, stop and pick our route over the waterway. There were scores of them. In some places branches had been felled to form a primitive bridge, but each crossing was hazardous, and countless times I had to jump off the back and help drag the two bikes across. I saw why any bike bigger than 100cc would be too cumbersome and heavy to manhandle through the eastern Congo. 

Butcher’s account of his trip moves in the most natural way, day by day, logging his thoughts and impressions as he goes. I relish this journal-like form of writing.

All three of these books contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

March 25, 2024 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his “All That Glitters,” in this week’s New Yorker, calls T. J. Clark “the most eloquent Klimt hater.” What’s that based on? I had to dig to find out. It turns out that, in 2010, Clark wrote a letter to the London Review of Books, responding to correspondence generated by Michael Hofmann’s “Vermicular Dither” (London Review of Books, January 28, 2010), a review of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, in which he (Hofmann) refers to Klimt as “the Kitschmeister.” Clark writes,

I have no dog in the ring as regards Stefan Zweig; but as Gustav Klimt has come up in your correspondence, and even been claimed as ‘one of the greatest painters ever’, I do want to say that when I read Michael Hofmann’s verdict on the artist I found myself breathing a sigh of relief (Letters, 11 February). At last someone had dared state the obvious. As for ‘greatest painters ever’, there is a special place in the hell of reputations for those who tried hardest for the title in the first years of the 20th century: the Frank Brangwyns, the Eugène Carrières, the Anders Zorns, the John Singer Sargents, the Giovanni Segantinis. Not that these artists are uninteresting. Someone with a strong stomach and a taste for tragic irony should write a book about large-scale and mural painting in the two decades leading to Mons and Passchendaele. But taken at all seriously – compared with their contemporary Akseli Gallen-Kallela, for example, let alone the last achievements of Puvis de Chavannes – the greats of Edwardian Euro-America strike me as Kitschmeisters through and through: early specialists in the new century’s pretend difficulty and ‘opacity’, pretend mystery and profundity, pretend eroticism and excess. Klimt has a place of honour in their ranks.

Arn is right. There's no love there. By the way, I wasn't doubting Arn's word. I just couldn't recall ever reading anything by Clark about Klimt. And I've read a lot of Clark. I devour him.

Postscript: Just as an off-set to Clark’s acid verdict, consider what Peter Schjeldahl said about Klimt’s “Adele”:

With the best of will—and I have tried—“Adele” makes no formal sense. The parts—including the silky brushwork of the young lady’s face and hands, which poke through the bumpy ground as through a carnival prop—drift, generating no mutual tensions. The size feels arbitrary, without integral scale in relation to the viewer: bigger or smaller would make no difference. The content of the gorgeous whatsit seems a rhyming of conspicuously consumed wealth with show-off eroticism. She’s a vamp, is Adele; and for whom would she be simpering but the randy master, Herr Klimt? The effect is a closed loop of his and her narcissisms. They’re them, and we aren’t. I think we are supposed to be impressed. And let’s be. Why not? Our age will be bookmarked in history by the self-adoring gestures of the incredibly rich. Aesthetics ride coach. ["Changing My Mind About Gustav Klimt's 'Adele' "]

I love that “gorgeous whatsit.” Can kitsch be beautiful? Schjeldahl said yes. 

On the Horizon: "Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb 'New Yorker' Essayists"

Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023) are two of the great New Yorker essay collections of the last twenty years – where “great” means original, acerbic, perceptive, evocative, analytical, passionate, illuminating, stylish. To celebrate them, I’m going to select four of my favorite pieces from each book (one per month, for the next eight months) and try to express why I like them so much. A new series then – “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists” – starting April 15, 2024.

March 18, 2024 Issue

My fascination with the two versions of Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” continues. This week she reviews Misipasta, a Williamsburg market that sells fresh pastas and sauces, and is also a restaurant. In the print version, she writes, “There are about twenty counter stools, and the air smells like Parmigiano and butter.” In the extended newyorker.com version, she says,

There are about twenty seats indoors, all of them counter stools, and one or two are nearly always empty. The lights are just dim enough to soothe, the tidy menu of cocktails and bitter Italian sodas ready to offer a bit of relief. The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters. 

What fascinates me is (1) the artful economy of the magazine column, and (2) the ravishing extra details of the web version. Here’s another example: in the magazine, she writes, 

Have a slice of crispy farinata, a lacy-edged chickpea-flour pancake aromatic with rosemary. Have an artichoke sandwich, one of the city’s great secret sandwiches – an enormous mess of grilled artichoke hearts and hot chili peppers, barely held together by oozing provolone cheese. Bring home a pound of pasta – frilly lumache, or long, flat tubes of paccheri – and a jar of thirty-clove sauce. You won’t make pasta nearly as good as Robbins’s – even with the same ingredients, some things just have to get all the way into your bones—but it doesn’t hurt to try. 

Here's the web version:

Have an espresso, fruity and bitter. Have a slice of crispy farinata, a lacy-edge chickpea-flour pancake aromatic with rosemary. Have one of the city’s great secret sandwiches, an enormous mess of marinated and grilled artichoke hearts, spiked with hot chilis and barely held together by oozing provolone cheese. Buy a pint of Robbins’s satiny hazelnut gelato. Get a pound of pasta—frilly lumache, or long tubes of paccheri—and a jar of thirty-clove sauce, heady with garlic. You won’t make pasta nearly as good as Robbins’s at home—even with the same ingredients, even with the same tools, some things just have to get all the way into your bones—but it doesn’t hurt to try.

Who would not want such delectable writing to go on forever? The print version is wonderful. But the expanded newyorker.com version is divine. To have them both is double bliss! 

Acts of Seeing: Birch Chandelier

Photo by John MacDougall

Rained yesterday. Temperature dropped below zero. Everything encased in ice. This morning the sun came out. Woods turned to crystal. There’s a path that runs along the edge of John Arch’s Pond to the beach. I went in there. Bent-over birches like fabulous chandeliers. Branches fused in cascading luminosity. What a scene! I couldn’t get enough of it. By afternoon the ice melted. Trees dripped water. Scene dissolved. 

March 11, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his absorbing “The Boy Who Cried Art,” in this week’s issue, says of graffiti artist Keith Haring, “His chalk drawings are almost always very crude, so as not to interfere with the whooshing immediacy of the performance or the nervous allure of the performer.” That “whooshing immediacy” is brilliant. I wonder if it was inspired by Norman Mailer’s great “The Faith of Graffiti” (included in Mailer’s 1982 essay collection Pieces and Pontifications). Mailer wrote, 

Yes, the graffiti had not only the feel and all the super-powered whoosh and impact of all the bubble letters in all the mad comic strips, but the zoom, the aghr, and the ahhr of screeching rails, the fast motion of subways roaring into stations, the comic strips come to life.

Arn mentions Mailer’s essay in his piece. I think Mailer’s appreciation of graffiti was deeper than Arn’s is. Arn calls it “Business Art.” He calls Haring a “Business Artist.” What do those terms mean? Arn writes,

Even in its infancy, there was something in New York graffiti that smacked of Business Art. You can see it in Basquiat, who put a copyright symbol on his creations well before they hung in galleries. Or watch “Stations of the Elevated,” Manfred Kirchheimer’s ecstatic M.T.A. documentary. Pay attention to the way he cuts between spray-painted trains and signs for Burger King and Coppertone. When people watched the film in 1981, they may have sensed aesthetic deadlock: commercial art and street art face to face, without much of anything to say to each other. But you might also interpret these scenes as street art competing with commercial art, trying to match its bigness and brightness—and, the moment you do, Haring seems less the artist who betrayed graffiti and more the artist who made its guilty dreams come true.

"Guilty dreams"? I don’t see anything guilty about graffiti. I see it as our version of cave painting, an exuberant assertion that we exist in this time and place. 

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #8 "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' "

Illustration by Eric Nyquist, from Kathryn Schulz's "Pond Scum"

This is the third post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' " (October 27, 2015):

Kathryn Schulz, in her virulent "Pond Scum" (The New Yorker, October 19, 2015), calls Henry David Thoreau "self-obsessed," "narcissistic," "fanatical," "parochial," "egotistical," "disingenuous," "arrogant," "sanctimonious," "hypocritical," and a “thoroughgoing misanthrope.” She says, “The poor, the rich, his neighbors, his admirers, strangers: Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity even encompassed the very idea of civilization.” Reading her evisceration of Thoreau’s character, I was reminded of John Updike’s comment on Lord Byron: he “was a monster of vanity and appetite, with one possibly redeeming quality: he could write.” Schulz doesn’t spend much time on Thoreau’s writing ability. She’s too busy excoriating him for, among other things, shunning coffee (“I cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee”). 

“Pond Scum” contains a number of original poison-tipped barbs. My favorite is Schulz’s description of Walden as “less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” 

Granted, Schulz does praise Thoreau’s gift for nature description. She says,

Although Thoreau is insufferable when fancying himself a seer, he is wonderful at actually seeing, and the passages he devotes to describing the natural world have an acuity and serenity that nothing else in the book approaches. It is a pleasure to read him on a battle between black and red ants; on the layers of ice that form as the pond freezes over in winter; on the breeze, birds, fish, waterbugs, and dust motes that differently disturb the surface of Walden.

Yes, it is a pleasure to read him on those things, and many more besides. So what’s Schulz’s point? Robert Sullivan, in his wonderful The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009), says, “A central theme that anyone considering Thoreau must face early on is the jerk factor. Was Thoreau a jerk?” Well, we know where Schulz stands on that question. According to her, he was a jerk par excellence. But if he hadn’t been a jerk, maybe he wouldn’t have written the way he did. Somewhere in his letters, Van Gogh says, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint.” Similarly, Thoreau could say, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t write.” Who cares if Thoreau was a jerk? Most of us are jerks one way or another. But not many of us can write like Thoreau. 

On the Horizon: Ian Frazier's New Book "Paradise Bronx"

I see that Ian Frazier has a new book coming out. It’s called Paradise Bronx. His publisher, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, promotes it as his magnum opus (“Ian Frazier’s magnum opus: a love song to New York City’s most heterogeneous and alive borough”). Frazier is among the New Yorker greats, right up there with Liebling, Mitchell, Kael, and McPhee. His Great Plains, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia are among my favorite books. For me, the release of Paradise Bronx, scheduled for August 20, 2024, is one of the major literary events of the year. I avidly look forward to it.

On the Horizon: 5 McPhee Canoe Trips

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy's Blog

In homage to one of my all-time favorite New Yorker writers, John McPhee, I’m launching a new series – an appreciation of five of his best pieces, each of which is about a canoe trip he took.

The five pieces are “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” (February 24 & March 3, 1975), “The Keel of Lake Dickey” (May 3, 1976), “The Encircled River” (May 2 & 9, 1977), “Farewell to the Nineteenth Century” (September 27, 1999), and “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (December 15, 2003). 

I’ll focus on one piece each month, examining what it’s about, how it’s made, and why I’m drawn to it. A new series then – “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – starting April 7, 2024. 

March 4, 2024 Issue

I love these sentences:

1. Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works. [Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B.”]

2. In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge. [Ben McGrath, “Where’s My Car?”]

3. Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell. [Ian Frazier, “Uncaged Birds”]

All three are from this week’s New Yorker. Which one’s my favorite? Well, all three are great. And I don’t actually have to choose. But if I did, I’d pick Frazier’s surreal “cloud” description – such a surprising, delightful combination of words: “performance,” “cloud,” “off-stage,” “cloud-making machine,” “beams of light,” “vertical shafts,” “interrogation lamps,” “columns of a courthouse,” “bars of a prison cell.” You’d wonder how their combination makes sense. But it does, in the context of Frazier’s excellent Talk story about an opera for the wrongfully convicted. Bravo, Ian Frazier!

Postscript: I see the magazine has a new film critic – Justin Chang. Is this just for this issue, or is it permanent? Chang’s review of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses” intrigues me, particularly its exotic setting (eastern Anatolia). If I get a chance, I’ll check it out.

Acts of Seeing: Calçada da Glória

Calçada da Glória, 2024 (Photo by John MacDougall)

I’m never sure about my choice of photos. For some reason I’m drawn to this one. I took it last month when we were in Lisbon. I love this old street. Its name is Calçada da Glória. We walked it up and down and took many pictures. But it’s this one that speaks to me. Of course I relish the receding, curving, downhill perspective, and the mash-up of walls and buildings, and the rails and cobblestones, and the overhead funicular railway wires. But what I like most, what makes the photo distinctive (for me, at least) is the graffiti-painting session going on in the yard at left. I love the juicy colors of the graffiti on that immense dingy white wall. What a canvas! Dan Chiasson once wrote, “Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place.” I think this is true. 

3 for the River: Tim Butcher's "Blood River"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Blood River.  

In this great book, Tim Butcher chronicles his harrowing forty-four-day, three-thousand-kilometer journey through the Congo in 2004 – “great” because it’s vivid, detailed, and unforgettable; “harrowing” because of the many dangers he faces. 

His trip follows the historic route of journalist-explorer Henry Morton Stanley, when he mapped the Congo River, 1874-1877. It unfolds in eight stages: (1) Kalemie to Kasongo by motorbike (500 km); (2) Kasongo to Kindu by motorbike (200 km); (3) Kindu to Lowa by UN patrol boat (150 km); (4) Lowa to Ubundu by pirogue (200 km); (5) Ubundu to Kisangani by motorbike and pirogue (150 km); (6) Kisangani to Mbandaka by UN push-boat and barge (1000 km); (7) Mbandaka to Kinshasa by UN helicopter (600 km); (8) Kinshasa to Boma by jeep (400 km). 

1. Kalemie to Kasongo

This is the riskiest leg of Butcher’s journey. He says, “I knew the river descent would be hard, but the thing that worried me most was this overland section.” The terrain is impenetrable jungle, and the trail is narrow and overgrown. To make matters worse, rebel soldiers roam the bush. Butcher recruits a man from an aid group called Care International. His name is Benoit Bangana. Benoit has a colleague named Odimba. They have two Yamaha 0ff-road bikes. Benoit advises that “Motorbikes are the only way to travel” from Kalemie to Kasongo. The plan is that Butcher would ride with Odimba on one bike, and Benoit would ride on the other one with all their luggage. But then another man, Georges Mbuyu, a member of a pygmy rights group called La Voix des Minoritiés, agrees to join the expedition. Georges travels regularly in the bush. However, he doesn’t have a motorcycle. If Georges is to accompany them, they need a third bike. They find one owned by a man named Fiston Kasongo. For a price, Fiston agrees to go with them and drive Butcher on his bike. 

And so, one morning in August, 2004, the journey begins. Butcher writes,

I love starting a journey very early in the day. It offers the comforting sense that if something goes wrong, there is still the whole day to sort it out. As we left Kalemie before dawn that August morning, I felt a strong sense of well-being. The track was overhung with dew-drenched branches and twigs, and within a few minutes my wet clothes showed why Benoit and Odimba were wearing waterproofs. But the fact that I was soaked did not dim my spirits. After all the planning and worry, I was finally on the track of Stanley in the Congo, picking my way from Lake Tanganyka across the ridges and valleys that he had traversed in 1876. I can remember feeling excitement. And I can remember just how the euphoria began to ebb a few kilometres down the track when we had our first flat tire.

That first flat is on Odimba’s bike. Odimba fixes it expertly. The next three flats are on Fiston’s bike. His rear inner tube is a disaster, patches on patches. It’s decided that Fiston can’t go on. After fixing his tire one more time, he and Georges leave the group and head back to Kalemie. Butcher, Benoit and Odimba continue toward Kasongo on the Yamahas. They overnight in a bush settlement called Mukumbo. Butcher describes his lodgings:

Benoit returned to lead me to the hut that the chief had had prepared for me. It had walls of dried mud on wattle, a roof of heavy thatch and a door panel made of reeds woven across a wooden frame. Without a hinge, it worked by being heaved across the doorway, which I soon found had been cut for people quite a bit shorter than me. There was nothing modern in the room whatsoever. On the beaten-earth floor stood a bed – a frame of branches, still in their bark, lashed together with some sort of vine. The springs of the bed were made of lengths of split bamboo anchored at only one point halfway along the bed, so that when I put my hand down on them they bent horribly and appeared close to collapse. But the design was ingenious because when my weight was spread across the entire structure, the bamboo screen supported it easily, giving and moving with the contour of my shoulders and hip. It was a Fred Flintstone orthopaedic bed and I found it amazingly comfortable.

The next day, rising at 3:00 AM, the trio continue their travel. Butcher suffers from dehydration (“The bottles I had drunk the day before were simply not enough, and I had not had a drop of water overnight, leaving me with a whopping headache and a pain behind my eyes”). He also has a sore ass (“My backside had stopped being numb and had moved into a painful phase, each buttock screaming to be relieved of the pressure of being squashed against the plastic of Odimba’s motorbike seat. I learned to lean on one side and then the other to alleviate the pressure, but it was agony”). Whenever they encounter soldiers, they speed up, and though the soldiers jump up, grab their weapons and shout at them, they’re too late; the bikers are already by them, disappearing down the trail into the bush.

Finally they reach Kasongo. Butcher writes,

I remember little about the arrival, apart from the vast jug of filtered water that I gulped down and the smell of the previous night’s hut on my mosquito net, in which I wrapped myself before collapsing.

2. Kasongo to Kindu

Benoit stays in Kasongo. Butcher and Odimba continue on by motorcycle to Kindu, on the upper Congo River. Butcher describes his first sighting of the great river:

We simply turned a corner and there, unheralded, in front of me, lay one of the natural wonders of the world. The object of so much mystery for generations of outsiders, and the thing that had fired my imagination through years of research, oozed lazily downstream between two thickly forested banks almost a kilometre apart. The midday sun was directly overhead, my least favourite time of day in the Congo when all the colours of the trees are washed out and the heat is at its most suffocating. In the flat light, the river appeared viscous and still.

Butcher, Odimba, and their loaded motorbike cross the Congo River in a pirogue:

Eventually its bow slid onto our bank with the lightest of kisses. The dreadnought was heavy and the river too inert to make it swing downstream, so it just sat there like a compass needle pointing in the direction I needed to go, straight across the Congo River. A dozen or so passengers disembarked, carrying bundles of fruit wrapped in banana leaves trussed up with cords made from vines. One man had with him a type of home-made bicycle where part of the frame, the front forks, were made of rough branches of wood still in their bark. There was brief moment of negotiation between Odimba and the oldest paddler, before a tariff was agreed and our motorbike, still laden with luggage, was picked up bodily by four men and dropped into the canoe. The hull was deep enough for one of the paddlers to sit on the bike and freewheel it down to the lowest and most stable point.

It takes Butcher and Odimba another two days of hard biking to reach the port of Kindu.

3. Kindu to Lowa

In squalid Kindu, Butcher struggles to find a way downriver. Eventually, after five frustrating, uncomfortable days, he hitches a ride on a UN river patrol boat. The region is in its dry season; the river is low. The helmsmen drive the boat slowly, nosing it through sand banks, searching for a navigable channel. The slow pace affords Butcher the opportunity to look around and study his surroundings in detail. Here, for example, is his description of some of the rusting wrecks of old boats that used to ply this stretch of river, but which now line the left bank for well over a kilometre:

One ship had been completely overrun by a reed bank and its old smokestack could just be seen poking from the vegetation with ivy, not smoke, spewing out of the top. Another hulk was lying on its side clear out of the water, the panels eaten away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass. But my favourite was an old stern-paddler, a rust-red X-ray image of the Mississippi steamboats of my imagination. The panels were all gone, but the superstructure remained in skeletal form. At the stern was the octagonal tubular frame on which the wooden blades of the paddle once stood.

The boat takes him 150 kilometres downriver, at which point its patrol in that direction ends. Butcher decides to go it alone from there. He’s deposited on shore near the village of Lowa.

4. Lowa to Ubundu

This is my favorite section of the journey. In Lowa, Butcher hires a pirogue and four paddlers to take him to Ubundu. This move brings him just about as close to the Congo River as he can get without swimming in it. You can tell from the beauty of his descriptions that he relishes the experience. For example:

The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled wooden paddles. About three metres long, they were shape of spades from a deck of cards, only stretched out to mansize, with shafts that were thin and shiny, polished by years of being slid through calloused hands.

But no pleasure lasts for long in the Congo. As Butcher nears Ubundu, his sense of unease begins to build. What’s his next step? The river is navigable only as far as Ubundu, at which point he will have to continue overland for 100 kilometres around a series of rapids and cataracts known as Stanley Falls, until he reaches Kisangani, the large port city built at the bottom of the seventh and final set of rapids. Butcher writes, “All in all, I knew Ubundu was always going to be one of the major troublespots on my journey.” 

5. Ubundu to Kisangani

But it turns out Unbundu isn’t that bad. Butcher finds lodging in the church of St. Joseph’s. And three motorbike drivers from the aid group International Rescue Committee volunteer to take him to Kisangani. His description of the trip is superb. Here’s a sample:

There was absolutely no work taking place on the road. The advancing jungle had choked it to a single-track footpath, snaking around mature trees growing up from the centre of the old carriageway and past vast mudslides and dramatic rockfalls. Bridges had been washed away, making us pick our way down to the bottom of water courses and then charge up the other side. Recent rains made the whole exercise a dirty and dangerous one as the bikes slithered in the glutinous mud time and again, often pitching me onto the deck. One fallen tree caused a twenty-minute delay as the only route for our convoy of three bikes was up and over the top. This meant unloading everything, carting it over to the other side and then heaving the bikes over the fallen trunk, all the time sliding in mud that stood no chance of drying out because the dense leaf cover kept out any direct sunlight. The sticky heat felt as if we were toiling inside a hothouse.

6. Kisangani to Mbandaka

This section contains one of the book’s most memorable lines. Butcher is aboard a UN pusher traveling 1000 kilometres downriver to Mbandaka. He says, “To pass the time I would drag out my daily ablutions, taking perverse pleasure in the slow process of boiling water for a meticulous, slow shave, before taking one of the world’s most dangerous showers.” He explains that the water for the shower comes straight from the river. He says,

Against the creamy ceramic of an old shower cubicle, the water ran brown like tea. It reminded me of Scottish hill water tainted with peat, only it was much warmer and the chemicals that leached brown into the Congo River were more terrifying than those found in Highland soil. Somewhere to our north ran the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but a name that is associated with a horrific medical condition. It was near this river that a virus was first discovered that caused its victims to die in a spectacularly horrible way, bleeding to death from every orifice. Several of the world’s other spectacularly horrible haemorrhagic fevers were first discovered in the Congo. I kept my mouth shut whenever I showered.

Nevertheless, whether it’s from the shower or some other source, Butcher becomes sick. By the time he gets to Mbandaka, it’s all he can do to climb off the boat and back onto terra firma.

7. Mbandaka to Kinshasa

In Mbandaka, feeling too ill to face another delay of unknown duration, Butcher decides to travel the 600 kilometres to Kinshasa by UN helicopter. He says, “The shame I felt at temporarily abandoning Stanley’s route was more than outweighed by a growing sense of relief that my ordeal was nearing its end.”

8. Kinshasa to Boma

In Kinshasa, Butcher enters the world of the Congo super-elite. He stays at the headquarters of a cobalt-mining company, “a brand-new, luxury villa built on a prime piece of city-centre real estate fronting directly onto the Congo River.”  It’s only after two days of “sleeping in a bed with laundered sheets, drinking clean water, eating healthy food and dosing myself with antibiotics” that he feels strong enough to undertake the final leg of his journey. Using a jeep loaned to him by the mining company, he and two others drive the 400 kilometres to Boma, on the Congo River estuary. 

As he rides in the jeep, Butcher reflects on his 3000-kilometre Congo journey. He says, “In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.”

Blood River is one of my favorite books. The above outline doesn’t come close to doing it justice. Maybe in future posts I can do better, explore it more deeply. My next post in this series will be on structure.