These three great books abound with inspired details: the shaving lather on Patterson’s rifle after he shoots a moose (“I was sitting on a log having my weekly shave when I heard a stone rattle. I looked up, and there was a bull moose by the water’s edge a couple of hundred yards up the Flat. Very quietly I put down my shaving brush and picked up my rifle and fired. Down came the moose, and I wiped the lather off the stock of the rifle and set the weapon back against the log”); the sinister wing dam that Raban momentarily glimpses while fishing for walleye on Lake Pepin (“The wake of a big downstream tow pulled the water away from the wing dam; just for a second it lay exposed, a serrated line of rocks like a jawbone of blackened teeth”); in Butcher’s Blood River, the coil of ivy that the palm-oil trader carries with him on his bicycle to use as a tire patch (“He smiled when I asked him what the loop of ivy was for. ‘That is from a rubber tree. If I have a flat, I break the ivy and a glue comes out that will mend the puncture. It is the repair kit of the forest’ ”).
Patterson is a superb describer of method, of how he does things – makes a campsite, builds a log cabin, sews a pair of fur mitts. His art is in his precise details. Here’s an excerpt from a brilliant two-and-a-half-page description of how he manages to make a snug campsite in a blizzard:
It was a dirty night. The roar of the wind could be heard out on the open river: inside the trees one could feel it a little and occasionally there would come the whirring thud of snow dislodged by the gentle movement of the branches. I chose two spruce about ten feet apart, more or less in line with the wind, and with an open space in front of them. I snowshoed quickly around the campsite, sharply striking each overhanging tree twice with the back of the little axe; that fetched down any loose snow that would otherwise fall into camp or on to the fire when the heat from the flames rose among the branches. Then I trimmed the two chosen spruce up to a height of about six feet, laying the small dead branches in a pile to serve as kindling. Next, off came the snowshoes, and one of them was used as a shovel to dig down to ground level, banking the snow up all around, but especially behind the fireplace where it would act as a reflector. Then I laid the kindling in the fireplace, together with a twist of birch bark from my pocket. A match was applied and the little pile burst into flame. I nursed it carefully, adding bigger twigs and then branches and then a log or two – anything I could reach till it became a fire. I got the tea pail and filled it with snow, rammed in and pressed down, for this dry snow is nothing but frost crystals; it has nothing in common with the snow of southern lands, and there is very little water in it. I pushed back the blazing logs and set the tea pail on the ashes, right against the hottest part of the fire – it was safe there and could not overturn. Next, I cut down a tall, dead spruce, about fifteen inches through, that was standing handy. I felled it behind the fire and moved alongside it on snowshoes, trimming the branches and flinging an armful on the fire to get more light to work by; then I cut through the tree and moved forward first one end and then the other of the big log till it lay resting on the snow wall at each end, just above and just back of the fire – between the fire and the big reflector wall of snow. The flames promptly curled around it and soon it would be a glowing, radiant mass of charcoal on the surface, giving out heat all night and ready to burst into flame again at breakfast time.
That “together with a twist of birch bark from my pocket” is wonderful – a real woodsman’s detail.
Raban’s forte is river description. Detail after detail gleams in his depiction of the Mississippi: “I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak”; “I was afloat over a stump field submerged under just a few inches of water. As a roller sucked the river away, it exposed the bed of black-buttery peat, the sawed-off boles like bad teeth, and the boat grounded with a groan and a bang, the motor stalling as it hit a root”; “The current grabbed hold of the boat, flipped it around, and sent it skittering southward out of the city like a puck on an ice rink. I hardly had time to get the motor going before I was swept past the floating depot where the tows refueled and was into the humping, broken water below the highway bridges.”
I could go on quoting forever. Raban’s details are often in his adjectives – not just “peat,” but “black-buttery peat”; not just “boles,” but “sawed-off boles”; not just “water,” but “humping, broken water.”
My favorite details in Tim Butcher’s Blood River describe his experience traveling down the Congo in a pirogue: “The low wicker seat was smaller than my backside, but it was surprisingly comfortable and as the paddlers began to find their rhythm, I let my fingertips trail in the river water. It was as warm and soothing as a bath.” “I ran my wet fingers across the coarse hull of the pirogue, tracing gouges left by the boatmaker’s adze. They felt like a rough-hewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed and cursed by this great natural phenomenon.” Regarding his guides’ paddles, he writes,
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. The leaf-shaped blade spread broad and fat before tapering gracefully to a point. It was no surprise when later on the journey I saw them being used both as trays for food and as weapons for fighting.
He describes the paddlers’ way of drinking from the river: “To drink they would squat down while we were out in midstream, lower their faces over the edge of the pirogue until their lips were suspended maybe ten centimetres above the river and literally throw the water into their mouths with their hands.”
Butcher even describes what happens on a pirogue when you have to urinate:
They peed over the edge of the boat and were as sure-footed as if they were standing on terra firma. I was more ungainly, so when I tried, the effort of standing up and keeping my balance made me way too tense. Only after hours of discomfort could I build up the pressure required to overcome my nerves, and then only if I kneeled on my rucksack. Standing on the wobbly pirogue was much too nerve-racking ever to enable me to pee.
Butcher’s immersive details put us squarely there, in the pirogue with him and his paddlers, as they make their way down the mighty Congo. It’s an unforgettable ride.
In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books.
