By “action” I mean narrative action – physical movement through time and space. It’s an important ingredient. Without it, narrative is static. To hell with mental journeys! Give me the real thing. These three great books do exactly that. John McPhee, in The Pine Barrens, drives the undulating sand roads of the pine forest and canoes its rivers. He visits fire towers, pine towns, and factory ruins. He visits Fred Brown’s home in Hog Wallow. He observes the cranberry harvest, “when the bogs are flooded an inch or so over the vines, and the cranberries, which float, are batted free by motorized water rakes until they form a great scarlet berry boom – hundreds of thousands of cranberries bobbing and drifting with the wind or on a slow drainage current to a corner of the bog, where they are hauled in.” He accompanies the Philadelphia Botanical Club on its summer field trip in the pines:
Mrs. Evert called out to her husband, “Brooks, keep your eyes open and see if you can see the adder’s tongue fern over there.” Someone else found an adder’s tongue fern, and all the others assembled around it, on their hands and knees, as they did, moments later, around an orchid called Loesel’s twayblade. This was in Martha, and the orchid was growing on the site of the mansion that had stood in the middle of the now vanishing town. Overhead, crowded down by the pines, were the strangely twisted catalpa trees that had been planted by the people of Martha in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In one of my favorite passages, McPhee attends a tribute to the Mexican pilot Emilio Carranza, who, in 1928, was attempting a solo flight from Mexico City to Washington, when he fatally crashed in the Pine Barrens. Each year a ceremony is held at the Carranza Memorial, which marks the crash site. Here’s an excerpt:
Three hundred people were there, half of them Mexican. The Mexicans came from as far away as Chicago, but most of them were from New York, northern New Jersey, or Pennsylvania. They were in costume, in the main, and before the ceremony began they played strident arrangements of Mexican songs, like “Mi Patria Es Lo Primero” and “Mi Lindo Monterrey,” on a record player that was set on the tailgate of a Chevrolet station wagon. Girls in florid skirts and white blouses took thirty minutes to make up, combing and spraying one another’s hair and swaying to the sound of the phonograph. Little boys wore frilled shirts and straw hats. One man wore a green-white-and-orange sombrero, a red bandanna around his neck, and a black shirt. A Mexican colonel, tall and trim in a deep-green uniform, walked through the crowd and took a seat in a folding chair under a canopy, where people from Chatsworth and other places in the pines sat quietly in the heat, waiting. Two trucks from the state Forest Fire Service arrived, a bus and a truck from Fort Dix, and an ambulance. A fire warden came out of the woods carrying a six-foot-pine snake. Mexican children formed a circle around him, and he told them that a group of Boy Scouts had cut the head off a rattlesnake in that same part of the woods three days before. An army band from Fort Dix put the Mexican phonograph to shame with a soft and beautiful flow of Mexican melodies, notably “La Paloma” and the “Zacatecas March.” There were thirty-five men in the band, including a blonde soldier with a bowl haircut who had the touch of Granada with a pair of castanets. American Legionnaires with red-veined, waxy faces walked around saying, “Where’s the beer?” The beer was on ice in a large blue garbage can under a pitch pine, and the Legionnaires – who came from the Mt. Holy area, outside the pines – shared it with the Tabernacle Township police, one of whom was so heavy that he could not reach down into the garbage can. Brigadier-General William C. Doyle, of Fort Dix, gave an address, and said, “Here in New Jersey’s pine country, the gallant airman was grounded forever. He was not dess-tined to complete his mission.” The Honorable Donald E. Johnson, Immediate Past National Commander of the American Legion, said in the course of his speech that he had recently spent “an unprecedented hour with the President of Mexico.” He also spoke about the war in Vietnam, saying, “Any one who tells you this is a civil war is either ill-informed or uninformed or deliberately deceptive.” There was no discernible reaction from either the Mexicans or the pineys. Finally, he mentioned Emilio Carranza, saying, “Had Captain Carranza lived, his name might be forgotten today – such are the imponderables of life and death.” Another Legionnaire informed the crowd that men of the American Legion had hacked a trail twenty-five miles through the wilderness to carry Carranza’s body out to Mt. Holly. Actually, Carranza crashed beside a sand road, and his body was removed easily to Chatsworth. What the Mt. Holly Legionnaires have done, though, is to organize and maintain the annual ceremony. Ten large floral wreaths were placed around the memorial. Six United States soldiers raised rifles, a second lieutenant said, “Sergeant of the firing squad, prepare to salute the dead,” and three rounds were fired. A soldier played “Taps.” From the two flagpoles, the flags of Mexico and the United States descended. There was a contrail fifty thousand feet above the scene, and at a lower altitude a Navy jet fighter passed over it as well. A young man named Antonio Huitron, who had a child in his arms, and who lived on 176th Street in New York and had been in the United States for six years, said to me at this moment, “It was very sad, because everyone in Mexico was expecting him to come back.”
Wow! What a marvelous passage – the surreal reality of a Mexican celebration going on deep within the wilderness of the Pine Barrens. McPhee captures it magnificently – castanets, beer, speeches, wreaths, flags, jet fighter, pine snake – the whole bizarre, exuberant show in one brilliant, concentrated six-hundred-and-sixty-four-word paragraph.
There’s plenty of action in The Meadowlands, too. Sullivan hikes to Snake Hill. He canoes across Kearney Swamp. He canoes Berry’s Creek and Berry’s Creek Canal. He drives to Point-No-Point to wander around beneath the Pulaski Skyway. Sullivan does a lot of wandering around. It’s one of the book’s key actions. I love tagging along with him as he pokes around the Meadows, visiting places. He says,
I like to think of the Meadowlands as an undesignated national park, where you can visit all the sites, or as a more classic tourist destination, like Paris, where instead of roaming through old streets and wandering aimlessly through cafes and shops I wander along the edges of the swamps. One spring, I flew to Newark, rented a car, and checked into a hotel with the idea of touring around and just seeing where events would lead me.
One of the book’s highlights is the canoe trip that he and his friend Dave take across the Meadowlands. Here’s a taste:
We entered our second marsh, which was similar to the first, except perhaps more reed filled. I later learned that these small bodies of impounded water were formed at random, by the construction of railroad lines and the new and old turnpikes, but from the vantage point of our canoe at that moment, this seemed as natural a way to form a body of water as any. It was here, in the second swamp, that we came upon our first stumps from the Meadowlands old cedar forest. The stumps floated like corpses, their roots disappearing in the dark water. We poked at their tentacles with our oars, as a couple of red-winged blackbirds looked on suspiciously. A few minutes later, in a spot far from roads and highways, we discovered little islands, composed wholly of reeds. One island was surrounded by bright yellow police emergency tape: CAUTION, the tape said. Another island was inhabited by a lonely six-foot stepladder. In the next marsh, before an audience of terns, we canoed past a submerged control room of a radio transmission station, its giant antenna felled in the water like a child’s broken toy. In the water below our canoe, we could just make out fences topped with barb wire. I knew this to be the remains of one of the oldest radio antennae in the Meadowlands, thought to be the first to ever broadcast the voice of Frank Sinatra. When we approached Belleville Turnpike, we pulled our canoe and all our gear up over a four-foot-wide pipe that carried the water supply of Jersey City, and then, with the boat on our shoulders, we ran, timing our dash across the highway with the break in the waves of cars and trucks.
The action in On the Rez is similar to that in the other two books – lots of driving, walking, nosing around places, seeing what there is to see. It’s my kind of action – laidback, easygoing. But there’s one sequence that is very dramatic, in which Frazier’s life is actually at risk. It’s February; Frazier is driving the I-90, on his way home to Missoula from Pine Ridge. “Snow was thick in the air and the road had become a hard-polished white.” His car goes out of control. Frazier describes the moment:
I was suddenly skidding at 55 miles an hour backwards in the left-hand lane, then into the center divider, back across the right-hand lane, off the right-hand shoulder, and down the embankment, with plumes of snow blowing past. I crashed sideways through the freeway fence, snapping the barbed wire like string, rolled completely over, and landed on the passenger side in a ditch by an access road.
Frazier describes the aftermath of this crash in detail – the arrival of a highway patrolman, and then, shortly after that, the arrival of a Billings Gazette reporter, who takes photos of Frazier’s damaged Blazer. Then the tow truck guy arrives and hauls the Blazer to a Sinclair station by the interstate. Frazier tells about the repairs that guys at the Sinclair do to the Blazer – raising the crumpled roof, duct-taping the cracks in the windshield, taping a piece of heavy cardboard “with a few lug-soled boot prints on it” over the broken passenger-side window. And then Frazier gets in the Blazer, drives back on the road, and continues his trip. This is where the trip gets really hairy. Frazier writes,
By now the snow was coming down so hard I could see only a short distance ahead, and when semis passed me, I could see almost nothing but the snow they swirled. The road was a dim blowing world in which headlights suddenly appeared in the rearview mirror and red taillights suddenly flew by and disappeared. The tape holding the windshield to the frame quickly came apart, and the windshield hung loose like a drapery, bouncing with every jolt and letting snow in to pile up on the dash. The car made a strange noise at speeds above thirty miles an hour and refused to go much faster than thirty-five. I anticipated the start of a skid in every shimmy and gust of crosswind. Ragged breaks in the snow berms showed where other vehicles had skidded off the road. After about forty-five miles and ninety minutes of this, I pulled off at Columbus, Montana, and went to a Super 8 Motel right by the exit. The motel had a lot of trucks in its parking lot and a long line at the check-in desk. When I finally got to the head of the line, the lady there said she had just a few rooms left. She said there had been a wreck with fatalities on the interstate some miles to the west and the truckers had heard about it on their radios and had decided to quit for the day.
But that’s not the end of the story. Frazier gets up at three in the morning and decides to get back on the road. This time he travels as far as Livingston when a driver flags him over to tell him his left rear wheel is wobbling as if it is about to come off. He goes to a nearby Tire-Rama, where they tell him his left-rear axle is bent. They don’t have the part, but they call the Tire-Rama in Bozeman, which has it. Frazier wobbles twenty-six miles over the pass to Bozeman. At the Bozeman Tire-Rama they say they can have the axle fixed by late afternoon. The story of this wild ride ends with Frazier at the Bozeman Tire-Rama leafing through a newspaper when he suddenly sees a photo of his car:
On page 1 of the B section of the Billings Gazette was a large full-color photo: my car’s intricate underside against the white of a snowscape, the winch cable connecting the capsized vehicle to the tow truck, the happy tow truck driver in the foreground. I took the page with the photo and hurried back into the Tire-Rama work bays past the CUSTOMERS KEEP OUT signs and showed it to the man working on the axle. When he finally understood what I was talking about, he was unimpressed to be working on a famous car featured on page 1 of the Gazette’s B section.
I relish this account of Frazier’s hazardous trip back home from Pine Ridge. It has nothing to do with life on the reservation. But it’s part of Frazier’s experience writing about the place. He tells it marvellously.
My next post in this series will be on how these three great books convey sense of place.
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