How do you evoke a place in words? As these three great books show, one way is through the power of observation – the gift of the eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger. For example, in The Pine Barrens, McPhee describes Fred Brown’s house in Hog Wallow:
Fred Brown’s house is on an unpaved road that curves along the edge of a wide cranberry bog. What attracted me to it was the pump that stands in his yard. It was something of a wonder that I noticed the pump, because there were, among other things, eight automobiles in the yard, two of them on their sides and one of them upside down, all ten years old or older. Around the cars were old refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, partly dismantled radios, cathode-ray tubes, a short wooden ski, a large wooden mallet, dozens of cranberry picker’s boxes, many tires, an orange crate dated 1946, a cord or so of firewood, mandolins, engine heads, and maybe a thousand other things.
I relish the specificity of that list. McPhee’s descriptions are triumphs of observation. Here’s another one – a depiction of Chatsworth General Store:
When I first stopped in there, I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals, and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter. A glass counter top next to the wooden one had been rubbed cloudy by hundreds of thousands of coins and pop bottles, and in the case beneath it were twenty-two rectangular glass dishes, each holding a different kind of penny candy. Beside the candy case was a radiator covered with an oak plank.
Details accrete, and a whole world springs into being. That “Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter” is wonderfully noticed.
Accretion is Robert Sullivan’s method, too. In The Meadowlands, he describes what he sees as he and his friend Dave canoe across Kearny Marsh:
Around us there were green hills of grass-covered garbage dumps. We saw more carp, more muskrats, mudflats covered with sandpipers, and the frozen-in-time remains of a snapping turtle that appeared to have been decapitated by a train just as it had crawled up out of the marsh. We also saw a Thermos, three unopened cans of Pepsi, a beach chair sitting on another island, and a Seven Seas Red Wine Vinegar salad dressing spill. Passing over more underwater fences, we felt as if we were paddling just above Atlantis. At precisely one hour and fifty-two minutes into our trip, we saw our first abandoned appliance, a refrigerator.
Sullivan not only notices visual details; he notes sounds, smells, and textures, too:
We stood for a while beneath the tall cement legs of the turnpike. Distant airhorns blasted, set off by train track workers nowhere to be seen, and the sound seemed like the sad calls of undiscovered birds.
Dave was the first to voice concern; he spoke after we inhaled a dank, sewery smell that seemed to have been stirred up by our paddles. “I feel like I just knocked a couple of years off my life,” Dave said.
Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.
In one of my favorite passages in The Meadowlands, Sullivan touches a leachate seep, “a black ooze trickling down the slope of the hill, an espresso of refuse.” He writes,
But in this moment, here at its birth, at a stream’s source in the modern meadows, this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. I touched this fluid – my fingertip was a bluish caramel color – and it was warm and fresh. A few yards away, where the stream collected into a benzene-scented pool, a mallard swam alone.
Ian Frazier’s power of observation is immense. He, too, uses accretion of detail to convey his sense of place. Here, from On the Rez, is his description of Big Bat’s Texaco:
In Pine Ridge, Big Bat’s is the place you go. If you’re just passing through or visiting, you go to Big Bat’s because it’s one of the few places on the reservation that looks like what you’re used to in paved America. Big Bat’s has a big, highway-visible, red-and-white sign, and rows of pumps dispensing gasoline and diesel fuel, and full-color cardboard advertisements affixed to the top of the pumps, and country music playing from speakers in the canopies above; inside, it has the usual brightly lit shelves of products whose empty packages will end up on the floor of your car, and freezers and beverage coolers set into the wall, and a deli counter highlighted in blue neon and staffed by aproned young people who use disposable clear plastic gloves to put cold cuts on your six-inch or twelve-inch submarine sandwich, and video games, and TV monitors just below ceiling level showing CNN or country-music videos, and plastic tables and window booths where you can sit and eat or just sit, and a row of pay telephones. If you live on the reservation, if you’re not just passing through, you go to Big Bat’s because that’s where everybody goes.
Frazier’s descriptions of place are often lyrical, sometimes bordering on poetry. Here, for example, is his depiction of the sun-dance grounds:
We got in my car and drove a few miles north on the highway, then turned off into pasture. He said that he wanted to collect some more sage and that he knew a good place for it by the sun-dance grounds. We went through several fenced fields, Le getting out to open the gates. Then we came down a small embankment and into an open flat surrounded by cotton wood trees. In the center of it stood a sun-dance arbor – a shelter in the shape of an O, tree-limb posts supporting crossbeams laid over with a roof of bushy pine boughs – and in the center of the O stood the sun-dance pole. From the pole’s top fluttered strips of cloth in the four sacred colors, which are red, black, yellow, and white. A sun dance had taken place there a week or so before, and the grasses were still trampled down, and the dusty ground exhaled a good fragrance I couldn’t identify. There was not a scrap of litter anywhere. Near the sun-dance arbor remained the willow frame of a sweat lodge, a delicate sketch of a dome just big enough to sit under. By the lodge frame I saw a few remaining pieces of split cottonwood of a deep yellow, a heap of stones, and a sort of whisk made of long-needle pine boughs tied with baling twine. Aside from the twine, the fastenings of blue nylon cord on the sweat-lodge frame, and the cloth at the top of the sun-dance pole, everything in this ceremonial place was made from natural materials found close at hand. Most religious structures look as if they had descended upon the landscape from above; these looked as if they had risen on their own out of the ground.
That last line is quintessential Frazier – perceptive, lyrical, epiphanic.
Description of landscape is one way to evoke place. Another is description of people. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
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