The Pine Barrens features one of McPhee’s most vivid and eccentric “characters” – Fred Brown. McPhee introduces him in the first chapter:
I walked through a vestibule that had a dirt floor, stepped up into a kitchen, and went on into another room that had several overstuffed chairs in it and a porcelain-topped table, where Fred Brown was seated, eating a pork chop. He was dressed in a white sleeveless shirt, ankle-top shoes, and undershorts. He gave me a cheerful greeting and, without asking why I had come or what I wanted, picked up a pair of khaki trousers that had been tossed onto one of the overstuffed chairs and asked me to sit down. He set the trousers on another chair, and he apologized for being in the middle of his breakfast, explaining that he seldom drank much but the night before he had had a few drinks and this had caused his day to start slowly. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but there’s got to be something the matter with me, because drink don’t agree with me anymore,” he said. He had a raw onion in one hand, and while he talked he shaved slices from the onion and ate them between bites of the chop. He was a muscular and well-built man, with short, bristly hair, and he had bright, fast-moving eyes in a wide-open face. His legs were trim and strong, with large muscles in the calves. I guessed that he was about sixty, and for a man of sixty he seemed to be in remarkably good shape. He was actually seventy-nine. “My rule is: Never eat except when you’re hungry,” he said, and he ate another slice of the onion.”
McPhee is clearly fascinated by Fred, whom he meets purely by accident, when he stops at his house in Hog Wallow to ask for water. In the weeks that follow that first encounter, McPhee visits him many times. What fascinates McPhee is Fred’s deep knowledge of the Pine Barrens. Fred and his friend Bill Wasovwich ride with McPhee through the pines in McPhee’s car for five and six hours at a time, with Fred commenting on what they’re seeing as they go. McPhee’s description of this experience is one of the book’s highlights. Here’s a sample:
It is possible to drive all day on the sand roads, and more than halfway across the state, but most people need to stop fairly often to study the topographic maps, for the roads sometimes come together in fantastic ganglia, and even when they are straight and apparently uncomplicated they constantly fork, presenting unclear choices between the main chance and culs-de-sac, of which there are many hundreds. No matter where we were – far up near Mt. Misery, in the northern part of the pines, or over in the western extremities of the Wharton Tract, or down in the southeast, near the Bass River – Fred kept calling out directions. He always knew exactly where he was going. Fred was nearly forty when the first paved roads were built in the pines. Once, not far from the Godfrey Bridge on the Wading River, he said, “Look at these big pines. You would never think that I was as old as these big pines, would you? I seen all these big pines grow. I remember this when it was all cut down for charcoal.” A short distance away, he pointed into a high stand of pitch pines and scarlet oaks, and said, “That’s the old Joe Holloway field. Holloway had a water-powered sawmill.” In another part of the woods, we passed a small bald area, and he said, “That’s the Dan Dillett field, where Dan made charcoal.” As the car kept moving, bouncing in the undulations of the sand and scraping against blueberry bushes and scrub-oak boughs, Fred kept narrating, picking fragments of the past out of the forest, in moments separated by miles: “Right here in this piece of woods is more rattlesnakes than any place else in the State of New Jersey. They had a sawmill in there. They used to kill three or four rattlesnakes when they was watering their horses at noon. Rattlesnakes like water.... See that fire tower over there? The man in that tower – you take him fifty yards away from that tower and he's lost. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know nothing. He can’t even fry a hamburger.... I’ve gunned this part of the woods since I was ten years old. I know every foot of it here.... Apple Pie Hill is a thunderstriking high hill. You don’t realize how high until you get up here. It’s the long slope of a hill that makes a high one.... See that open spot in there? A group of girls used to keep a house in there. It was called Noah’s Ark.... I worked this piece of cedar off here.... I worked this bog for Joe Wharton once. My father used to work for Joe Wharton, too. He used to come and stay with my father. Joe Wharton was the nicest man you ever seen. That is, if you don’t lie to him. He was quiet. He didn’t smile very often. I don’t know as I ever heard him laugh out loud.... These are the Hocken Lowlands.” The Hocken Lowlands surround the headwaters of Tulpehocken Creek, about five miles northwest of Hog Wallow, and are not identified on maps, not even on the large-scale topographic maps. As we moved along, Fred had a name for almost every rise and dip in the land. “This is Sandy Ridge,” he said. “That road once went in to a bog. Houses were there. Now there’s nothing there.... This is Bony’s Hole. A man named Bony used to water his horse here.” Every so often, Fred would reach into his pocket and touch up his day with a minimal sip from a half pint of whiskey. He merely touched the bottle to his lips, then put it away. He did this at regular intervals, and one day, when he had a new half pint, he took more than five hours to reduce the level of the whiskey from the neck to the shoulder of the bottle.
That last detail is among my favorites in all of McPhee’s vast oeuvre. Fred Brown embodies the Pine Barrens: “He always knew exactly where he was going.”
There’s a guy in Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands who is comparable to Fred Brown. His name is Leo Koncher. He’s eighty-three years old; he’s lived in the Meadowlands his entire life. Sullivan writes,
Leo is five feet eight inches tall and has silky white hair and a slightly impish grin. He is a retired machinist and he typically dresses in shirtsleeves and khakis, as if he were in the middle of an unfinished project. He is a widower, and his home is a ramshackle field station stuffed with gear and equipment for the various expeditions he regularly undertakes into the Kearny Marsh, among other places in the Meadowlands.
Leo is an intrepid Meadowlands explorer. “He knows all the channels in the reeds in the Kearny Marsh intimately,” Sullivan writes. Sullivan accompanies him on some of his expeditions. For example:
One day I went out in Leo’s canoe and we were specifically hunting for treasure. He sat in the middle on a kind of padded lawn chair. He was wearing his khakis, a long-sleeved white shirt, a red-and-white handkerchief around his neck to protect him from the sun, and a cap advertising Domino’s Pizza. The bow on Leo’s aluminum canoe said Born Free. Leo told me to sit in the back and paddle, although he became disappointed with my speed and eventually commandeered the paddle and did it himself. As Leo toured me through the marsh, he recalled canoeing in a swamp in Florida with his late wife. At one point on the trip, Leo apparently thought he was tying up their canoe to the roots of a mangrove tree but the roots turned out to be snakes. “My wife got hysterical,” he said. He also told me about the hunters he occasionally meets during duck hunting season – “It can be a war zone out here,” he said – and took me to a little hunters’ blind hidden away on an island of reeds. “Go ahead, pull up close,” he said. “I want you to see this. You may find it rather unpleasant.” When I stood up in the canoe to look in, I saw thousands of flies. I looked back at Leo. He grinned.
Sullivan calls Leo “an unofficial poet laureate of the Meadowlands”: “He has chronicled his trips on the marshes with frequent dispatches to the letters pages of local papers.” The themes of the letters are “the natural beauty of the marsh and the beauty of the creatures who live there, as told by a solitary wanderer.” Sullivan also reports that Leo “recently gave the Kearny Public Library a series of photos that he had taken at various times of the year from both his canoe and bicycle.” In one of my favorite passages, Sullivan describes the photos:
The photos are of giant huckleberry bushes on the old dumps; the marsh in the early morning when a mist covers the lakes for as far as you can see; the marsh at sunset when the reddish outline of the reeds licks the gray sky like flames; the snow-white flowers of the marshmallows, and the phragmites in fall when they turn a dusty brown.
Ian Frazier’s On the Rez features at least two people who embody the character of Pine Ridge Reservation – Le War Lance and SuAnne Big Crow. Frazier and Le are friends. But their relationship is complicated. Frazier says, “Le and I have fallings-out from time to time. He often is not a very nice guy.” Frazier describes him vividly:
Le’s appearance has varied over the years. He is about six feet tall, and has a broad face rather like the actor Jack Palance’s. Le’s eyes can be merry and flat as a smile button, or deep and glittering with malice or slyness or something he knows and I never will. He is fifty-seven years old. I have seen his hair, which is black streaked with gray, when it was over two feet long and held with beaded ponytail holders a foot or so apart, and I have seen it much shorter, after he had shaved his head in mourning for a friend who had died. He has big hands which can grip a basketball as easily as I can hold a softball, and long arms. He is almost never able to find shirts or coats with long-enough sleeves. I’ve seen him in fancy tooled cowboy boots, in oversize Italian loafers with metal buckles, and in running shoes; in many different cowboy hats, in an orange-and-white knit ski cap bearing the name of an insurance company, and in snowmobile caps with fur earflaps. I’ve seen him fat and thin. For a while he was about 260 pounds, a pro-football heft. Then he became slim and rangy-looking. He told me he was losing weight because he had cancer. I asked what kind of cancer he had and he replied, “Generic.” He told me he would be dead in six weeks, and even gave the date on which he would die, which he said had been revealed to him in a dream. That was about eight years ago. He has gained back a lot of the weight since then.
Frazier says of Le,
He calls me every few weeks, it seems, to ask for money. It’s good that he does, I suppose, to keep me from getting sentimental when I think of him. Even now I can feel my words want to pull him in a wrong direction, toward a portrait that is rose-tinted and larger than life, while he is pulling the other way, toward reality. Sometimes when he calls, his voice is small and clear, like neat printed handwriting; other times, depending on his mood and how much he’s had to drink, his voice is sprawling and enlarged, like a tall cursive signature with flourishes on the big letters and ink blots and splatters alongside.
Frazier visits Le in his Washington Heights apartment, at the far northern end of Manhattan. His descriptions of these visits are among my favorite passages in the book. Here’s a sample:
Le was drinking a sixteen-ounce can of Budweiser beer. He asked me to sit, and he offered me one. As I got accustomed to the light, I saw sixteen-ounce Budweiser cans everywhere – not scattered around carelessly, but set upright neatly among the furniture, on the end table, in the shelves of the bookcase, under the television, in the corners; it was like a brain-teaser drawing: “How many beer cans can you find in this picture?” He introduced me to his cat, Hey Baby, and to Coyote, his dog. Coyote was small and waggy and blind in one eye. A painting of an eagle with wings spread covered an entire wall. It was done in sketchy strokes of brown on the wall itself, and one of the legs in particular was so detailed and eagle-like, with careful feathering and sickle-shaped claws, that I thought it possible he had gotten as close to a real eagle leg as he said he had. In the middle of the eagle he had pasted a poster advertising the Longest Walk, a demonstration organized by the American Indian Movement in 1973 to protest anti-tribal legislation then before Congress. Le said he had participated in the walk, which began in California and ended in Washington, D.C., and that he had worn out four pairs of boots, three pairs of tennis shoes, and two pairs of other shoes along the way. He said concrete just eats shoes up. Then he told me to look at the ceiling: a sketch of a buffalo head done in carpenter’s pencil, full face, stared down. He walked to different parts of the room and pointed up. “Here is his horns ... here is his eyes ... here is his nose ... here is his beard.” The ceiling was white; this was a sacred white buffalo, he said.
Eventually, Le moves back to Pine Ridge Reservation. Frazier decides to visit him there. This is the start of his exploration of the reservation. Here’s his description of the inside of Le’s house:
Le invited me in, and we climbed the single cinder block he used for a doorstep. His door latch was a green-and-white plastic fish stringer, which he tied to a nail inside. He asked if I’d had breakfast and offered me a beer. I replied that I had quit drinking. He said, “That reminds me – I’ve got to take my pills again.” He produced half a dozen pill bottles of various sizes and shook pills from them into his palm. Hospitably, he first offered a large orange capsule to me. “Want one?” I declined, with thanks. Then he washed them all down with a few swigs of beer. He sat on a stove log and I on the only chair. The amount of stuff in his house overthrew my attempt to take in. There was a non-working clock on the wall, and a brown hole near it where the oven pipe used to be, and a cast-iron woodstove, and a plastic milk crate full of silver tinsel Christmas wreaths, and a yellow hard hat, and a photograph of a statuesque Indian woman in a T-shirt smiling and holding a .357 Magnum revolver. (“That’s my nephew’s wife, Deborah. She’s a rowdy from the Fort Apache Reservation”), and a rolled-up section of snow fence, and a poster from the movie Incident at Oglala, and a copy of the collected short stories of Ernest Hemingway, and several sports trophies, and the paperwork from Le’s recent hospital bills. A door just behind me opened into a room filled several feet deep with suitcases, plastic picnic coolers, backpacks, baby carriers, trunks, and heavyweight canvas tote bags. I remembered when Le had just moved from New York City up to Monsey, and I had commiserated with him, saying how hard it was to move. He had replied, “It’s not hard for me. I’m nomadic.”
Le takes Frazier inside the culture of the reservation. He introduces him to members of his family – Floyd John, Florence Cross Dog, Aurelia Two Crow. He takes him to various locations – Wounded Knee, the sun-dance grounds, the rodeo grounds, the cemetery. He’s an invaluable contact and an unforgettable character. But he’s exasperating. He’s often drunk. He’s often asking Frazier for money. Through the ups and downs, their friendship endures. Near the book’s end, Frazier writes,
Eventually I drove him to Verna Yellow Horse’s house across from the Catholic church in Oglala, and we sat in my car with the engine idling and the heater on. Le told me about police officers he had fought or intimidated (one in Grand Junction, Colorado, in particular), and he went on to revile and defy all immigrants to his country, and he said this was his land, and he said, “I know who I am!” He sang some Lakota songs. He said many times that he and I are brothers. He said that there is a deep spiritual bond between us. He took my hand in the “power” shake – hands clasped upright, palm to palm – and held on to it for a long time. I was a bit uncomfortable, as I sometimes am with him. I disregarded a lot of what he said and reduced it in my mind to about 20 percent face value. But the part about us being brothers I did not discount. By different routes and for different reasons, our affections have ended up in the same place; being called Little Brother means a lot to me. Through the swerves in our relationship it took me years to discover this.
The other major figure in On the Rez is SuAnne Big Crow. She died in 1992, when she was seventeen, three years before Frazier’s first visit to the reservation. Frazier brings her alive on the page. He talks with her mother Chick Big Crow. He talks with her high school basketball coach Charles Zimiga. He talks with members of the basketball team that SuAnne played for – the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes. He describes the Lakota shawl dance that SuAnne spontaneously did at center court in a pre-game warm-up in the town of Lead. She was fourteen at the time. Lead fans were yelling at the Lady Thorpes, calling them “squaws” and “gut-eaters.” SuAnne ran out onto the court, “unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance.” She also began to sing in Lakota, “swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl.” The crowd went completely quiet. Frazier writes,
In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.”
Most memorably, Frazier reconstructs the 1989 state Class A championship game in Sioux Falls between the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes and the Milbank Lady Bulldogs, in which SuAnne scored the winning basket in the last second of play. Here’s an excerpt:
There’s a scramble, Milbank has it for an instant, loses it; and then, out of the chaos on the floor: order, in the form of SuAnne. She has the ball. She jumps, perfectly gathered, the ball in her hands overhead. Her face lifts toward the basket, her arched upper lip points at the basket above the turned-down O of her mouth, her dark eyes are ardent and wide open and completely seeing. The ball leaves her hand, her hand flops over at the wrist with fingers spread, the ball flies. She watches it go. It hits inside the hoop, at the back. It goes through the net. In the same instant, the final buzzer sounds.
SuAnne embodies the greatness of Pine Ridge Reservation. Frazier writes, “Here was a hero – not a folk hero, a sports hero, a tribal hero, or an American hero, but a combination of all these.”
Three of the most significant people in these books are the authors themselves. Their “I”s are present on almost every page. What are they like as characters? Can these works be read as self-portraits? What are the implications of their first-person perspective? That’s the subject of my next post in this series.
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