3 Great Thematic Travelogues: People

This is the seventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of people.

“Above all, this is a book about people and place,” says Macfarlane, in the “Author’s Note” at the beginning of The Old Ways. The people who figure most centrally in his narrative embody the paths and seaways he travels – people like Ian Stephen, Finlay MacLeod, Anne Campbell, Steve Dilworth, Rajah Shehadeh, Miguel Angel Blanco, Jon Miceler. They guide Macfarlane. Stephen accompanies him on two voyages, one to the Shiants, the other to Sula Sgeir. MacLeod and Campbell help him find Manus’s way. Dilworth takes him on a pilgrimage to a sacred rock on the Isle of Harris. Shehadeh guides his walks in Palestine. Blanco walks with him through the Fuenfría valley. Miceler leads him on an expedition to Minya Konka.

They’re all wonderful guides. How does Macfarlane evoke them? At least three ways. Firstly, he describes their physical appearance. Here, for example, is his portrait of Ian Stephen:

Ian in appearance: curly silver hair, a shallow white stubble, two thin silver earrings in his left ear, too fine to be piratical. Ian in manner: sharp, fox-like, generous, mischievous. Ian in voice: lilting, Gaelic-inflected. Ian in stature: small, almost boyish. He has an air of youthfulness to him, seems younger than me, though he’s more than twenty years my senior. His physique, like his language, is compact and wiry, capable of reach and strength. Physically, he’s whipped-tight, made of hawser and halyard wire, but his character is full of flex. He passes in and out of moods of intense concentration, whose endings are marked by a quick grin, a register shift, an agile impiety. He doesn’t take well to fools or frauds. The first time we met I felt gauged, appraised, quickly read. Eyes moved up and down me. I had the same sense of apprehension as when stepping through an airport scanner. Then – clear. Green light. No improper goods. Nothing falsely hidden. A test passed, for the time being at least.

Secondly, he describes where and how they live. Here, for example, is his depiction of the kitchen of Steve and Joan Dilworth’s house in the Hebridean village of Geocrab:

Within a few minutes of arriving I was at the kitchen table with a coffee in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other, telling Steve and Joan about the night in the beehive shielings and the discovery of Manus’s path. A stuffed guillemot regarded me quizzically from on top of a wall-mounted speaker. On a three-foot-deep southern windowsill sat what looked like the bronze skull of a praying mantis, two feet long and with bulging eyes. Stacked under the window were dozens of empty bird’s-egg display cases: dark pine, glass-topped, segmented by fine wooden partitions, with cotton-wood nests ready to receive each blown dead egg, and copperplated name cards to identify the species: Sardinian Goldfinch. Greenshank. Red-Billed Tern.

And here, unforgettably, is Steve’s workshop:

On a chest freezer sat a human skull, the cheekbones of which had been partially built up with plaster and resin, but the nose of which was unreconstructed: just a blade of cartilage cutting out from the face. On a shelf was a wooden owl, with a glistening rope or cord of metal protruding from its open mouth. From a rafter, dangling from its meat hook, was the Hanging Figure.

Two of the walls were lined with workbenches. Barrels stood about as tables and desks. Every surface was cluttered with objects. Conical flasks, bell jars, retorts, syringes – the glassware of an apothecary or mad inventor. Cork-stoppered phials, film cannisters. I found a jar containing an inch or so of a red unguent, which appeared to glow from within. I picked it up and rotated it so that I could read the sticker: SEAL OIL. The oil slunk around the jar’s base, leaving a ruby tideline on the glass. 

There were pots filled with feathers, mostly tail and wing, and separated roughly by species. On the benches were the tools of the job: clamps, pliers, calipers, gauntlets. A springy curl of minke baleen, a foot-long, black and polished. The cochlea of a grey whale. 

At waist level on a bench in the workshop was a basket filled with horns, teeth, bones and beaks from unidentifiable creatures. Unicorns? Hippogriffs? Dragons? I lifted the basket, and underneath it was a shallow crate containing perhaps fifty hollow sand dollars, little pods of white with their cryptic dot-markings. Nestled among them was an armadillo’s shell, orangey in colour and delicately articulated, covered in pale wire-like hairs. I picked it out and held it. It sat like a bubble on my palm.

The third way Macfarlane evokes his people is by showing them interacting with the landscapes they know and love so intimately. Here, for example, is his description of Finlay MacLeod interpreting certain topographical features of the Isle of Lewis:

One of the reasons I enjoy being with Finlay is his ability to read landscapes back into being, and to hold multiple eras of history in plain sight simultaneously. To each feature and place name he can attach a story – geological, folkloric, historical, gossipy. He moves easily between different knowledge systems and historical eras, in awareness of their discrepancies but stimulated by their overlaps and rhymes. Scatters of stones are summoned up and reconstituted in his descriptions into living crofts. He took me to a green knoll in Baile na Cille in mid-Lewis, and recalled for me the scene in 1827 when a Reverend Dr. Macdonald had gathered 7,000 people around the knoll for a mass conversion to Calvinism. A crag-and-tail outcrop of gneiss in the moor drew him back into the Holocene and an explanation of how, after the glaciers had retreated from the Western Isles around 12,000 years ago, the peat began to deepen in the lees of the exposed rock-backs. To Finlay, geography and history are consubstantial. Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically.

Roger Deakin’s Waterlog features dozens of people. For example:

Sid Merry, who takes Deakin eel fishing on the Great Ouse (“Sid is a wiry, weather-beaten man of medium build who knows the Great Ouse better than anyone”);

Ernie Hall, a dart player in the Three Tuns at Welney, who tells Deakin about the times after work on hot days he and his friends “used to dive off the bridge there into the muddy Hundred Foot Drain, swim down on the ebb-tide to the Crown, three miles away, sink three pints while the tide turned, then swim back up on the rising tide to Bank Farm, where he lived”);

Deakin’s old swimming companion Dudley, who accompanies him on swim at Holkham beach (“Miles from anywhere, we came upon a waterhole that was especially long and deep, and splashed about in it like two desert travellers in an oasis”);

Deakin’s cousin Adrian, who accompanies him on a swim in a tarn in the Rhinog Mountains of Wales (“We stripped off and leapt in. It took our breath away. The pool was three or four feet deep with just enough room to swim, as in a treadmill, against the current. Every second was an eternity. Neither of us stayed in for longer than a minute but sprang out on the knife-edge between aching and glowing”);

Judith, Deakin’s host at the weir in the village of Fladbury on the River Avon (“We dived off an old stone landing-stage into sixteen-foot-deep clear water above the weir and recklessly breaststroked a few hundred yards upstream as far as a bridge”);

Deakin’s friend John, who accompanies him on a swim in a bathing place in Dartmoor where the River Dart is joined by an unusually cold moorland torrent (“My friend John and I, wearing masks, snorkels and flippers, dropped straight into deep water off some rocks and swam against the current up into the pool. What we saw there astonished us both. About ten feet down in the clear water, dappled with sunlight, lay dozens of salmon, many of them well over two feet long. They turned and nosed off languidly upstream at our approach, disappearing into the clear green bubbling river, or amongst the shadows of underwater rocks”);

Madeleine, a painter, whom Deakin meets when the two of them are swimming in Penzance’s Jubilee Bathing Pool (“Madeleine asserted confidently that swimming is better than sex, and that it is an invaluable inspiration to her painting. There was no arguing with that. Her comment was curiously in tune with the sensuous nature of these original lidos”).

Deakin’s friend Brian, who uses his boat to shield Deakin from the view of the coastguard as he swims across the mouth of the Fowey River from Polruan to Fowey and back (“Brian and his children, Holly and Joe, chatted away as we went, and I eased into a steady breaststroke, keeping to the seaward side of the boat, out of sight of the harbourmaster’s office”);

Deakin’s friend Gary, who accompanies him on a swim in a natural rock pool at Treyarnon, in Constantine Bay (“Gary and I went in too, and the retriever, called Moll, we discovered, swam over to greet us. She looked magnificent in the water and moved with instinctive grace, snout just clear of the surface, tail out as a rudder”);

Stephen Rees, who tells Deakin a story about being bitten by a pike (“Almost immediately he felt ‘a bash’ in his right arm, which was trailing in the fast water. He told me he thought for a moment he had hit it on a sunken branch. Then he looked down and recognized the head of a pike holding on to his forearm and saw the flash of its body as it spun away”);

Gavin Edwards, an Aysgarth potholer, whom Deakin encounters at Bernie’s Caving Café in Ingleton, and who tells Deakin about the existence of a wild gorge (“a deep gash in the limestone filled with white water dropping steeply for two hundred feet”) called Hell Gill, which Deakin decides to swim;

Deakin’s friends Caroline, Ruth, and Neil, who row Deakin across the loch at Ardpatrick, Argyll (“The plan was to row across from the ferry cottage to the quay on the opposite shore. I would then swim back, escorted by the boat”), and who, the following afternoon, accompany him on a swim “in 360 feet of turquoise water in a sheer-sided quarry on Belnahua”);

Denis, who takes Deakin in his boat to Gillingham Strand on the River Medway, and then escorts him on his swim across the river to Hoo Salt Marsh Island and the Folly Fort (“Sometimes Denis rowed ahead of me, sometimes to one side, and sometimes behind. Both of us had settled into the zen of rhythm by now”);

Steve, an artist camping on Hoo Salt Marsh Island, who gives Deakin a tour of Folly Fort (“Steve’s canvases were propped up around the walls or hung from a washing line like dried cod. They were a kind of collaboration between the man and the river. When we had finished our lunch and I had changed, we set off over the marsh to explore the island and see some of his work in progress”);

Somerset farmer Peter Hansford, who shows Deakin his cider shed (“Mr. Hansford drew off some of the dark nectar out of a tap in one of the barrels, and offered us a half-pint each. It was viscous, cool and sharp, then the taste of the fruit came through. It was probably vicious too, but I liked it and was soon on a second glass”);

Deakin’s friend Lucy, who invites him to swim in the outdoor pool on the grounds of her posh London flat (“I can think of no greater luxury than swimming outdoors at night in gently mulled water when there’s a chill in the air. It is like being tucked up in bed on a frosty night with the window ajar”);

Deakin’s friend Michael, who arranges Deakin’s admission to the indoor swimming pool of the Royal Automobile Club in London (“The long, green pool was a magnificent high-ceilinged Byzantine affair, all turquoise mosaic pillars and wide terrazzo floors. The pool was edged with marble and a fine spray of water played on the surface at the shallow end. The pillars sparkled with a serpentine brilliance and there was a Roman opulence to the place”); 

Deakin’s friends Lucy, Madeleine, Tim, and Meg, amongst others, who join Deakin at the Hidden Hut, in Walberswicki, Suffolk, to celebrate his journey’s end with a Christmas Day swim in the North Sea (“Once fully immersed and striking out for deeper water, I experienced the intoxication of the fiery cold, and found myself splashing about and even body-surfing with manic energy”).

Macfarlane and Deakin have many friends and companions and appear to enjoy their company. I’m not sure the same can be said of Lawrence Osborne. In his The Wet and the Dry, he says repeatedly that he wants to be alone: “I am resolutely solitary at the hotel bar at ten past six, and the international riffraff have not yet descended upon its stools”; “I am alone, I think to myself, on my little lake of slightly gelatinous vodka. I am alone, and no one can touch me. I am haraam”; “But usually, as I say, I am alone, and it is this quality of aloneness that is most special. The solitude of the bar is so absolute, so gutting that you wonder why Edward Hopper didn’t paint it more often”; “Crudely but also subtly, the bottle facilitates this solitude, and the drinker knows it all too well”; “It was a place to savor life’s inevitable solitude and uncertainty”; “ ‘The bar,’ as Luis Buñuel once wrote, ‘is an exercise in solitude’ ”; “Some places are intended as a withdrawal, a penance. Places where one is doomed to be alone with the self”; “And as I sip my vodka martini in the Bristol at midnight, alone but for a bowl of salted peanuts ...”; “Back in Cairo, I spent some days alone at the Windsor, venturing nightly down to the decaying bar and its atrophied antlers and drinking cold glasses of disgusting Omar Khayyam with plates of hummus.”

Nevertheless, people do figure in Osborne’s book. There’s the Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt, with whom Osborne has lunch:

The windows were open, and we could smell the snow. On the table was a bottle of Chateau Kefraya, the wine that Jumblatt invests in. As I was seated next to him, he politely poured me a glass. The politics died down, and he seemed genuinely curious to hear what a drinker would think of his production.

There’s Osborne’s family: his father (“He liked his pint rather than his dram”); his mother (“She was a woman who had wandered almost by accident into a life she had not quite intended for herself”); his great-uncle John O’Kane (“Here was a male gorgon who stormed around the world on ‘business’ liquoring himself at a thousand bars, ‘that drunken Irish loafer,’ as my father called him, who didn’t care about gathering moss as he rolled like a stone through his ramshackle life”).

There’s Osborne’s Italian girlfriend Elena, “in all her blonde and oddly Nordic magnificence.” I like this line: “Elena crawled on top of me and said, ‘Drink or amore? Which one first?’ Amore, then, but soon after drink.”

There’s Isphanyar Bhandara, owner of the Murree Brewery in Rawalpindi. Osborne visits his office:

In wall cases stood rows of Murree products: Kinoo Orange Vodka, Citrus and Strawberry Gin, Vat No. 1 Whisky, clear rum, and beers. There were also the fruit juices and fruit malts that Murree sells to Muslims, foremost among them a thing called Bigg Apple. When Isphanyer spoke rapidly on the phone, his Urdu was mixed with urgently crisp English words: “maximize,” “incentivize,” “target,” and then “look after him!” From time to time he paused to sweep a deodorant stick into his arm pits and laughed a little nervously. He was handsome, quick, and on edge.

There’s master distiller John Campbell, who gives Osborne a tour of the Laphroaig distillery on the Isle of Islay:

We went up to the cement-floored malting room, where Laphroaig’s barley is rolled out and dried. Malting is the process of flushing barley three times with water to make it germinate over a period of fifty-two hours. The husks are then dried three times as well. Laphroaig is one of only five distilleries in Scotland that “floor malts” by hand – that is, they expose the grain to natural air by opening and closing windows. Enzymes pour through the tiny acrospire at the barley husk’s core, and at its tip an embryo begins to emerge. Campbell split one and showed it to me, adding that this means the barley is getting ready to produce sugars. But before this germination actually occurs, there’s an intermediate step: the husks are shoveled into a kiln room for the process known as peating. A peat fire belches a perfumed smoke into the kiln for fifteen hours and saturates the dried-out barley with its aromas.

There’s Osborne’s friend Sébastien de Courtois, a French scholar of Islam, who takes Osborne to the Nurettin Cerrahi Tekkesi, a little-known dervish school of the seventeenth-century saint Cerrahi Halveti, where they witness an extraordinary ceremony:

A series of circles had formed, the men holding hands. They turned slowly clockwise, their heads still turning to left and right, dipping, the bodies bending slightly to the right as they uttered the same words. In the salon, the old men seated on the sofas made the same motions with their heads, their eyes closed. They were inducted into the same trance. The sema, the ceremony. Drummers had appeared, in white turbans. At the center of the circle stood a single dervish in his tall camel-hair sikke hat symbolizing the tombstone of his ego. He was younger than the leaders conducting the chants, the mustache carefully trimmed.

The chanting ebbed and flowed, changed rhythm and speed. The men began to sweat and half-dance as they turned. Something had clicked between them, and they were now fused into a single whole. The man in the sikke began to rotate in the center of the space. His arms wide, dressed in white, he spun like a sycamore seed falling: an expression of pure intoxication.

And there are the two Lebanese winemakers Labib Kallas and Andre Hajj Thomas, who give Osborne a tour of their vineyards located some thirty miles north of Cairo:

We walked across the vineyards in cool winter sun. Vines to the horizon in every direction. The two men stopped here and there to watch the workers pruning, intervening to correct their technique. The intricate technical details of viticulture are so alien here that they have to be supervised with constant attention. The two men sometimes sleep out in the vineyards in order to do it around the clock, and over time the field hands have adapted to these peculiar demands. Yet over this whole enterprise, with its initial investment of $2 million, there hangs the inevitable uncertainty of making an alcoholic product in a country that is retreating from its secular inheritance. 

Those are just some of the people in The Wet and the Dry. And don’t forget the bartenders: Time Out’s Johnny Khouris (“Beirut’s most famous bartender”) and the Windsor’s Marco (“An ancient and venerable bar must have a barman exuding those qualities. The Windsor has Marco”), to name two.  

All three of these great books throng with people. I’ve identified a number of them. But, so far, I haven’t mentioned the protagonists – the authors themselves. Their “I”s are on almost every page. Can these works be read as self-portraits? That’s the subject of my next post in this series.  

Acts of Seeing: Purple Lupins

Photo by John MacDougall

Yesterday I biked to Robinsons Island. It’s about fifteen kilometers from our place in Stanhope. I went along Gulf Shore Way through Prince Edward Island National Park. Beautiful day, sunny, 15°. I biked a gravel path that circles the island. I saw lots of wildflowers – lupins, wild roses, daisies, buttercups, devil's paintbrushes. There was an abundance of lupins – purple, pink, and white. I stopped at my favorite lookout on the island’s north shore. Again, lots of lupins. I took this shot, showing lupins, crumbling bank, beach, and driftwood. I found a blue-and-yellow lobster buoy on the beach in near mint condition. I took it back with me and added it to my collection. 

Postscript: Mark Singer 1950 - 2026

Mark Singer (photo by Neilson Barnard)

I see in the Times that Mark Singer has died: “Mark Singer, Longtime Writer for The New Yorker, Dies at 75.” The Times piece rightly says that he “extended the magazine’s franchise of rich reporting and witty prose about offbeat, complicated and quintessentially American characters.” It quotes New Yorker editor David Remnick: “He came out of the tradition of A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell and Calvin Trillin, which is to say he combined meticulous reporting and a very distinctive comic voice, which is extremely rare.” This is well put. 

Singer was also a master of the “Talk of the Town” story. See, for example: 

“Man vs. Mouse” (“He arranged ‘a Maginot Line of glue traps’ and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”); 

“Sleight of No Hands” [“Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, of ‘one fully operative appendage’)”];

“Bank Shot” [“When he arrived at Eyebeam, the immediate challenge was to center the logo of American Eagle Savings Bank on the cover of Theories of Business Behavior, by Joseph William McGuire (formerly in the collection of the Cloud County Junior College Library, of Concordia, Kansas)”];

“All-Nighter” (“Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?”);

“Risky Business” (“ ‘As soon as they started moving the bulls out of the pens into the bucking chutes, I could see Bushwacker go from docile to this’ – he pantomimed a bull pawing the ground – ‘and I thought, This bull knows’ ”).

Singer’s Mr. Personality (1989), one of the most beautiful collections of New Yorker writing ever published, contains twenty-five  of his “Talk” pieces, including such classics as “Yabba-Yabba, Doodle-Doodle” (in which Mr. Blatford memorably says, “You get your change from a change machine, put your dog in the Doggie Washer, do your yabba-yabba, doodle-doodle – you know, whatever you do while you’re waiting in a Laundromat – and then go home with a clean dog”) and “Pigeon Mumblers” (“Some Greenpoint pigeon mumblers who are familiar with Killer’s irascible moods say that if he really put his mind to it, he could probably hatch a baseball”).

In a future post, I’ll consider Singer’s literary legacy in more detail. For now, I just want to pay my respects to him. He's a New Yorker great. 

June 22, 2026 Issue

I know the focus of Ian Frazier’s “Talk of the Town” story in this week’s issue is the new ICE prison in Newark. He vividly describes it: 

Delaney Hall, a thousand-bed privately owned ice prison in Newark, is in the city’s industrial lowlands. Its address, 451 Doremus Avenue, makes it seem like an entity with physical limits, but that’s not how it looks to passersby, unless they are in the air, taking off from or landing at Newark Airport. Delaney Hall occupies tens of thousands of square feet enclosed in chain-link fencing that bulges outward like the front end of a whale, if you can imagine a whale also crisscrossed with razor wire. To a person at ground level, Delaney Hall seems to go on forever.

He describes the incredibly loud noise of the place, too:

When the trucks pass the crowd that is protesting the treatment of the detainees the facility now holds (it is the largest ice prison on the East Coast), some of the drivers honk in support. The horns are incredibly loud. Now and then, a driver will blast his horn for what seems like minutes. Amid the protesters facing off with the ice agents, the volunteers there to help the detainees, the banks of media cameras on tripods, the planes and helicopters overhead, the pipelines, train tracks, telephone poles, and the vast bulk of the prison itself, a long blast from a truck sounds satisfying and right.

But the part of the story that resonates with me is the last paragraph, when Frazier’s attention shifts from the prison and the protesters and the noise to the pond next to the prison visitor’s parking lot. He writes,

Doremus Avenue and the warehouses and tank farms and truck lots and junk yards along it are not far from the Passaic River. This is swampy Jersey, as opposed to hilly Jersey. Next to the prison visitors’ parking lot, a small catchment pond holds runoff. The lawn around the pond had been mowed without anybody picking up the trash beforehand. Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. The geese had been there off and on for days.

Frazier has a keen eye for urban nature. In the midst of pandemonium, he notices the pond and the geese carrying on life as best they can. I think he draws inspiration from them. They’re a welcome relief from all the man-made chaos happening right next door. 

Evan S. Connell's Brilliant "Son of the Morning Star"

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I’m not a student of American history. But this is one event I know something about, thanks to Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star (1984). What an extraordinary book! 

Connell weaves a rich, intricate tapestry, piecing together multiple versions of the battle, comparing stories, dispelling myths, weighing evidence, searching for truth in a welter of contradictions and inconsistencies. Here, for example, he makes short work of the notion that Custer shot himself:

He is said to have shot himself, the ultimate proof of cowardice, and today many people believe it. That he did so can be verified by numerous testimonials. For instance, an army officer in Wyoming was told by an old Indian that he – the old Indian – was hiding in a buffalo near the battlefield and saw Custer commit suicide. Buffalo seldom wallow on hillsides, but never mind. No powder burn was observed on his temple, but never mind. A right-handed man is not apt to shoot himself in the left temple, but never mind. These days it is stylish to denigrate the general, whose stock sells for nothing. Nineteenth-century Americans thought differently. At that time he was a cavalier without fear and beyond reproach.

Connell doesn’t denigrate Custer. But he doesn’t idolize him, either. He says,

Regardless of Sitting Bull’s presence or absence, regardless of the strategy he did or did not contrive, there is no doubt that Custer tracked these temporarily peaceful tribes. He tracked them, following a plan drawn up by General Terry, and it is clear that he meant to assault them. Instead of being ambushed, therefore, he must be likened to a hunter stepping into the jaws of his own trap.

Connell’s writing is superb – sharp, vivid, perceptive. Here, for example, is his portrait of the great Hunkpapa Lakota warrior Gall:

Even in pudgy middle age Gall was a man of such explosive strength that he fairly cracks the photographer’s glass. Every plate reveals a leader of prodigious psychic and physical energy. Full-length photos make him look squat, with short bent legs and a torso the size of a beer keg. Twelve years after the great fight he stepped on a scale. He weighed 260 pounds. At the Little Bighorn with white stripes painted on his arms and a hatchet in one thick hand, in the fullness of manhood, he must have galloped through Custer’s desperate troops like a wolf through a flock of sheep.

Son of the Morning Star is a remarkable effort to comprehend a chaotic battle in all its horror and complexity. Someday I’ll write an in-depth review of it. For now, on the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, I just want to ring the gong for a species of factual masterpiece. 

Postscript: David Hockney 1937 - 2026

David Hockney in his studio, 1978 (photo by Snowdon)

I see in the Times that David Hockney has died: “David Hockney, Who Restored the Human Form to Art, Dies at 88” (The New York Times, June 12, 2026). He’s perhaps best known for his “pool paintings,” e.g., A Bigger Splash (1967), Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1971). Rebecca Mead says of them, “They capture a kind of carefree milieu that manages to be suggestively hedonistic while being almost Edenic in the loving treatment of male nudity” (“David Hockney’s Hidden Depths” (newyorker.com, June 16, 2026).

My favorite Hockney is California Art Collector (1964). Julian Bell, in his “More Light!” (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017), describes it brilliantly:

In California Art Collector (1964), it is the unfamiliar luxury of long-fiber carpets, as much as that of private swimming pools, that seems to have snagged his attention. Patches of wavy, watery brush rhythms ruffle the creamy primer at the base of the six-foot canvas, abutting other, denser paint patches—notably the chunky white and buff of an armchair fabric with floral patterning and the flamboyance of a carnation-pink wall. Between armchair and wall, we see the green of the collector’s dress surmounted by her head in profile, which turns to commune with a modernist sculpture while behind it another head, that of another sculpture, turns to face the opposite way.

Bell continues:

Patches abutting, or patches laid side by side on a warm accommodating ground: these are ways that Hockney’s pictures are often pieced together. They become floors on which rugs have been strewn. Hockney displays a childlike delight in setting one type of content against another. In California Art Collector, floral chintz against green velour, the three discrete color blocks of that modernistic snowman, the stage-prop rainbow wedged between wall and distant pool; or in Hockney’s subsequent pictures of California pools, grids against undulations, translucent splashes against dense sun-soaked blues.

(Unfortunately, no decent reproduction of California Art Collector exists on the internet.)

I also love Hockney’s landscapes, e.g., Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980), Nichols Canyon (1980), and the astonishing Garrowby Hill (1998) for their ravishing color combinations and ingenious multipoint perspectives. 

David Hockney, Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980)

Hockney was also a creative photographer. His photocollages are inspired! See, for example, his spectacular The Scrabble Game (1983). Lawrence Weschler said of it:

And the extraordinary thing about this collage is that it lends itself to that kind of second-guessing—it opens out onto that kind of storytelling. Indeed, it simultaneously tells a story and presents a group portrait. Dozens of hands, eyes, faces, a spinning board at countless angles: and yet at all times a recognizable picture of a group of three—implicitly four—individuals (five if you count the cat) engaged in an immediately recognizable activity. (“True to Life,” The New Yorker, July 9, 1984) 

In trying to determine just exactly what it is that draws me to Hockney, I return to Rebecca Mead’s word “hedonistic.” His pictures express pleasure – the pleasure of color (the "flamboyance" of that carnation-pink wall) and texture (that “floral chintz against green velour”) and light (those California pools, “grids against undulations, translucent splashes against dense sun-soaked blues”). 

David Hockney, The Scrabble Game (1983)

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #3 Berton Roueché’s "Janine"

Illustration based on photo from hotelsafloat.com

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Berton Roueché’s leisurely “Janine” (October 22, 1984). 

In this immensely enjoyable piece, Roueché travels to the heart of Burgundy aboard the passenger barge Janine. The hundred-and-sixty-mile trip takes six days. He starts in Lyon, goes up the river Saône, through the Canal de Bourgogne, and ends in Dijon. We meet Janine’s captain and crew. We meet the other passengers. We get a tour of the barge:

The Janine has an open forward deck (furnished with white iron garden chairs and matching parasoled tables), which opens into a red plush salon, a small bar, and a dining room with six tables, each of them seating four. Aft of the dining room (I later learned) is the galley, and aft of that, up some steep steps, is the pilothouse. The cabins are below— at the waterline, in fact—and all of them have names reflective of the region. I was assigned to Beaune. There were two small, head-high windows (with the river lapping almost to the sills), two narrow bunks, arranged foot-to-foot in an L formation, and a small closet. There was a plastic bottle of Evian mineral water on the washstand, a red rosebud in a vase on a shelf, and three framed reproductions of lifelike fruit and flower arrangements by Redouté on the walls. I stowed away my luggage and went back up on deck. Most of my fellow-passengers were already there, sitting or standing and chattering cocktail-party talk. Two or three idlers watched with interest from the street above the seawall and the quay. A pretty, dark-haired, blue-eyed, hugely smiling French girl (named Bernadette) passed among us with a tray of tall glasses of kir.

The trip gets underway:

We were moving. We had cast off and were sliding away from shore. The party chatter faltered. The Saône at Lyons is a beautiful river, and I stood and watched it reveal itself as we reached midstream and gently chugged upriver through a green allée, between orderly rows of leafy plane trees that lined the gray stone quays. Beyond the trees were rows of apartment houses—dusty yellow and faded orange, with tall windows flanked by faded blue shutters—in the formal style of the middle nineteenth century, and rising beyond the apartments were the delicate towers and spires and belfries of churches. The party chatter began again. We crept under a bridge. A racing scull appeared in the distance. It came skimming closer. And closer. And suddenly darted for shore, to sit there bucking and bouncing in our wake. The women from Michigan smiled and waved. The oarsman hunched his shoulders and looked away. The sky to the west brightened into a sunset blaze. A star came out. 

I love that detail about the racing scull. Roueché writes simply, but vividly – in the tradition of Chekov and Hemingway. Yes, he’s that good. His words call up pictures. Here’s his description of a pretty stretch of river between Tournus and Chalon-sur-Saône:

There was a feel of deep and peaceful country, but it was country ordered by man. The rows of plane trees, the poplar allées, even the patches of woods and the meadows of grazing sheep, had a look of arrangement, of traditional design. There were swans floating here and there along the riverbanks, geese grazing in the sheep meadows. A heron flapped from shore to shore. A flock of some cootlike ducks dived under our bow. A couple on horseback—a man and a woman in immaculate riding clothes—appeared on the left bank and cantered away on a path among the poplars. A village appeared on the right: thirteen stone houses, some long and low, some tall and thin, but all of them the color of yellowy autumn leaves, all of them with faded blue shutters, all of them roofed with rusty-black tiles—strung out in a tight little row behind a column of shapely plane trees, above a long stone quay.

The river journey features side-trips to a vineyard, an ancient abbey, a prestigious restaurant, an outdoor market. Sometimes, after the Janine ties up, Roueché goes for walks. Here, he walks Mâcon:

There were big wrought-iron planters spaced along the seawall, with geraniums and begonias in brilliant bloom. There was a large park with gardens and shade trees. Across the Saône I could see another old stone seawall and an orderly mass of forest. Mâcon is not a village. It is a town— an industrial town—with a population of almost forty thousand, and it has been an important river port for centuries. Walking under the trees and past the flowering planters, and looking out at the bright-green water, I thought of the river towns I had known at home, and their dingy and desolate waterfronts.

The meals are très French and très delicious. Day 2 of the trip, here’s dinner on the Janine:

It began with a soup: a mussel bisque. The main course was roast veal with a sauce au poivre. There was a green salad with a port-wine vinaigrette, and a selection of cheeses. Dessert was two Bavarian creams, apricot and vanilla, with a purée of whortleberries. With the roast we drank a Côte du Rhône. The white wine—golden green and smelling faintly of hazelnuts—was a Saint-Véran. When I went down to my cabin, I found a bedtime snack on my pillow: a chocolate thin-mint.

That "golden green and smelling faintly of hazelnuts" is very fine.

My favorite part of “Janine” is the last part, Day 6, when the barge enters the Canal de Bourgogne: 

We had come through half a dozen locks on the Saône, but they were modern locks, of generous size, lined with steel and equipped with great steel sluice gates that were opened and closed by a lockkeeper at a console in a control tower high overhead. The Canal de Bourgogne is a nineteenth-century canal, and its gates are operated by levers and wheels turned entirely by human weight and muscle. We crawled into a slot only inches wider than the Janine and with hardly a foot of clearance fore and aft. We sat for minutes deep down between two walls of dripping stone. There was the sound of rushing water. We began to rise. The earth slopes gently up to Dijon from the Saône at Saint-Jean-de-Losne. This was the first of twenty-two lifts, which would raise us a total of a hundred and ninety feet. We rose slowly, slowly, as slowly as an ancient freight elevator. My eyes came even with the top of the lock wall, with the top of an iron bollard. We kept rising. The lock-keeper’s house appeared, a small stone square with a red tile roof and a life preserver in a glass case. Above the door was a sign: “Écluse St.-Jean-de-Losne-Duon 29.4 km. St.-Jean-de-Losne 0 km.” We came gently to rest. The lockkeeper, a woman, was working a long iron lever. She was a burly figure in a long dress and a thick sweater. The canal stretched straight ahead, a boulevard of shining water lined with poplars, on a kind of causeway ten feet or more above the surrounding countryside. 

Roueché has breakfast. By the time he’s finished, the barge is moving into its second lock, Écluse Viranne. He can see the next lock in the distance. He says, “The towpath beckoned. It would be an easy walk.” He and several of his fellow-travellers leave the Janine, still sitting in the lock, and set off along the path. Roueché writes,

We walked in the dappled shade of the poplars. It was a countryside of plowed autumn fields and still, green pastures and scattered groves and flocking rooks and, far away, the clustered rooftops of a village. The canal was a deep, oceanic green. Its grassy banks were abloom with wildflowers: something blue that looked like chicory, something pink that looked like thistle, something yellow that looked like asters, and a delicate lavender flower that I had never seen before but somehow recognized on sight—an autumn crocus. We reached the next lock (Écluse Brazey) well before the Janine and walked on. 

Back on the Janine, Roueché goes through Écluse Beauregard and Écluse Longvic. The piece ends sensuously:

We passed a barge headed down-canal. It was a family barge—a load of gravel forward, and a cabin with white curtains at the windows just aft of the pilothouse. Its name was lettered on the stern: Espérance. We climbed through Écluse Romelet. There was a sudden rise of apartment buildings up ahead on the right. On the left were what looked like warehouses. The canal ran unchanged between its rows of trees, beside the grassy banks and the towpath. But the country was giving way. Beyond the apartments was a tract of identical little white houses with identical geranium gardens. Beyond the warehouses were storage tanks: “ESSO.” “TOTAL.” “MOBIL.” “ELF.” We climbed through Écluse Colombières. The canal still had its flanking trees, but the grassy banks had become a quay, and the towpath was now a street. Steep-roofed buildings rose up all around us. I became aware of a smell in the air. It was a pleasant smell, and a familiar smell. It was a smell I knew very well. But it was a smell I had never smelled in the open air before. And then I realized. This was Dijon. The smell was the smell of mustard.

A delectable conclusion to a delectable piece. Pure pleasure! 

On the Horizon: Mid-Year Top Ten 2026

It’s time to start composing my “Mid-Year Top Ten 2026.” Each year at this point, I like to pause, look back, and take stock of my New Yorker reading. I find listing is a good way to do it. I’m not going to reveal my #1 pick just yet. But I’ll give you a hint. It features a weathervane made from an empty soda bottle and some hazard tape. That’s it, no more clues. As it is, I’ve probably given it away. Besides mid-year hasn’t arrived yet. There are two more New Yorkers still to come. Who knows what delightful surprises they might contain. 

June 15, 2026 Issue

Nick Paumgarten, in his “Talk” story “Fanboy,” in this week’s issue, describes the musician Kurt Vile:

He was sitting in a corner of Old Rabbit Club, a bar on MacDougal Street, drinking a non-alcoholic beer. He had on a Waylon Jennings T-shirt under a red plaid shirt, and an MF Doom baseball cap that contained a cascade of curly hair that Vile has a tendency to hide behind. A beer-menu lamplight suggested that the color of his Chuck Taylors was lavender. He was hanging out late (a) to make the trip down the turnpike at midnight (“Musicians know, it’s an easy shot late at night—it’s like teleportation”) and (b) to catch another band’s gig at Le Poisson Rouge.

That’s an inspired passage! Four swift, vivid, specific sentences and – voilà! – Vile springs to life. Paumgarten is a great writer.  

Homage to Hoagland: "Knights and Squires"

This is the second post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Knights and Squires: For Love of the Tugs” (included in Hoagland’s 1970 collection The Courage of Turtles).

This exuberant piece is an account of a day Hoagland spends aboard the tug Teresa Moran, “a new, 4290-horsepower, round-the-clock boat which had just changed crews, as it does every other day.” 

He introduces us to the crew: Captain Biagi (“Biagi’s back hurt because he’d been raking fertilizer into his lawn the day before; he’s peppy, talkative, competent, clever, and lives in East Brunswick, New Jersey”); co-captain Ray Carella (“Carella, who started on the Erie Canal at sixteen as a deckhand, now lives in East Meadow, Long Island, but is a gaunter, less assured, somber man”); Ture Eklund, deckhand (“a soft-spoken, civilized fellow who lives in Westchester County and builds model boats”); Walter Anglim, deckhand (“a raw-boned, rugged American sort”); Tom Rasmussen, engineer (“young, gangly, and energetic”); Joe Gallant, engineer (“a husky, hard-headed old customer”); and Candy Coelho, cook (“a Portuguese who is a veteran of forty-four years on the tugs, though his tightly smooth face doesn’t show it”). 

Hoagland’s account begins at noon with the Teresa Moran helping the ocean liner United States get underway from its slip in the North River:

The United States, though the biggest of ships, is not a particularly memorable proposition among all the tasks that come to a tug. We were helped by the Esther Moran, which tied onto the stem: we were at the bow, with Carella in the wheelhouse. Captain Biagi, on the ship’s bridge, gave his directions by walkie-talkie, each tug answering with its peep whistle to conform that the order was understood. Two longshoremen cast the hawsers off, and the ship, its engines reversed, provided its own motive power, while the Teresa and Esther kept it clear of the pier. Especially at the Manhattan piers, which are finger wharfs, built at right angles to the river, undocking a ship is a great deal simpler than docking it. The ship has been moored bow-in, so the tug which is at the bow only acts as a rudder as the ship backs away. In a kind of a dance, the Teresa nudged first one side of the stem, then the other – the stem looming overhead as sharp as a blade. There were acres of black steel plating, rivets in twisting patterns, and the two anchors like a whale’s eyes. The ship blasted its whistle to warn any traffic on the river and in no time it had backed into the current whereupon the two tugs pushed it around ninety degrees to head towards the sea. Compared to the rigamarole of warping a big ship into its slip, this was as easy as kicking your shoes off.

The Teresa’s next job is to go around Lower Manhattan and up the East River to an oil depot at 138th Street in the East Bronx to pilot the Liberian tanker St. Grigorousa:

A silent back stretch, 138th Street is beyond Hellgate Bridge, off Sunken Meadows and by North Brothers Island, where the planes sweep low every thirty seconds to land at LaGuardia Airport. The St Grigorousa, scruffy, patch-painted, offered no problems, except that our tug in maneuvering got careless and snapped a few pilings on an adjoining dock. The Greeks on the ship watched this little miscalculation with the attention which seamen of different nationalities bestow on each other’s blunders. Anglim had had trouble throwing a line up on deck, and that interested them, too. 

While accompanying the St. Grigorousa downstream, they see the Marie Moran, the Patricia Moran, and the Esther Moran pushing the broad side of a lumber boat, the Seamar from Coos Bay, Oregon, which had managed to draw parallel with its pier but was unable to approach closer. The dispatcher tells them to go to its assistance quickly. Hoagland writes,

Without waiting for Biagi to come off the ship, we swung away, and putting our bow amidships on the Seamar, shoved full ahead for what amounted to nearly an hour. Our extra horsepower did stop the drifting, but then no more progress was made, though the four tugs shifted position and pushed as hard as they could. First the outflowing tide had been the villain, but soon it was just a case of the ship being so heavily loaded that her keel was touching the bottom; we were trying to push her into a list sufficient to bring her deck close to the dock where the cranes would be able to unload her. It was tedious business; the tug captains talked back and forth on the radio and talked to the pilot, who was from the Patricia.

Eventually the Teresa leaves the other three tugs shouldering the Seamar and heads for Governor’s Island to pick up Biagi, who’s been deposited on a small barge boat called the Lester. On this mission, there’s nearly an accident:

A German freighter, the Hilde Mittman, was travelling beside us as we entered the curve that the East River makes near Delancey Street. At the same time, however, a tug called the Carol Moran was coming upriver, as well as a Penn Central Railroad tug which was roped between two unwieldly carfloats. The Hilde was outside of us and signaled them both to go outside her – or, in other words, closer to Brooklyn – but the Carol swerved inside instead, between the Hilde Mittman and us. The Hilde had to veer toward the railroad tug suddenly, and the railroad tug was almost forced into a pier on the Brooklyn side of the river – trying to avoid a collision, she reversed engines and swung dangerously sideways, and the bow lines on one of the carfloats broke. The Carol went on, the Hilde went on, but we lingered a moment or two to see whether she needed help.

The Teresa’s next job is to help a McAllister tug sail the freighter Fraternity from Pier 1 in the Erie Basin. Hoagland describes the trip:

We passed a good many ships in berths on the way: the Alamahdi, the Concordia Lago, the Lexa Maersk, the Lichtenfels. A paint-company launch puttered by, towing rafts and scaffolding; also a union launch collecting dues from the barge and lighter men whom it encountered. The sun had come out, the weather was warming up genially. Tugboats ride very low in the water, with the stubby bow pushing waves that are higher than the decks. It was a lovely, foamy, noisy trip. Standing on the fantail, I had the sense I was aquaplaning, a feeling of victory. “How are you doing – meditating?” asked Eklund.

They guide the Fraternity out of its slip and out of Erie Basin without difficulty. I love this passage:

It’s always a sharply focused instant when a ship separates from the tugs. Water slashed in as the gap opened; the wind seemed to blow harder, no longer blocked by the ship, and it was an ocean wind. For the first time, the ship’s screw kicked up a deep, worldly froth, a green wake, and the Fraternity pointed away, heaving us where we were. 

The next job is across the Upper Bay at Pier F in Jersey City. Hoagland writes,

The Baltic Sea (Goteberg) was our new eight o’clock ship. Eklund heaved up the throwing line, which has a ball on the end so that it will hang over the ship’s rail until it’s retrieved. Since the ship was white, he put a white cloth over our bow, where we would rub paint. Up on deck the silent Swedes with their beards and curly blonde hair and muted manner looked down at us, though their captain was pacing restlessly. We waited three quarters of an hour while they finished swinging cargo aboard and setting the hatches to rights. Tugboatmen kill these odd bits of time with cards, and tying up all over the harbor, they know little waterfront stores everywhere which can be reached by froghopping over a series of pilings and climbing a fence or two. Then Carella, as pilot, performed a simple and classic soft-shoe undocking from Pier F “into the stream,” as they say, scrambling down to the Teresa again while the Swedes watched. The ship had its running lights on, green on the starboard and red on the port, and the uncountable lights of Manhattan were emerging in all their bravado as the dusk darkened. The water churned between ship and tug; the sea breeze struck us as we slid clear of the ship – the mystically warm-and-cold wind of May.

The last job Teresa performs before Hoagland debarks is to help the Joan Moran sail the Ixia, an English timber boat. Hoagland describes the trip to Greenpoint where the Ixia is docked:

The spray plumed like cream at our bow, and the water was like crinkled tinfoil. The lights of the city were like jubilant news. They were flung out so far that what can one say? They’re not man-made; they’re the work of some several million men. The lights in the office buildings are a blunt blind yellow, blaring into the muffling night, but the lights of Stuyvesant Town and the other big centers of home life are like stippled banks of amber, glowing. I sat on the capstan in the stern, and it was like a whole screwy radar screen. It’s so dazzling that one’s eyes go dead every minute or so, looking. You can’t take it in; you look until your eyes go blank, turn them away to the darker water, and then look again at the sweep of it and the shining water, until again your vision wilts and goes dead.

The Teresa and the Joan push the Ixia out into the stream, and she gets underway. Hoagland’s ride is over. The Teresa drops him off on South Street on her way to another job. He writes, “I stood on the bow fender and climbed over the rail at Pier 9, East River, waving good-by and shaking hands, worn out, exuberant, and caught a bus home.”

“Knights and Squires” exemplifies Hoagland’s tremendous descriptive power. It contains several inspired sentences. This one, for example:

Eklund, a relaxed man, worked with brief motions, snuggling the thick Dacron lines around the horns of the bitt as easily as if he were tightening his belt.

And this beauty:

In the spotlight a leaping reindeer on the smokestack came alive, and the smoke, bowel-gray, bulged out of the stack, vaulting and rolling.

In detail after splendid detail, “Knights and Squires” evokes the action of a working tug in one of the world’s busiest harbors. I first read it fifty years ago. I've never forgotten it.

Postscript: Two more excellent “tugboat” pieces by Hoagland: “The Tugman’s Passage,” in his 1982 collection of the same name; and “Tugboats on the Tanana,” chapter 13 of his Alaskan Travels (2013). 

Postscript: Robert Coles 1928 - 2026

Robert Coles (photo by Wendy Ewald)

I see in the Times that Rober Coles has died: “Robert Coles, Pulitzer-Winning Child Psychiatrist, Is Dead at 97.” Coles is best known for his five-volume Children in Crisis series, published between 1967 and 1977. But I know him for an excellent book he published in 1997 called Doing Documentary Work. It’s an illuminating discussion of literary documentaries such as James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. It also considers the work of documentary photographers Walker Evans and Dorthea Lange, among others. Coles admired writers and photographers who searched for “the factual, the palpable, the real.” But he was also mindful of the impossibility of being truly objective. “We notice what we notice in accordance with who we are.” That observation is one of my touchstones. Coles wrote it.  

June 8, 2026 Issue

Stargazy pie. Ever heard of it? I hadn’t until I read Helen Rosner’s delightful “Tables for Two: Dean’s,” in this week’s issue. The pie has a gross-looking fish head sticking out of it. A photo of it, by Clark Hodgin, illustrates Rosner’s piece. Stargazy pie is a specialty of Dean’s, a new British pub on the edge of SoHo in Lower Manhattan. Rosner loves the place. She says, “I was shocked by how much I adored the food at Dean’s, how walloped I felt by it.” You can tell how much she enjoys it from the lavishness of her food descriptions. Here’s Dean’s stargazy pie:

The stargazy pie at Dean’s—a new British-ish, pub-ish restaurant on the edge of SoHo—is, in a word, freaky. The head of a fish, cooked and glossy gray, emerges from a latticed crust, regarding the ceiling with an unnerving, dull-eyed serenity. A tail protrudes, too, at an opposite angle, giving the impression of a flexed body hidden beneath the surface of the pastry sea. (In fact, the head and tail are unconnected, and mostly decorative, intended to be removed before eating.) This wondrously bizarre dish originates in Cornwall, where the story goes that a fisherman named Tom Bawcock once braved a winter storm to bring in a catch so vast that it saved his whole village from starvation. His neighbors baked the entire haul into an enormous pie, and left the heads of the fishes poking through as a celebration of abundance, or maybe an announcement of survival. The version served at Dean’s is more modestly sized than the pie of legend, serving one or two, but under its crust, which is almost obscenely rich with butter, is a classic stargazy filling, a creamy, chowder-adjacent stew of assorted fishes and soft hunks of potato—hot and heartening, and not freaky at all.

Mm, I’ll have a plate of that, please. I love that “almost obscenely rich with butter.” That’s from the newyorker.com version. When reading “Tables for Two,” always check out the newyorker.com version. It contains numerous extra felicities. For example, here’s Rosner’s description of Dean’s boiled ham:

The boiled ham, for instance, is heaven: two thin slices of meat, pink as tongues, with a parsley bechamel dotted with tiny, tender favas, and a mass of rough-mashed potatoes that seemed to be nearly half butter, salted just to the ecstatic edge of overmuch.

That “salted just to the ecstatic edge of overmuch” is inspired. Only the newyorker.com version has it. 

Photo by Clark Hodgin, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Dean's"