Ian Frazier's New Book "The Snakes That Ate Florida"

The year begins auspiciously with a gift from Ian Frazier – a new collection of his incomparable reporting, essays, and criticism called The Snakes That Ate Florida. It’s been out for about a month. I’m just discovering it now. If I’d been on the ball, I would’ve seen a capsule review of it in newyorker.com’s “The Best Books of 2026 So Far.” But that’s a big “if.” The review reads as follows:

In this collection of essays, reported pieces, and criticism dating back to the nineteen-seventies, Frazier’s sharp eye for finding the complex in the quotidian is on full display. From tales about monster trucks and the Maraschino-cherry empire to musings about lantern flies and Lolita, the collection—much of which was published in this magazine—spotlights the vibrancy of topics often under-noticed. In the playful and diligent hands of the seasoned staff writer, these ordinary things feel extraordinary.

I don’t know who wrote that, but whoever it was knows his/her Frazier. I’m trying to cut back on the number of books I buy this year. But this is one I absolutely must have. Frazier is one of my heroes. I love his work. I’ve likely already read a lot of these pieces when they originally appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. But that’s okay. Like Chekhov’s stories, they’re worth reading and rereading. It will be great to encounter them again, this time as a collection – perhaps the most significant nonfiction collection of the year. 

Inspired Sentence 8

There is an odd rakishness, a mettlesome spirit, running through the cubism of the rocks of this natural esplanade, which must be the combined effect of its undulant surface, the general twist the nearby fault has given to the vicinity, and the carefree poise of a square-faced block – I am sure it must measure forty feet each way – that has detached itself from the cliff against which it leans one elbow, and stands on two fat little legs looking as if it were about to skip into the sea with the ponderous charm of one of Picasso’s surreal beach girls.

That’s from Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1985) – one of the great landscape books. Robinson is describing a section of the north-western coast of Aran. I love that “the cubism of the rocks” and the way the metaphor is picked up again at the end in the description of the square-faced block that “leans one elbow” against the cliff. When was the last time you saw a giant chunk of coastal stone compared to “one of Picasso’s surreal beach girls”? Probably never. It’s a surprising, imaginative, original image – one of dozens in this extraordinary book.  

4 Ways of Looking at Andrew Wyeth's "Wind from the Sea"

Andrew Wyeth, Wind from the Sea (1947)

Nancy K. Anderson, in her absorbing essay “Wind from the Sea: Painting Truth beneath the Facts” (in Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In by Nancy K. Anderson and Charles Brock, 2014), writes,

Wind from the Sea is first, a superbly constructed image rendered with great technical skill. Far from a replication of a bedroom window, the painting is a disciplined distillation of object and experience with an expansive subtext of personal symbolism. For Wyeth, the painting became a reflection of Maine in all its weathered toughness, and also a metaphorical portrait of Christina – stoic, strong, yet feminine. Wind from the Sea, like many of Wyeth’s paintings, is also an image haunted by death. Interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay. Outside the window, parallel tracks lead to an undefined shore, the river flows to the sea, and at the forested horizon is a cemetery.

This passage suggests at least four ways of looking at Wyeth’s great picture:

1. As “a superbly constructed image rendered with great technical skill”;

2. As “a reflection of Maine in all its weathered toughness”;

3. As “a metaphorical portrait of Christina”;

4. As “an image haunted by death.”

These four perspectives intrigue me. I want to consider each them in more detail. 

1. A Superbly Constructed Image

I like this perspective. It admires Wind from the Sea for the artful way it’s painted. You don’t have to know the picture’s backstory to appreciate the technical virtuosity of its brushwork – the way Wyeth conveys the delicate lace curtains billowing in the wind, the way he renders their bird-and-flower pattern, the way he captures their disintegrating texture. It’s all right there on the surface. All you have to do is look. It’s a mimetic triumph. 

2.  A Reflection of Maine

Well, maybe. What is it about the picture that tells you it’s Maine and not, say, Connecticut, or New Hampshire, or New Brunswick? I don’t see any clues that connect this painting specifically to Maine. In order to make that connection, you have to know something about its background. At a minimum, you have to know that Wyeth painted it in Maine and that it depicts a Maine landscape as seen by Wyeth out the third-floor bedroom window of an old Maine farmhouse. 

3. A Metaphorical Portrait of Christina

Now we’re really delving into this painting’s backstory. Anderson, in her essay, tells us that Christina is Christina Olson. She and her brother Alvaro lived in a three-story, eighteenth-century, saltwater farmhouse on Hathorn Point, Cushing, Maine. The house was built by their maternal ancestors, the Hathorns. Christina, crippled by a degenerative muscle condition, couldn’t walk, climb stairs, or groom herself. Alvaro looked after her. The house was in poor condition. Rags were stuffed in broken windows. The clapboard exterior, originally painted white, had been stripped bare by sun and wind. Inside, the wallpaper was curling away from the walls. The curtains hung in tatters. Christina and Alvaro lived mostly on the ground floor. Rooms on the upper floors were rarely used. 

Wyeth first met Christina in the summer of 1939. Betsy James, soon to become Wyeth’s wife, introduced him to her at the Olson house. While he was there, Wyeth made a watercolor of the place. Following that first visit, Wyeth returned to the house every summer. As his friendship with the Olsons deepened, he was given free run of the place. Over time he studied it from every angle, inside and out. 

On a hot August day, 1947, Wyeth was at the Olson house, in an abandoned third-floor bedroom, intending to make a watercolor study of a dormer window. Anderson, in her essay, tells what happened next:

When noonday sun sent the temperature soaring, he crossed to the other side of the room and opened a window with a view to the sea. A soft ocean breeze lifted curtains that had lain undisturbed for decades. Birds delicately crocheted on the decaying lace appeared to fly. Wyeth made a quick sketch and later told a friend that the chance event had made his “hair stand on end.” By early fall, he had translated that momentary experience into one of his most remarkable paintings, Wind from the Sea.

Once you’ve read that, you see the painting in a completely different way. You see it as a live image, a record of a real event. But do you see it as a metaphorical portrait of Christina? That seems more of a stretch. Anderson writes,

Knowing Wyeth’s predilection for investing images with symbolic references, it is easy to see how the solid straight window frame that anchors Wind from the Sea came to serve him as a metaphor for Christina’s strength of character and how the delicate birds on the disintegrating lace reflected her feminine grace.

Okay, fair enough. But not everyone who views Wind from the Sea will know about its connection with Christina. That connection is not apparent on the face of the painting.

4. An Image Haunted by Death

Anderson writes,

Wind from the Sea, like many of Wyeth’s paintings, is also an image haunted by death. Interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay. Outside the window, parallel tracks lead to an undefined shore, the river flows to the sea, and at the forested horizon is a cemetery.

This is interesting. Anderson tells me something I would not have realized on my own – that those tiny specks of white on the far shore are grave markers. Is the presence of those grave markers sufficient evidence to support Anderson’s “haunted by death” reading? Maybe, especially if you read it in conjunction with her observation that the “interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay.” 

Unquestionably, Wyeth is interested in subjects that show “the passage of time and the onset of decay.” I share this interest. It’s one of the reasons I love his work. His paintings exude a delicious melancholy. But to say Wind from the Sea is death-haunted seems to me to conflict with the way the breeze has stirred those old curtains to life. Isn’t that the real point of the picture? “A soft ocean breeze lifted curtains that had lain undisturbed for decades. Birds delicately crocheted on the decaying lace appeared to fly.” Wind from the Sea has the breath of life. 

Hilton Als' "William Eggleston's Lonely South"

William Eggleston, Untitled (1972)

I like the way Hilton Als interprets the above photo by William Eggleston. In his absorbing “Photo Booth: William Eggleston’s Lonely South” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2026), he writes,

The real stunner when it comes to showing us community is Eggleston’s 1972 image of a young Black woman, sitting in a church pew with other women of color, turning to look over her shoulder at the camera. The woman’s hair is straightened—“correct”—and she is thin; she wears a sleeveless, wine-colored dress, and the long fingers of her left hand rest on her left shoulder, partly hiding her mouth. It’s a powerful evocation of the psychology of beauty in the American South. Is she covering her mouth because she’s been made to see her lips as too big? Does she straighten her hair because the “natural” look has caught on only in big cities, where women have more freedom to express themselves, or is she simply trying to align herself with the older women she is sitting with, to be one with them? By looking at the white man behind the camera, is she doing something forbidden? We’ll never know. And it’s those many mysteries, rooted in the real and the possible, that continue to make photography in general, and Eggleston’s in particular, so fascinating.

Rather than read speculative narrative into Eggleston’s image, Als asks questions. He proceeds interrogatively. To me, this is the preferable way to go when dealing with an art as enigmatic as photography.  

February 9, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Michael Schulman’s “Deepfaking Orson Welles.” It’s about a fascinating attempt by a startup studio to use artificial intelligence to restore Welles’s mangled 1942 masterpiece “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Schulman talks with the key people involved in the project – Edward Saatchi and Brian Rose. He chronicles the making of “The Magnificent Ambersons.” He visits the Los Angeles set where the new A.I. scenes are being shot. And he explains the challenge of the project: 

Simply prompting the computer to suck up the existing movie and spit out new scenes would create a cold, uncanny-valley effect. A.I. tends to flatten lighting, and that would clash with Welles’s rich chiaroscuro. Then, there was what Saatchi called the “happiness” problem: left to its own guided intuition, the A.I. technology often makes characters look cheerier, especially women. Saatchi played an A.I. clip of sullen Aunt Fanny, in the grim final scene, inappropriately smirking in her rocking chair. “In terms of subtle despair, it has absolutely no idea what to do,” he said. “That’s part of why having the actor is really important.”

Schulman even participates in the process. He writes,

Saatchi gave me a preview of how it would all work. Between takes, the crew subbed me in for Pressley, putting me in a period coat and a clip-on tie, and had me blunder through one of Eugene’s lines. Two hours later, the A.I. team sent back a rough clip of Cotten doing the line—turning his head as I’d turned mine, speaking in his voice but with my delivery, even breaking into a laugh, as I had done after tripping over the words. “Usually, we’d spend a lot more time on it, but this is just to give you a feel,” Saatchi said. Still, it was pretty impressive—and disorienting.

“Deepfaking Orson Welles” is a glimpse of the future – the use of A.I. to riff on old movies. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Three inspired lines in this week’s New Yorker:

1. Scott Shepherd plays multiple roles, but is particularly droll as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging hornily through Dublin. – Emily Nussbaum, “Goings On: Off Broadway”

2. Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette. – Dan Stahl, “Bar Tab: Haswell Green’s”

3. I slept with a Yale guy one block over who, with his five Yale roommates, sold semen to a sperm bank, and they pooled the profits to buy an espresso maker for six hundred dollars. – Jill Lepore, “The Chapman House”

Acts of Seeing: Sanirajak

Photo by John MacDougall

May 9, 2008, I was in the Inuit hamlet of Sanirajak, on the shore of Foxe Basin in Nunavut. I took a lot of pictures. I like this one for its content. There’s a lot going on here: three kids, three snowmobiles, a husky pup tied to a hockey stick stuck in the snow, the long runners of a wooden sled, a polar bear skin stretched on a wooden frame, leaning against the house. I love the red jacket of the kid running in the foreground, and the metallic red, green, and blue of the snow machines, and the yellow boots of the little kid looking down at the pup. But what makes the picture, for me, at least, is that magnificent polar bear skin drying in the arctic air, a reminder that this is wild country where the polar bear still roams. 

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #7 James Lasdun's "Glow"

Photo by Joakim Eskildsen, from James Lasdun's "Glow"

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 James Lasdun's wonderful “Glow” (April 29, 2019).

In this memorable piece, Lasdun travels to northern Scandinavia to see the aurora borealis. Of course, the aurora borealis being a natural phenomenon, there’s no guarantee it will appear when he’s there. The question of whether or not he’ll see it propels the narrative. 

First, he stays at an igloo hotel, the Aurora Village, in the town of Ivalo, Finland. His room is called an Aurora Cabin. Lasdun describes it:

A glass-panelled dome loomed over the north-facing end of a single room, with luxe bedding and a complimentary drinks tray arranged below, like the furnishings of a tastefully debauched starship. Slipping under a reindeer-fur coverlet, I found myself facing the first conundrum of northern-lights tourism, which is that the more comfortable your viewing situation the more likely you are to be insensate when the lights appear. I was eager to see them, naturally, but not obsessed. I had a whole week, and, from what I’d read, at the time of my visit there were good odds for a display on most nights. With this comforting thought, I fell asleep.

Lasdun doesn’t see the lights that night. The next day, killing time until evening, he goes on an ice-fishing safari. He writes,

The fishing rods seemed absurdly short and bendy, like something that you might use to win a prize at an amusement park. We squatted at our holes, dipping and raising as instructed. The flat landscape around us was more built up than I’d expected this far north, but pleasant enough under the fresh snow, with the wide sky showing different pinks and yellows every time you looked at it. Now and then, dogsleds carrying tourists hurtled by; each time, we laboriously took off our mittens and glove liners and rummaged for our phones, in order to take photographs.

That night, he’s back in his glass igloo, staring up at the night sky. He falls asleep. Something wakes him at three. He writes,

Groggy and myopic, I caught a promising green blur overhead and grabbed my glasses. The color of an aurora depends on which atmospheric gases are being pelted by solar particles. Oxygen emits a greenish hue and, occasionally, red; nitrogen emits violet and blue. In this case, the green turned out to be emitted by a light on the thermostat—its glow was reflected in the glass dome. Nevertheless, the sky had cleared, and the stars glittered promisingly above the snow-gloved spruce trees. I stared up for a while. Gazing at the sky at 3 a.m., however, in the hope of being granted a vision of dancing emerald lights is an activity that quickly starts to feel absurd, even delusional, and I soon passed out again. In the morning, I learned that I hadn’t missed anything.

The next day, he decides to go farther north and stay at a hotel on the vast frozen lake of Anari. He signs up for Aurora Camp, “which promised warm drinks ‘while waiting for the sky to show its magic.’ ” At eight o’clock, he joins a dozen other campers. A snowmobile tows them across the lake in a train of open sleds. He writes,

Once we were on the other side, a guide lit a fire, draping reindeer hides over logs for us to sit on, and hung a kettle to boil. The simplicity of the arrangement appealed to my sense of how these things ought to be conducted, and even though there was thick cloud cover, I felt optimistic. We had two and a half hours to kill, and the weather, as we reminded one another at regular intervals, was unpredictable in these parts. 

The sky doesn’t clear. The temperature drops. Lasdun begins to doubt whether he’ll ever see the lights. He writes,

No surprises occurred overhead, but an earthly one did: a woman suddenly slipped her arm through mine and began murmuring in my ear in Italian. I looked at her, and she gave a shriek: she’d mistaken me, in my snowsuit, for her husband. Peals of unnerving laughter broke from her as we sledded back across the lake. The incident gave concreteness to the dim sense of cosmic disfavor beginning to take hold in me. The nature of these wonder-chasing trips is that your success rate sooner or later gets entangled with your feelings about what you deserve. I had four more nights, so there was no cause for serious alarm, but I’d started entertaining irrational thoughts all the same. Was I unworthy in some way? Could I be harboring attitudes unconducive to the granting of heavenly visions?

A couple of occurrences the next day deepen his unease. On a three-hour ride from Inari to the airport in the Norwegian village of Laksely, his taxi hits a reindeer. Here’s his account of the incident:

As we drove northwest, the landscape and the sky merged into a white haze, with only the dark-etched undersides of branches to distinguish one realm from the other. It was beautiful in an unearthly way, as if the world had become a silver-nitrate photograph of itself. Road signs grew fewer and farther between, with Sámi place-names appearing under the Finnish. The road was covered with packed snow and the driver was going fast. On a long, straight, desolate stretch, we came over a rise and saw five reindeer galloping straight toward us. The driver cursed in English: “Shit.” I braced myself, felt a slam, and saw one of the animals thrown into the air. It had antlers, and, as the previous night’s guide had informed us, a deer that still had them in late winter was female, and probably pregnant. We backed up and found it lying, dead, in the snow. The taxi was dented but drivable, and after reporting the accident we continued on our way, both of us badly shaken.

When he arrives at the airport, it’s closed. The taxi is gone. Lasdun finds himself alone in the arctic cold. He says, “I was a fool about to freeze to death in pursuit of a high-end tourist fad.” Eventually an airport worker appears and opens the doors. 

Still chasing the aurora, Lasdun flies to Tromsø, Norway. He signs up for a night with a company that takes you out to a wilderness camp and leaves you alone until morning. He gets on a sled and his guide, using a snowmobile, hauls him across the frozen surface of Lake Kilpisjärvi to a dark hut, raised up on sled runners, on the ice. The hut has a transparent section of roof above the bed for viewing the night sky. 

Lasdun and his guide go for a walk along the shore and make a campfire. They witness a faint green bar of light in the sky. The bar grows brighter, but then clouds move in and obscure it. Lasdun writes, “I could now say truthfully that I’d seen the northern lights, and I was happy, though my happiness had more to do with relief—mission accomplished—than with joy. It had been a very minor spillage of the green grail.”

The guide leaves. Lasdun returns to the hut and gets into bed. He wonders how he’ll respond if he should see a major display of the lights. He writes, “When an industry is focussed so determinedly on the commodity of wonderment, it spurs thoughts of resistance—at least, it does in me.” But as it turns out, he doesn’t have to respond. The aurora doesn’t appear.

For his final evening in Tromsø, Lasdun books a seat on an Aurora Chase. At the appointed hour, he joins the crowds heading down to the waterfront, where the chase vehicles pick up passengers. He hears a coach driver mutter, “Not the best weather outlook tonight.” He writes, “The prospect of spending the next six hours driving around with little hope of seeing the lights was deeply unenticing. I was about to bail on the adventure when a burly Norseman barked out my name from his roster. I meekly boarded his sleek black van.”

An hour into Finland, they pull off the main road and park. Lasdun disembarks, with fifteen companions, into the freezing dark. Camera tripods are set up, a fire is built. Lasdun is skeptical that anything is going to happen. Then a crack appears in the clouds directly above them. Lasdun writes,

It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain.

Lasdun is blown away by the experience. He says, “You develop the overwhelming impression that some cryptic but staggeringly powerful intelligence is staging a performance expressly for you, even as you remind yourself that this can’t be the case.” 

Back on the bus, the photographers in the group compare images. Lasdun had attempted to take some snapshots with his phone, but they turned out to be terrible. He’s relieved to discover that one photographer had taken nice pictures of each of them, “including one of me with the stunned look of a nonbeliever witnessing a miracle.” I relish that line. It beautifully captures Lasdun’s conflicted perspective on northern-lights tourism – mostly skeptical but, in the end, enthralled. 

February 2, 2026 Issue

There’s a wonderful sentence in Jillian Steinhauer’s “Goings On” note this week that I want to highlight. Reviewing a Louise Bourgeois exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, she writes, “The display, although understated, highlights the rhythms of Bourgeois’s obsessive repetitions, and pleasure comes in the form of details, such as in an untitled piece in which a pair of marble eggs hides in a stack of weathered crates.” 

Pleasure comes in the form of details – that could stand as my own critical motto. Art is in the details; so is pleasure. Steinhauer links the two beautifully. 

Kevin Wild's Superb "42 Days Alone"

This is just a quick note on Kevin Wild’s exhilarating seven-hour-forty-seven-minute YouTube video 42 Days Alone: A Perilous 650 km Solo Journey Across the Labrador Wilderness. I’m currently immersed in it. I’m on Day 23. “Immersion” is the right word for the experience of watching this incredible documentary. Wild’s skilful camerawork (including breathtaking drone footage) and sound recording put me right there with him in his seemingly indestructible red Prospector canoe as he paddles wild rivers and lakes, portages over boulder-strewn land thick with willow, runs menacing rapids, and battles blood-thirsty hordes of mosquitoes and black flies. Along the way, he sees bears, moose, caribou, eagles, lynx, and the aurora borealis. He catches trout. He camps, makes fires, cooks, swims, and every now and then has a taste of whiskey to celebrate the completion of a particularly arduous stage of his journey. Wild is an excellent canoeist and outdoorsman. His commentary is always intelligent and illuminating. The rugged, magnificent Labrador landscape he travels through is wild to the limits of the term. This is the best wilderness travel video I’ve ever seen. Highly recommended.  

Tables for Two Tango: Helen Rosner's "Bong"

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Bong"

This is the fourth post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Rosner’s vibrant “Tables for Two: Bong” (September 29, 2025).

In my previous post in this series, I noted that Goldfield is as much at home in a humble food court as she is in a Michelin-starred restaurant. The same goes for Rosner. She delights in the funky vibes of buzzy neighborhood eateries, where having a meal is as much about being part of the scene as it is about savoring the food. Case in point is her wonderful review of Bong. She writes,

Bong, a new, itsy-bitsy, absolutely electrifying Cambodian restaurant in Crown Heights, has more energy even while you’re waiting on the sidewalk for your table to be ready than most spots can muster on their most lit-up nights of the year. For the three evenings a week that it’s open, the whole operation, in a modest storefront on a residential corner, is shimmeringly alive. The cooks are half dancing in the open kitchen as they slice and stir-fry. The customers all seem wildly in love with one another. Inside, the light bouncing off the acid-green walls makes everyone’s faces appear traced with neon. The thumping bass of the hip-hop playlist reverberates through the dining room and rolls out through the open door to reach the diners seated at bistro tables out front. Even a half block away, the air smells sweet and bright, like seared shellfish, sharp vinegar, and the blistery green of sizzling herbs.

Wow! That’s her opening paragraph. She is rolling! I love that “shimmeringly alive.” Her description of Bong’s lobster dish, named after the owner’s mother, Mama Kim, is ravishing:

Mama Kim’s namesake lobster (listed with the minimal description “IYKYK”) is a magnificent mountain of crustacean legs and claws, the pieces stir-fried with oodles of slivered ginger and a sweet-spicy herbaceous paste, made by Mama Kim, that clings, slurpably, to the meat and drips juicily onto a pile of rice below. 

Most pleasurable of all is Bong’s whole fried fish:

Along with Mama Kim’s lobster, a dish about which I have had literal dreams, my favorite thing on the menu was the whole fried fish—dorade, on one visit, the skin crackly and dusted with toasted rice powder—which eyeballs you lasciviously from an oval plate. Its flesh is scored into diamonds, the way you might slice a lattice into the fat end of a pork shoulder; it’s visually striking and functionally quite useful, creating perfect little pull-off morsels ready to be dipped in sour-tamarind sauce and wrapped up in a lettuce leaf with Vietnamese coriander and diếp cá (a punchy herb known as fish mint). Here, perhaps, the chaotic-party energy of the place could have used a little focus, or been channelled into a brief anatomy spiel: I saw way too many tables dive ecstatically into the fried fish—and then, too happily, allow their plates to be cleared away without realizing that, if you flip the creature over, there’s an entire second serving to be found on the other side.

Exhilarating food, vivacious mood – the perfect blend! Rosner captures it brilliantly. 

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Roger Deakin's "Waterlog"

This is the second 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 review Deakin’s wonderful Waterlog.

“The warm rain tumbled from the gutter in one of those midsummer downpours as I hastened across the lawn behind my house in Suffolk and took shelter in the moat.” Thus begins this magnificent amphibious travel journal – an account of Deakin’s “long swim through Britain.” His moat is where the journey first suggests itself, and where it begins. It’s where he’s bathed for years, “swimming breaststroke for preference.” He says he’s “not a champion, just a competent swimmer with a fair amount of stamina.”

Deakin is inspired by John Cheever’s classic short story “The Swimmer” (The New Yorker, July 18, 1964), in which the hero, Ned Merrill, decides to swim the eight miles home from a party on Long Island via a series of his neighbours’ swimming pools. Deakin says, “One sentence in the story stood out and worked on my imagination: ‘He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the country.’ ”

Deakin’s journey curves across the country, too: Hampshire, Cambridge, Norfolk, Wales, Worcestershire, Dartmoor, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Argyll, Jura, Northumberland, Essex, Kent, Somerset, London. Deakin travels to all these places and more. Everywhere he goes, he seeks out places to swim – beaches, bays, rock pools, rivers, streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools, aqueducts, flooded quarries, canals, even drains. The older and wilder these places are the better. “In wild water,” he says, “you are on equal terms with the animal world around you: in every sense, on the same level.”

The book unfolds in thirty-six chapters, each chronicling at least one of Deakin’s swimming excursions. His first trip, on April 23, 1997, is to the Scilly Isles, where he plunges into the frigid waters of Great Popplestones Bay:

I stripped off and ran naked in the water, screaming inwardly with the sudden agony of it. It was scaldingly cold, and the icy waters kept on tearing pain through me until I got moving and swam a few frantic strokes as children do on their first visit to the deep end, then scrambled out breathless with cold; a mad moment of masochism. So much for the fabled caress of the gentle Gulf Stream. I climbed straight into my wetsuit and swam comfortably out again into the amazing clear water in a flat calm, crossed the little bay, marvelling at the brightness of everything, and swam back again. The sand was white and fine, and shone up through the water. Small dead crabs floated amongst the thin line of shredded bladderwrack and tiny shells oscillating up the beach. The silence was disturbed only by nature’s bagpipes, the incessant gulls. I climbed out onto the rocks that glinted gold with quartz and mica, stripped off the wetsuit, and laydown to dry in the sun. Spread out next to me, it looked like another sunbather.

Deakin’s descriptions of his swims are superb – vivid, sensuous, evocative. Here’s one from Chapter 3 (“Lords of the Fly”). He’s in Winchester, searching along the banks of the River Test for a once-popular bathing place called Gunnar’s Hole. He eventually finds it. Its motionless surface is entirely covered by “a classic duckweed lawn.” He writes,

The massive concrete walls of the pool were in surprisingly good condition, and, on the basis that stolen fruit always tastes sweetest, I climbed through the concrete river inlet sluice to drop in silently at the deep end. Sinking through the opaque green cloak was like breaking the ice. I laboured down the hundred yards of the pool, mowing a path in the lawn which closed behind me as I went. Moorhens scampered off, half-flying over the billiard-baize green. The water beneath was still deep, but no longer the ten feet it used to be below the diving boards. It had silted up to between five and seven feet. Reaching down, I felt soft mud and ancient fallen branches, and sensed giant pike and eels. 

I love that passage. That “Moorhens scampered off, half-flying over the billiard-baize green” is brilliant. Here’s another one, this from Chapter 11 (“Salmon-Runs”). Deakin is in Dartmoor, swimming across the River Dart estuary:

I had crossed to the centre of the wide bay from the Coastguard’s Beach. A little group of surfers clustered waist deep, waiting for the big grey rollers that surged out of the open sea, breaking on a sandbar. I threw myself in with them and swam inland. I felt the incoming tide lock on to my legs and thrust me in towards the distant woods along the shore. Each time a frond of sea-lettuce lightly brushed me, or glued itself around my arms, I thought it was a jellyfish, and flinched. But I soon grew used to it; seaweed was all around me, sliding down each new wave to drape itself around me. I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved, jostled from behind by the swell. Then, as the tide rose higher, the sandy estuary beach came into focus. The woods reached right over the water, and began accelerating past me. I found I was moving at exhilarating speed, in big striding strokes, like a fell runner on the downhill lap. It was like dream swimming, going so effortlessly fast, and feeling locked in by the current, with no obvious means of escape. I was borne along faster and faster as the rising tide approached the funnel of the river’s mouth until it shot me into a muddy, steep-sided mooring channel by some old stone limekilns on the beach. I had to strike out with all my strength to escape the flood and reach the eddy in the shadows. I swam back up to the limekilns and crawled out on the beach like a turtle, but couldn’t resist dropping back into the muscular current for a second ride down the channel. 

I can practically feel that seaweed “sliding down each new wave to drape itself around me.” Deakin’s writing brims with the physical experience of wild swimming. That “I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved” is inspired! At times, it almost seems that Deakin is part fish. But there are limits to what he’s willing to tackle. He loves the water, but he also fears it. We see this in Chapter 23 (“Orwell’s Whirlpool”), where he considers swimming the channel between the Hebridean islands of Jura and Scarba. The channel, called the Gulf of Corryvreckan, contains a menacing whirlpool. Deakin writes,

The whirlpool was clearly visible, three hundred yards offshore towards the western end of the gulf. Inside its circumference was a mêlée of struggling white breakers, charging about in every direction, head-butting one another. Outside, the surface was deadly smooth. The neatly-folded swimming trunks in my rucksack felt somehow irrelevant as I stood by the shore, feeling a very tiny figure, unable to take my eyes away from the epicentre of the vortex. It seemed scarcely credible that a swimmer could have made this crossing from Jura to Scarba.

Deakin wants to swim it. He says, “The whirlpool and the gulf were the quintessence of the wildness of Jura.” The whirlpool both fascinates him and scares him. He decides not to swim it. “I had to face the fact that I wasn’t going to swim the Corryvreckan, at least not on this occasion.” He leaves Jura with his spirits “more than a little dashed.” He resolves to return one day and try again.

Deakin’s spirits soon revive. In one of my favorite parts – Chapter 31 (“A Mill-race”) – he travels to Norfolk in search of a pool on the River Bure. The pool is called John’s Water. He finds it near a solitary mill cottage by a twin-arched red brick bridge. “A vigorous mill-race sped through one of the arches, darting its turbulence far out into a wide black pool which whirled evenly between dense banks of weeds and watercress.” Deakin sheds his clothes, dons his trunks, and wades into the icy water. He writes,

The fine gravel bed was shallow at first, then shelved deeper into the mill-pond. I plunged in and was soon out of my depth, swimming with the eddy up towards the mill-race where it spouted from the bridge. Then I launched myself into it and shot downriver into the weed-carpeted shallows. I swam on, in water that reached halfway up my thighs if I stood up, much as ice reaches halfway up a champagne bottle in a bucket. The river was embroidered with such vivid green braids of water buttercup that I half expected to meet Ophelia lying on the bottom, garlanded unseasonably in its white flowers. I was swimming down an ice-floe, but it was so clear, so sweet, so lush that I soon warmed to the cold and paddled and waded back up through the eddies, gathering watercress as I went. This was of the best crops of wild, untutored cress I had ever seen, let alone picked. It banked up along the dusky river like green cumulus clouds. I circled the pool twice more, shooting the rapids of the mill-race, crazed with the opiate cocktail the brain and body must have sluiced into my frozen veins.

I love that “champagne bottle in a bucket” image. Deakin’s words call up pictures. He’s a great writer – active, direct, specific, vibrant, sensuous. Waterlog is his masterpiece. In future posts, I’ll explore it further. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Lawrence Osborne’s splendid The Wet and the Dry. 

Julian Lucas's "A Real Gas"

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Julian Lucas's "A Real Gas"

This is just a quick note to spotlight Julian Lucas’s delightful “Talk of the Town” story "A Real Gas," in this week’s issue. It’s a mini-profile of Carlita Belgrove, also known as the Famous Stove Lady. She’s an ingenious repairer of old stoves. Lucas visits her at her workshop in Mount Vernon. He writes,

She was sanding down an L-shaped knob for a client in the Hamptons, who’d hired her to modernize his nineteen-thirties Magic Chef. Behind her was an Aladdin’s cave of more than a hundred and fifty venerable gas ranges, some with polished chrome fixtures and others nearly rusted through. There were Chambers, Garlands, Crowns, and a hulking, buttercup-yellow Roper that resembled a muscle car. In a world going electric, the Stove Lady keeps their flames alive: “Nobody—not nobody, anywhere—does what I do.”

Lucas also accompanies her on a house call in Long Island to fix a stove called the Magic Chef, “a six-burner with an extra side oven shaped like a rolltop desk.” Restoration of stoves is a great subject. I enjoyed this piece immensely.