Jonathan Raban's "Old Glory"

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi (1981). I’m taking my time, savoring both the trip and the prose. Raban writes the kind of direct, specific, first-person sentence I relish. Here are a few examples:

The front gates of the lock opened on a blinding rectangle of day, and I was out, past the railroad sidings, into another chamber, another drop, more clammy half-darkness, and another wide-open afternoon.

The river, barred black and silver, was too bright to take in all at once; I had to watch each wave, looking for the rim of shadow under its breaking crest, and steer the bow into it.

Blunt-nosed tows came foraging out from what I’d thought unbroken forest, and I learned to look for their giveaway inverted commas of diesel smoke tethered above the treetops.

Sitting in a bar on Schuyler Street, I watched the swinging Texaco sign of the garage opposite and waited for it to quieten.

I was afloat over a stump field submerged under just a few inches of water. As a roller sucked the river away, it exposed the bed of black-buttery peat, the sawed-off boles like bad teeth, and the boat grounded with a groan and a bang, the motor stalling as it hit a root.

I was frightened of popping a rivet as the booming hull hit the whitecaps as if they were blocks of concrete.

Keen to first-foot in Missouri, I beached at a town that looked like an unkempt graveyard.

But all I saw was water, scrolled with hairlines around the bow of the boat, darkening with the sky, slick as the top of a vat of molasses.

The water here was thicker and darker than I’d seen it before; all muscle, clenching and unclenching, taking logs as big as trees and roiling them around just for the hell of the thing.

Raban is a superb describer. An excerpt from his masterpiece, Passage to Juneau (1999), appeared in The New Yorker (August 23, 1999) under the title “Sailing Into the Sublime.” Maybe someday, I’ll post a review of that great piece. In the meantime, I’m enjoying Old Glory immensely.