3 for the Road: Edward Hoagland's "Notes from the Century Before"

This is the first in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll begin with a review of Notes from the Century Before. 

Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before chronicles his 1966 trip up British Columbia’s Stikine River, “left as it was in the nineteenth century by a fluke of geography.” The geography is breathtaking – eighty thousand square miles ("like two Ohios") of wild rivers, snow-topped mountains, and thick forests, containing tiny villages that are “unimaginably isolated.” Hoagland travels by boat, plane, and truck. He does a lot of walking, roaming the settlements, talking to old-timers, seeing what there is to see, noting it all down – detail after amazing detail. Here, for example, is his description of the village of Eddontenajon:

The mountains stood close and steep, with silver runnels and pockets of snow and passes going off in every direction, as if the country were still full of sourdoughs and mystery trips. Plank bridges have been laid across a creek that bisects the village beside the church, which is another log cabin. On the low hill backing the whole, a cemetery is already getting its start, picket fences around the few graves. I walked up and down, pretending to have business to do at the opposite end from wherever I was, practically sifting the place through my hands like a miser. The cabin foundations sit edgily on the ground, as though on an unbroken horse. Initials are cut on some of the doors to tell who lives where, and fuzzy fat puppies play in front, next to the birch dog sleds which are seven or eight feet long and the width of a man’s shoulders, weathered to a chinchilla gray. The grown dogs sleep in the fog of hunger. Swaying and weak, they get up and come to the end of their chains, like atrocity victims, hardly able to see. Snowshoes hang in the trees, along with clusters of traps. 

And here’s his portrait of Willie Campbell, one of the oldest residents of Telegraph Creek:

At last Willie turned up, a stooped twisted man on a cane with a young tenor voice and another of those immense Tahltan faces, except that his was pulled out as long as a pickaxe and then bent at the chin. A chin like a goiter, a distorted cone of a forehead. He looked like a movie monster; he was stupendous. He was wearing hide mittens and shoes, and he pointed across the Stkine to where he had seen a grizzly the day before.

And here’s his depiction of a young man in Eddontenajon roasting a moose head over a fire:

On the scaffold overhead a batch of pink trout was drying. Pieces of meat hung down, a hole punched in each and a rope strung through. Some rib cuts were drying too, but mainly the fire was roasting the head of a moose, kept in its skin so the meat wouldn’t burn. It rotated steadily at the end of a wire which he wound by twisting from time to time. The eyes were closed, the hair was blackened and sometimes afire, the antlers were gone, the ears had been cut off to feed the dogs, yet it was as recognizable as a moose as in life – as at peace as a comic strip, humorous moose. He said the head would feed his family for a meal or two and that the body would keep them provisioned for the whole summer while he was away on a job.

If you relish definite, concrete, vivid writing, as I do, you’ll be sure to enjoy Notes from the Century Before. It’s written in the form of a journal, parts of it in the first person, present tense – my favorite mode. It brims with sentences like “Coming back across a grassy range, I meet a loose troop of horses, who slide out of reach like so many fish, wheeling in a flat, careful curve as if they were tied head to haunch: insouciant, bonehead horses, sinister in the face.” 

Hoagland seems incapable of writing vaguely. He deals in particulars. I read him as much for his exuberant style as for his substance. But the substance – “this gigantic ocean of heaped-up land almost too enormous to comprehend” – is pretty damn spectacular, too. The book is double bliss – amazing subject, delectable prose style. I devour it.

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Notes from the Century Before, including its action, structure, imagery, point of view, sense of place, and use of figuration. But first I want to introduce the other two books in my trio. Next month, I’ll review John McPhee’s great Coming into the Country.