3 for the Road: Structure

This is the fourth 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 focus on their structure. 

All three of these books have strong backbones. But each is structured differently. Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before is that most straightforward, least artificial of all literary forms – a journal. Starting on June 2, 1966 and ending on August 3, 1966, it’s an exuberant day-by-day account of Hoagland’s experiences roaming the wild Stikine country of British Columbia (“this gigantic ocean of heaped-up land almost too enormous to comprehend”). Its structure is chronological. There are no flashbacks, jump cuts, or other literary devices. Hoagland just gets up every morning, plunges into his extraordinary surroundings, and starts looking, filling his journal with detail after immersive detail. Here, for example, is the opening passage of his entry for June 27:

Glorious, blue and balmy. Caught a ride this morning to 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 a 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.

How I love that “practically sifting the place through my hands like a miser.” There’s nothing fancy about Notes from the Century Before’s structure. It’s just a journal – but what a journal! 

In contrast, John McPhee’s Coming into the Country is built; structure is part of its style. It’s divided into three “books” – each separately configured. Book I, titled “The Encircled River,” has an ingenious circular design, enacting the cyclical nature of the Arctic world it describes. It begins, in the present tense, on day five of a nine-day canoe-and-kayak trip down the Salmon River: “My bandana is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head, and now and then dip it into the river.” It then proceeds chronologically through the events of the last four days of the trip, then flashes back, and, in the past tense, recounts chronologically the first four days, ending where it began: “My bandana, around my head, was nearly dry. I took it off, and trailed it in the river.”

There’s a practical point to such artifice. If the piece is narrated sequentially, the dramatic high point – a grizzly bear encounter that happens on the first day of the trip – comes at the beginning. That’s a hard act to follow. McPhee’s structure puts it three-fifths of the way along, thereby creating a classic narrative arc. 

Here’s a taste of McPhee’s transfixing grizzly bear encounter:

We passed first through stands of fireweed, and then over ground that was wine-red with leaves of bearberries. There were curlewberries, too, which put a deep-purple stain on the hand. We kicked at some wolf scat, old as winter. It was woolly and white and filled with the hair of snowshoe hare. Nearby was a rich inventory of caribou pellets and, in increasing quantity as we moved downhill, blueberries – an outspreading acreage of blueberries. Fedeler stopped walking. He touched my arm. He had in an instant become even more alert than he usually was, and obviously apprehensive. His gaze followed straight on down our intended course. What he saw there I saw now. It appeared to me to be a hill of fur. “Big boar grizzly,” Fedeler said in a near-whisper. The bear was about a hundred steps away, in the blueberries, grazing. The head was down, the hump high. The immensity of muscle seemed to vibrate slowly – to expand and contract, with the grazing. Not berries alone but whole bushes were going into the bear. He was big for a barren-ground grizzly. The brown bears of Arctic Alaska (or grizzlies; they are no longer thought to be different) do not grow to the size they will reach on more ample diets elsewhere. The barren-ground grizzly will rarely grow larger than six hundred pounds. “What if he got too close?” I said. Fedeler said, “We’d be in real trouble.” “You can’t outrun them,” Hession said. A grizzly, no slower than a racing horse, is about half again as fast as the fastest human being. Watching the great mound of weight in the blueberries, with a fifty-five-five inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around. I had difficulty imagining that he could move with such speed, but I believed it, and was without impulse to test the proposition. 

He appeared to me to be a hill of fur – that is very fine. The entire description of the grizzly encounter, of which the above is just a portion, is excellent. Reading it, you can see why McPhee wanted it at the heart of his piece, and why he structured the piece accordingly. (McPhee describes the process of writing “The Encircled River,” among other pieces, in his superb Draft No. 4.) 

Book I of Coming into the Country is chronological (with a flashback). Books II and III are thematically structured. Each is an artful arrangement of narrative segments; each segment reports an aspect of the story. Book II, “What They Were Hunting For,” consists of seventeen segments; Book III, “Coming into the Country,” has thirty-six. Some segments are only three or four paragraphs; others are much longer. The segments are separated by white spaces. The governing aesthetic is montage. 

For example, in Book III, there’s a segment on the Gelvin family (“Stanley Gelvin grew up in the country, and therefore has no capacity to see it exotic”), followed by a segment describing McPhee’s interactions with the Gelvins (“One summer day, Ed and I made a two-hundred-and-fifty mile run in the pickup to collect a shipment of dogfood in Fairbanks”), followed by a segment on a friend of the Gelvins named Joe Vogler (“He picked up and tossed idly in his hand a piece of dry wolf feces with so many moose hairs in it that looked like a big caterpillar”), followed by a segment telling about Vogler and McPhee’s visit with a man named Fred Wilkinson, which leads, in the same segment, to McPhee accompanying Wilkinson on his visit with a man named Henry Speaker (“The skin of his face was hickory brown – tight skin, across sharp peregrine features, wrinkled only with a welcoming grin”). Speaker operates a hydraulic mine. McPhee observes it in action:

The nozzle opening was five inches, less than the spread of a hand. At a hundred and twenty-five pounds of pressure per square inch, though, the column of water shooting out of it had the hard, compact appearance of marble. Its great arc of power, as it trajectoried over the stream, seemed to subdivide into braided pulse units hypnotic to the eye. And where it crashed at the end of its parabola it sounded like a storm sea hammering a beach.

McPhee not only observes, he experiences: 

He said the horsepower of a D9 Cat was about half the horsepower he had coming out of that hose – look out, you could burn your fingers on the water. To be burned by water seemed irresistible. I put my fingers on the solid ice-cold projectiling cylinder a few inches from the nozzle tip, and pulled them away in an instant, burned.

In this way, thematic segment by thematic segment, Books II and III proceed, creating a rich, fascinating montage of Alaskan action, images, and characters.

Ian Frazier’s Great Plains is also structured thematically. It’s divided into eleven chapters, each on a different topic or set of topics. Each chapter is divided into sections separated by a white space. Each section presents an aspect of the chapter’s main theme. For example, Chapter 1, introducing the book’s subject, consists of two sections: the first vividly depicts the Great Plains (“The Great Plains are like a sheet Americans screened their dreams on for awhile and then largely forgot about”); the second describes Frazier’s project (“Eventually, over several summers, I drove maybe 25,000 miles on the plains – from Montana to Texas and back twice, as well as many shorter distances. I went to every Great Plains state, dozens of museums, scores of historic sites, numerous cafes”). 

Chapter 3 is my favorite. It consists of two sections on hitchhikers that Frazier met along his way. Section two describes a wonderful adventure in the company of a hitchhiker named Jim Yellow Earring. Frazier picks up Yellow Earring south of the town of McLaughlin, South Dakota, on a gravel road on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. He tells Yellow Earring that he’s been trying to find the site of Sitting Bull’s cabin on the Grand River. Yellow Earring says, “I’ll take you right to him.” He directs Frazier from the gravel road to a one-lane dirt road. Frazier writes, 

Soon a strip of grass growing between the wheels brushed under the car. Then we were on no road at all, just prairie with faint wheel tracks across it. Then we bounced into a road with deep ruts, and red dust came up through the holes in the floor. Nowhere up ahead did I see anything that looked like a river valley. Jim Yellow Earring said to keep going.

Frazier continues,

The road now led down a gully so steep that Jim Yellow Earring was thrown forward. His handprints were still in the red dust on the dashboard months later. I said I wasn’t going any farther. I put the car in reverse and tried to back up. Nothing happened. So we headed on down, with bushes now scraping the side. A branch came through the open window and caught me on the side of he head. Jim identified it as a branch of the wild plum tree. He said that wild plums were delicious. The high grass bent down under the front bumper and then sprang up when we passed. In the river bottom, where we finally stopped, the grass was above the door handle.

That “His handprints were still in the red dust on the dashboard months later” is marvelous. The whole passage is marvelous. The spot where they finally stop is where Sitting Bull’s cabin once stood. The site is surrounded by a woven-wire fence with a swinging gate. “Inside the fence is a stone obelisk, and a metal plaque erected by the South Dakota State Historical Society.” 

Chapter 3 is typical of the way Great Plains is structured: central narrative themes divided into various facets – each containing a piece of Frazier’s personal experience.

To sum up, Notes from the Century Before is chronological; Coming into the Country is partly chronological (Book I), partly thematic (Books II and III); and Great Plains is thematic. All three structures contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.