3 for the Road: Action

This is the fifth 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 action. 

Travelogues are inherently active. The writer moves through time and space and describes what he or she sees. But the three travel books I’m considering here are active in another way. Their authors aren’t simply passive observers; they’re participants. 

“John Ellis gets through work, gobbles a meal, and from six to nine o’clock we head off to pick up the bear which he shot yesterday.” So begins a wonderful action sequence in Notes from the Century Before. It’s exactly the kind of adventure I relish. Hoagland is in Wrangell, British Columbia, waiting for the boat that will take him up the Stikine River to Telegraph Creek. While in Wrangell, he meets Ellis, “a young fellow who repairs outboard motors.” Ellis invites him on this bearskin-retrieving mission, and off they go:

The skiff whirls and scuds over the water at 30 mph, with its bow high. We pass Dead Man’s Island, where the early Chinese cannery workers were buried; also Dairy Island, and Farm Island, five miles by fifteen, which splits the mouth of the Stikine. A boy of eight named Timmer is along, so John shows him the remains of the homestead on a point of the mainland where his mother grew up. We stop to look at a gold-rush message cut on a rock at the edge of the water. Only the simple numerals of the date are still legible. And an old bridge crosses a slough – two logs fitted onto a rock-packed frame, wide enough for a wagon. We whip and zoom into and out of the principal channel, which builds into slanting slopes of water against the sandbars. It’s as wide as the Hudson but is a rich brown-gray, littered with floating trees and boiling and pimpled with miniature whirlpools, with circles of surface water spinning and intersecting. Stunting for Timmer and me, Ellis shoots into the narrowest sloughs, curving with them and out at the end, after a mile between the close-set  walls of the rain forest. Mink, moose, beaver tracks. Cottonwood Island, Government Island. Government Island lies off the cove where the customs man had his cabin in the old days, in a thicket of tall hemlock trees and windfalls and brush. The roof has fallen in from the weight of the winters of snow. Nearby is the bearskin, about five feet long, representing an animal of two hundred pounds. John was watching a cow and calf moose in a slough, trying to photograph them, when the bear showed up on the opposite side and started across. He left the head intact when he skinned, and the mouth is still biting a mouthful of grass, the tongue is out, the lips are red-flecked. The ears are floppy, personable ears and the muzzle is well proportioned, the eyes not too small – a likeable face. Fine, unblemished fur, prime-of-life claws. Gracing the prow, stretched out, the skin makes the skiff look very big, but to me it’s a sad memento, and as he says it’s the sixth bear he’s killed, he begins to sound as if it were sad to him too. 

Again we skylark between the drift piles and swampy islands and crocodile logs, making the seething brown river a raceway, an obstacle course. The sun is low. The thick shoreline is that of a jungle river. Hundreds of great trees are stranded about in the shallows, so that parts of the estuary look like a naval graveyard. We swing near a beaver house, and swing near an eagle plunked in a tree. From time to time a seal surfaces and dives – whole herds go upriver during the salmon run. Besides the continual gulls, we start up a flock of ducks every couple of minutes, thirty or forty ducks, and since the boat zips along as fast as they do, we wheel them towards shore like a troop of horses, until they gradually outdistance us. 

It’s hard to stop quoting. The passage goes on for another three paragraphs, each a teeming run of exuberant eventfulness: “We visit the Farm Island farm, swerving up a creek, planing along”; “On the way out, we spot an otter and chase its ripples around”; “Then the river’s mouth again, with seals surfacing, and eagles and fleeing ducks, the snowing horizon – a profusion, a gushing of life.” It ends magnificently: “I goggle and grin quite helplessly, for this was the way the world was made.” The prose enacts the profusion, the gushing of life. Note the abundance of vivid, active verbs: “whirls,” “scuds,” “whip,” “zoom,” “shoots,” “swing,” “dives,” “wheel.” Note that wonderful “skylark”: “Again we skylark between the drift piles and swampy islands and crocodile logs, making the seething brown river a raceway, an obstacle course.” My god, I love that sentence! The whole book moves like that.

John McPhee, in his Coming into the Country, is also observer-participant. In one of my favorite passages, he watches Dick Cook, an outstanding woodsman, trapper, and dogsledder, ready his dogs for a trip to Eagle:

Dick goes out on the leveled stream and lays down harnesses in the snow. The sled is packed, the gear lashed under the skins. Everything is ready for the dogs. They are barking, roaring, screaming with impatience for the run. One by one, Donna unchains them. Out of the trees they dash toward the sled. Chipper goes first and, standing in front, holds all the harnesses in a good taut line. Abie, Little Girl, Grandma, Ug – the others fast fill in. They jump in their traces, cant’s wait to go. If they jump too much, they get cuffed. Wait another minute and they’ll have everything so twisted we’ll be here another hour. Go! The whole team hits at once. The sled, which was at rest a moment before, is moving fast. Destination, Eagle; time, two days.

Several paragraphs later, McPhee himself drives Cook’s dog team:

Dick has sometimes handed the sled over to me for two and three miles at a time, he and Donna walking far behind. On forest trails, with the ground uneven, the complexity of the guesswork is more than I’d have dreamed. We come to, say, a slight uphill grade. I have been riding, standing on the back of the sled. The dogs, working harder, begin throwing glances back at me. I jump off and run, giving them a hundred-and-fifty-pound bonus. The sled picks up speed in reply. Sooner or later, they stop – spontaneously quit – and rest. Let them rest too long and they’ll dig holes in the snow and lie down. I have learned to wait about forty-five seconds, then rattle the sled, and off they go. I don’t dare speak to them, because my voice is not Cook’s. If I speak, they won’t move at all. There are three main choices – to ride, to run behind, or to keep a foot on the sled and push with the other, like a kid propelling a scooter. The incline has to be taken into account, the weight of the sled, the firmness of the trail, the apparent energy of the dogs, the time since they last rested, one’s own degree of fatigue. Up and down hill, over frozen lakes – now ride, now half ride, run. Ten below zero seems to be the fulcrum temperature at which the air is just right to keep exertion cool. You’re tired. Ride. Outguess the dogs. Help with one foot. When they’re just about to quit, step off and run. When things look promising, get on again, rest, look around at the big white country, its laden spruce on forest trails, its boulevard, the silent Yukon. On a cold, clear aurorean night with the moon and Sirius flooding the ground, the sound of the sled on the dry snow is like the rumbling cars of a long freight, well after the engine has passed. 

Mm, that last line is crazy good! I relish the way the whole passage moves. It puts me squarely there with McPhee, now riding, now half-riding, now jumping off and running, now jumping back on, looking around “at the big white country, its laden spruce on forest trails, its boulevard, the silent Yukon.” Its immediacy is thrilling! 

There’s action aplenty in Frazier’s Great Plains, too. The killing of Crazy Horse, the slaughter of Custer and the 7th Calvary at Little Big Horn, the capture of a runaway yearling – these events are vividly described. As for first-person action, well, there’s lots of driving. In my post on structure, I mentioned Frazier and Jim Yellow Earrings’ wild ride to Sitting Bull’s cabin. That’s one of my favorites. Another is when Frazier and a friend are driving on the plains and get stuck in mud:

Suddenly we crossed the path of one of the rainclouds, and the hard dirt road turned to glue. Mud began to thump in the wheel wells, and the car skidded sideways, went off the road, and stuck. We got out in cement-colored mud over our ankles. Two pieces of harvesting machinery sat in a field nearby; other than that, there was no sign of people anywhere. I tried to drive while my friend pushed, then she drove while I pushed, then I left it in gear and we both pushed. We whipped the mud to peaks. It clotted on the wheels until they became useless mudballs. Finally I took a flat rock and got down on all fours and scraped the mud off each wheel. Then my friend drove carefully in reverse for one wheel turn until the wheels were covered again. Then I scraped the mud off again, and we drove another revolution. We kept doing this over and over until we made it back to dry ground. It took about two hours. Another event early travellers mentioned in their diaries was miring their wagons in the gumbo mud of the Great Plains. Now I knew what they meant. When I got back in the car, I was all-over mud and my fingernails were broken. From her purse, my friend produced a freshly laundered white cotton handkerchief. 

That “We whipped the mud to peaks” is excellent. Note the action-verbs – “skidded,” “pushed,” “clotted,” “scraped,” “whipped.” Frazier’s nouns and adjectives are also pretty damn effective. By the end of the passage, I felt as though I’d experienced “the gumbo mud of the Great Plains,” too. 

Action is a prime feature of all three of these great books. Another one is acute sense of place. That will be the focus of my next post in this series.