3 for the Road: People

This is the seventh 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 sense of people.

Everywhere they go in these great travelogues, Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier make a point of talking with people. Hitchhikers, old-timers, fishing guides, woodsmen, fur trappers, miners, bush pilots, park wardens, camp cooks – the authors never miss a chance to talk with whomever they encounter. For Hoagland, especially, talking with frontiersmen and recording their stories is the main point of his journey. He says, “I would be talking to the doers themselves, the men whom no one pays any attention to until they’re dead, who give the mountains their names and who pick the passes that become the freeways.”

To get some idea of the number of individuals peopling these books, consider this table:

Book	People
Notes from the Century Before	Lew Williams (editor of the Wrangell Sentinel); Joel Wing (Wrangell magistrate); George Sylvester (Wrangell roofer and fisherman); John Ellis (Wrangell outboard motor repairer, who takes Hoagland on an exhilarating boat ride); Tom Ukas (Wrangell totem-pole carver); Edwin Callbreath (Captain of the Judith Ann that takes Hoagland up the Stikine); Alec and Dan McPhee (Telegraph Creek old-timers); Gus Adamson (Telegraph Creek “river snagger”); Mr. Wriglesworth (Telegraph Creek old-timer); Mike Williams (Telegraph Creek old-timer); John Creyke (Telegraph Creek old-timer); A. J. Marion (Telegraph Creek old-timer); Benny Frank (Casca resident); Emma Brown (Benny Frank’s friend); Willie Campbell (“He’d been everywhere within three or four hundred miles, roaming alone. He’d seen all the lost, hidden lakes, crossing through notches, and killed every shade of grizzly, from silver to brown”); Bob Henderson; Steele Hyland; Lou Hyland; Cliff Adams; Armel Philippon; Hans Anderson (“an admirable old river bargeman”); Frank Pete; Alec Jack; Dogan Dennis; Jimmy Dennis; Jack Lee; Marty Allen (“Marty is a burned-faced fellow with sloping shoulders and a Roman nose, an Alberta nose”); Merv Hesse; Mr. Tommy Walker (“The delight of a hunt should be the stalk. The kill only puts a period to it, Walker says”); pilot Danny Bereza (“He’s a chattery, prim, preoccupied guy, and he popped through a pass from nowhere, materializing magically over Cold Fish Lake”); Jim Abou; Jim Morgan (“the last of a breed”); Rick Milburn; Walter Sweet (Atlin old-timer); Robert Craft (Atlin old-timer); George Edzerza (guide); Evelyn Jack (“eyelids like poplar leaves in a round flat face, and stiff black hair. Her nose is straight and short and her mouth, wild and cruel, turns down at the sides like a turtle’s mouth”); Norman Fisher; Bill Roxborough; Jim Nolan; Charlie Gairns; Father Decamp; Tahltan chief Eddy Frank; Surveyor General Gerry Andrews; Frank Swannell (“abrasive voice, a terse mind”); E. C. Lamarque (“still wearing the baggy wool pants of a woodsman”).
Coming into the Country	Bob Fedeler (“He would resemble Sigmund Freud, if Sigmund Freud had been a prospector”); Stell Newman; Pat Pourchot; John Kauffmann; Gene Parrish; Jack Hession; Willie Hensley (“Detached humor played across his eyes”); Richard and Dorothy Jones; bush pilot Cliff Hudson (“Bearded, bespectacled, with tousled thinning curly hair, Hudson flew in ten-inch boots and a brown wool shirt that had seen a lot of time on his back”); Carol and Verna Close; Evil Alice Powell; William Corbus; C. B. Bettisworth (“he had a backpackery, environmental look”); Earl Cook; Austin Ward; Barry Quinn;  William Pyle; Louise Kellogg; Robert Atwood; Ed Crittenden; Bill Ray (“He had heavy eyelids, and was a little figgy in the jowls”); Don and Patty Bender; Arliss Sturgulewski; Donna Kneeland; Dick Cook (“acknowledged high swami of the river people”); Eagle mayor and postmaster John Borg; Steve Ulvi; Louise and Sarge Waller; Viola Goggins; Elmer and Margaret Nelson; Dale and Gloria Richert; Jim Dungan; Wyman Fritsch; Ed Gelvin (“Trapper, sawyer, pilot, plumber, licensed big-game guide, welder, ironworker, mechanic, carpenter, builder of boats sand sleds, he suffered no lack of occupation”); Ginny Gelvin; Stanley Gelvin; Brad Snow; Lily Allen; Leon Crane; Charlie Edwards; Rich Corazza; Barney Hansen; Joe Vogler; Wayne Peppler; Fred Wilkinson;  Henry Speaker; Bill Lamoreaux; Earl Stout (“He came to the upper Yukon fifty years ago”); Jack Boone; Diana Green; Jim Scott (“face of an overweight hawk”); Elva Scott; Michael John David (“He laughs aloud – a long, soft laugh. His voice is soft, too – fluid and melodic, like nearly all the voices in the Village”); Mike Potts (“relaxed in the pleasure of his chosen life”).
Great Plains	National Park Ranger Gerard Baker (“Gerard Baker had a double-bladed throwing ax, and he and I spent an hour or so fooling around with it”); Gerhard Stadler; Lydell White Plume; Jim Yellow Earring; Le War Lance; George Scott; Mrs. Homer Lang; Bill Gwaltney, seasonal Park Service Ranger; Moses McTavish (“Moses McTavish asked me if I wanted to see his tipi”); Kathleen Claar, founder and curator of the Last Indian Raid in Kansas Museum; Ephriam Dickson III; Alan and Lindi Kirkbride; Buzz Mauck; Alvin Bates; Juanita Robinson and her daughters Kathleen, Karen, Kaye, Kolleen, Krystal, and Karmen; airman D. Moir; Staff Sergeant John Swift (“His eyes roved beyond his listeners as he spoke, like a man at a cocktail party hoping to spot a closer friend”).

I want to emphasize that all these people are real. They actually existed. Most of them are likely gone now. But on the page they still live, and will continue to live so long as there are eyes to read. The writers have preserved them, rescued them from oblivion. That, for me, is one of the cardinal achievements of these three great books.    

Many of these folks appear only briefly. Nevertheless, each is individually sketched – two or three artful lines and, voilà, a singular figure springs to life:

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. [Notes from the Century Before]

He is a big man, whose woolly beard and woolly crewcut surround pale-blue penetrating eyes. There is often a bemused smile. His voice is smoothly rolling and timpanic. He seems to drive it, like a custom-built car, to play it like a slow roll of drums. [Coming into the Country]

George is tall, red-haired, freckled, with deep squint-lines at the outside corners of his blue eyes. He drinks six or seven Pepsis a day. All the men in his family stick their tongues out to one side and bite them when they concentrate, like boys building models in old-time illustrations. [Great Plains]

He’s a lean-knit half-breed with high cheeks, walnut skin and a delicate nose – he looks like a honed Indian. His lips are so swollen from the sun that he can’t adjust them into an expression. They’re baked into testimonial form, or a sort of art form, like the curve of a fish backbone on a beach. [Notes from the Century Before]

The skin of his face was hickory brown – tight skin, across sharp peregrine features, wrinkled only with a welcoming grin. He wore hip boots, overalls, and gold-colored monkey-fist gloves. On his watchband were rubies embedded in an egglike field of placer gold. On his head was a brown Stetson – the only Stetson I’ve ever seen that was made of hard plastic. It had a crack in it that was patched with grout. [Coming into the Country]

Bill Gwaltney was wearing a Missouri River boatman’s shirt with bloused sleeves, white cotton broadfall trousers from an Amish clothing-supply house in Indiana, and a strand of red-and-blue glass beads of a design about three hundred years old. [Great Plains]

The heroes of these books get fuller treatment - more like oils than sketches. Here, for example, is Hoagland’s portrait of riverman Jim Morgan, “the last of a breed,” “the last of the wolfers”:

He is what he does. He’s a difficult man to convey on paper because he’s got nothing to say for himself. He’s like Willie Campbell. He’s the very best, the obscure common hero. He’s the man you want to see mountains named after, and yet he leaves it at that, he’s antidramatic. Answering my questions is not even much of a chore for him because he doesn’t connect up with them; he lives on a wavelength of silence. When we’re in the skiff, he drinks from his hat brim, dipping it into the river, and he moves through the muskeg and brush using none of my lunging motions, but with small ministeps. He splits firewood with a few quiet taps with one hand, holding the axe head. He keeps a blaze in the cook stove throughout the day, though our weather is up in the eighties, and he also wears long underwear: let the temperature change instead of him. He holds up his pants with suspenders. In one shirt pocket he carries his cigarette papers and in the other his bug repellent, which, like most old-timers, he seldom takes out. He has the same clear, extraordinary eyes as Armel Philippon and Alex McPhee, only more so. When these touch something they light on it. It’s mot that their big; it’s that their wide. They’ve seen nothing they couldn’t look at, and this not, I think, from innocence but rather because of all they have seen. Nobody has seen the whole world, but this is the quality of equilibrium with what one has seen. Of course a city man might have to go about with a half squint, if only to keep the soot out of his eyes. Morgan isn’t a smiler. Like Creyke, like Wriglesworth and Roy Callbreath and Jack Lee, he’s got swollen black lips that look as if they had been chapped for so many years that they’re almost impossible to adjust in any comfortable way. It’s hard enough opening and closing them, let alone trying to smile, and yet without moving his mouth, he’s another blithe man.

He is what he does - action is character. McPhee describes two of his heroes – the father-son team of Ed and Stanley Gelvin – in terms of their amazing resourcefulness and self-reliance. In one of Coming into the Country’s most memorable scenes, he shows Stanley Gelvin skilfully operating an enormous bulldozer in a remote area of Alaskan bush:

The sluice box should have a slope of exactly ten degrees. The D9 – larger than most cabins, lurching over mounds of its own rubble – seemed an unlikely instrument for so precise a job. Stanley – in his high seat, hands and feet in rapid movement among the multiple controls – suggested a virtuoso on a pipe organ even more than a skinner on a Cat. Gradually, a smooth ramp appeared. He had wired a carpenter’s level to the deck of the machine and had shimmed one end of it so the bubble would center when the Cat was on a slope of ten degrees. As he finished, and drove his fifty-five tons of yellow iron up the ramp, from bottom to top the bubble scarcely moved. Clanking off to fetch the sluice box, he hitched it to the rear of the big bulldozer, and pushed it backward down the narrow top of the dike. The sluice box weighs a couple of tons. He gently eased it down the ramp. Then he went and got the slick plate, and backed that down the top of the dike, too. He was grouchy – had been crabby all through the day – because he had no snoose. He was trying to quit, and had been six days without a dip of Copenhagan. Repeatedly, he shook his head in apparent dismay and made despairing remarks about the way things were going – heard mainly by the roaring Cat. The mouthpiece on the slick plate is nearly four feet wide and was designed to fit into the sluice box with very little clearance. Stanley backed the slick plate down the ramp. It weighs three tons, and he moved it steadily – without hesitation, without a pause for adjustment (just ran it downhill backward) – until the mouthpiece entered the box. It had not so much as brushed either side. The clearance was five-quarters of an inch one way and three-eighths of an inch the other. The day’s work finished, father and son flew home.

That brilliant passage is both a description of action and a portrait of Stanley Gelvin. McPhee admires the Gelvins enormously. He says,

The relationship between this father and son is as attractive as anything I have seen in Alaska – both of them self-reliant beyond the usual reach of the term, the characteristic formed by this country. Whatever they are doing, whether it is mining or something else, they do for themselves what no one else is here to do for them. Their kind is more endangered every year.

One of Ian Frazier’s heroes is Le War Lance. We first meet him in Great Plains. Frazier writes:

One day, on the street in front of my apartment building in New York (this was before I moved to Montana), I met a Sioux Indian named Le War Lance. I had just been reading a study of recent economic conditions on Sioux reservations. The authors seemed puzzled that so few Sioux were interested in raising sugar beets working in a house-trailer factory. As I waited for the light to change, I noticed that the man standing next to me resembled many pictures of Sioux that I had seen. I said, “Are you a Sioux?” He smiled and said, “I’m an Oglala Sioux Indian from Oglala, South Dakota.” He said his name and asked for mine. He had to lean over to hear me. He was more than six feet tall. He was wearing the kind of down coat that is stuffed with something other than down—knee-length, belted around the waist, in a light rescue orange polished with dirt on the creases—blue jeans lengthened with patches of denim of a different shade from knee to cuff, cowboy boots, a beaded-leather ponytail holder. His hair was straight and black with streaks of gray, and it hung to his waist in back. After I saw him, I never cut my hair again. In one hand he was holding a sixteen-ounce can of beer.

Le War Lance is one of Frazier’s greatest “characters." He figures centrally in Frazier’s On the Rez (2000), a sort of sequel to Great Plains. 

For me, the most significant people in these three books are the authors themselves. Their “I”s are present on almost every page. What are they like as characters? Can these works be read as self-portraits? What are the implications of their first-person perspective? That’s the subject of my next post in this series.