3 for the Road: First Person

This is the eighth 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 use of the first person.

All three of these books are written in the first-person major. That, for me, is a compelling aspect of their style. They aren’t second-hand reports (except when they're recounting other people's stories or telling about historical events). Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier were actually there, in northern British Columbia, in Alaska, on the Great Plains, walking trails, canoeing rivers, driving back roads. They’re writing from personal experience, which, for me, is the most concrete form of reality. 

But each of them has a distinctive way of “being there.” Their “I”s differ from each other. Hoagland is much more self-revealing than the other two. He discloses intimate details of his private life. For example,

I’ve been too busy and happy to be lonely, and I must say I’ve missed neither friends nor family, other than my former wife, whom I haven’t seen for two years now anyway, and have been missing right along. Sexually, instead of her, at night I visualize the English girl I lived with in Greece, whom I haven’t seen for nearly a year. She was a lean, dreamy, athletic blonde, born during the Blitz and frozen at the age of nineteen, it seemed to me, though she was five or six years older than that. She dreamed of love and being rich, mostly, and when we went to Izmir from Samos and lived it up, riding in horse-drawn cabs and so on, she crossed her tawny long legs and turned as creamy and smooth as a queen. The populace lined the curbs as we passed. She was loyal and sweet to me, but towards the end of the period we became choked with umbrages and unable to speak to each other except on the politest level. She ran away to another island on a night boat at one point, and after anguishing in uncertainty, I finally went to the police, imagining her death was on my head – I saw us as the petrifying snake and the bird. They thought that I might have murdered her and put a detective on my trail until she came back. Even so, as wordless as we grew after that, we made love better and better, my penis as big as a surfboard underneath us. Whether as the snake or not, from my window I watched her sunbathe and swim much of the day.

There’s nothing even remotely like that in Coming into the Country and Great Plains. McPhee and Frazier stick to what they observe. They look outward, not inward. Occasionally, they tell how they’re feeling:

Tracks suggest that it is something of a trail. I am mildly nervous about that, but then I am mildly nervous about a lot of things. [Coming into the Country]

I made sure I had a place to turn around, and then we started out. I was afraid I’d never get up the steep gully, but I did, my rear wheels tiptoeing along the edges of the ruts. [Great Plains]

Like pictures from pages riffled with a thumb, all these things went through my mind there on the mountainside above the grazing bear. I will confess that in one instant I asked myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” There was nothing more to the question, though, than a hint of panic. I knew why I had come., and therefore what I was doing there. That I was frightened was incidental. I just hoped the fright would not rise beyond a relatively decorous level. [Coming into the Country]

Whenever you see an abandoned house, you wonder. Usually, I was too shy to stop the car and go closer. The way a man in Texas looked at me when he drove up the driveway of an abandoned house as I was peering through the window and writing in my notebook (“busted air conditioner / empty Field Trial high-protein dog food bags / electric-fence transformer / pair of white water skis in corner”) gave me an idea of the way ghosts in these houses might look at me if they existed and could take shape for a moment. [Great Plains]

The trees finally end. I am pleased to see the big river. I make a bench of driftwood, eat cashews and apricots, and wait for Sarge. The walk took a little less than two hours. I don’t feel elevated by that journey, nor am I shy to describe it – just happy that it is complete. I scarcely think I was crazy to do it, and I don’t think I was crazy to fear it. Risk was low, but there was something to fear. Still, I am left awry. I embrace this wild country. But how can I be of it, how can I move within it? I can’t accept anymore the rationale of the few who go unarmed – yet I am equally loath to use guns. If bears were no longer in the country, I would not have come. I am here, in a sense, because they survive. So I am sorry – truly rueful and perplexed – that without means of killing them I cannot feel at ease. [Coming into the Country]

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn’t end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on train, slept in a boarding house, ate at table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going to where he expected to die; because, although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as Red and Spotted Tail as Spot, they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena that our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate. [Great Plains]

(Note that last quotation is all one sentence – a 325-word tour de force that bespeaks Frazier’s deep love for Crazy Horse.)

All three books are self-portraits, as much about the beholder as the beheld. Frazier, in his “Carving Your Name on the Rock,” an essay on the writing of Great Plains (included in the 1991 collection They Went, edited by William Zinsser), calls Great Plains “an internal landscape, a memoir.” He says, “Of course, what you’re really writing about is yourself – Great Plains is an internal landscape, a memoir.” This is true of Notes from the Century Before and Coming into the Country, too.

What selves are portrayed? Hoagland, in his Notes from the Century Before, describes himself as a rhapsodist (“I’m a novelist, not a historian, but at best I’m a rhapsodist too – that old-fashioned, almost anachronist form”). Rhapsodic passages abound. This one, for example:

Swaying and bucking as on a life raft, we scraped over a further series of ridges and peaks. This was the highest flying we had done: we were way up with the snow so that the cabin was cold. But the sunlight washed the whole sky a milky blue. Everywhere, into the haze a hundred miles off, a crescendo of up-pointing mountains shivered and shook. A cliff fell away beneath us as we crossed the lip. The lake down at the base of it was oil-green. We passed over a glacier – blue ice nestled into a saddle. There was no chance to watch for game, the plunging land was life enough. It was a whole earth of mountains, beyond counting or guessing at, colored stark white and rock-brown. To live is to see, and although I was sweating against my stomach, I was irradiated. These were some of the finest minutes of my life.

McPhee rhapsodizes, too, but in a different key – less euphoric, more humorous:

When I have stayed with the Gelvins, I have for the most part occupied a cabin toward the far end of the airstrip – a place acquired not long ago from an old-timer named Curly Allain, who was in his seventies and went south. He had no intention of returning, but he left his cabin well stocked with utensils, food, and linen – a tin of coffee close to the pot, fifty pounds of flour, five pounds of Danish bacon, firewood in three sizes stacked beside the door. Outside, some paces away, I have stood at a form of parade rest and in the broad light of a June midnight been penetrated in the most inconvenient place by a swarm of indecent mosquitoes, and on the same spot in winter, in a similar posture at the same hour, have stared up in darkness from squeaky snow at a green arch of the aurora, green streamers streaming from it all across the sky. At home, when I look up at the North Star I lift my eyes but don’t really have to move my head. Here, I crane back, lift my chin almost almost as far as it will go, and look up at the polestar flirting with the zenith. The cabin is long and low, and its roof is loaded white – mantled eighteen inches deep. Its windows are brown-gold from the light of burning lamps. The air is so still I can hear the rising smoke. Twenty-two degrees below zero. Balls of ice are forming in the beard. I go back inside and comb it off, and jump into a bag of down.

That “The air is so still I can hear the rising smoke” is very fine.

Frazier’s rhapsodies are like arias, soaring, thrilling, passionate: see, for example, the Nicodemus passage I quoted previously. Here’s another one – Great Plains’ extraordinary opening paragraph:

Away to the Great Plains of America, to that immense Western short-grass prairie now mostly plowed under! Away to the still-empty land beyond newsstands and malls and velvet restaurant ropes! Away to the headwaters of the Missouri, now quelled by many impoundment dams, and to the headwaters of the Platte, and to the almost invisible headwaters of the slurped-up Arkansas! Away to the land where TV used to set its most popular dramas, but not anymore! Away to the land beyond the hundredth meridian of longitude, where sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn’t, where agriculture stops and does a double take! Away to the skies of sparrow hawks sitting on telephone wires, thinking of mice and flaring their tail feathers suddenly, like a card trick! Away to the air shaft of the continent, where weather fronts from two hemispheres meet, and the wind blows almost all the time! Away to the fields of wheat and milo and sudan grass and flax and alfalfa and nothing! Away to parts of Montana and North Dakota and South Dakota and Wyoming and Nebraska and Kansas and Colorado and New Mexico and Oklahoma and Texas! Away to the high plains rolling in waves to the rising final chord of the Rocky Mountains!

All three writers are artists to the tips of their fingernails. All three are superb describers of nature. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.