This is the ninth 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 wonderful nature descriptions.
Part of the deep pleasure these books provide is a thrilling contact with first nature:
Mountains
The mountains go 6,000 to 10,000 feet, to gunsight peaks and to sailing, razory needle peaks. They’re blue, cut with shadows and loaded with snow, and they carry small glaciers slung on their hips. [Notes from the Century Before]
Rivers
We drifted down the Yukon through a windless afternoon. The fast-flowing water was placid and – with its ring boils – resembled antique glass. Down one long straightaway, framed in white mountains, we saw ten full miles to the wall of the coming bend. [Coming into the Country]
Foothills
Beyond the road were foothills, clear-cut timber in patches, like heads shaved for surgery, and beyond the hills were mountains. [Great Plains]
Lakes
The lakes were black, in strange, disorderly Rorschach shapes [Notes from the Century Before]
More Mountains
Now, off to the left of the Twin Otter, the Talkeetna Mountains, behind Larson Lake, were topped with a dusting of snow, and along the whole range the snowline was drawn absolutely level somewhere near five thousand feet, as if someone painting a wall had carefully cut in with a brush to whiten just the high part. [Coming into the Country]
Forest
The forest itself grew taller and vast. The low intervals of brush, the marshes, the pea-vine openings and meadows were stopped up. It was a lightless, impenetrable forest: it was the prototype forest which presents a mad sea-net of heaped, angular, tree-sized sticks as its face. You don’t think of going in; you just look at it, turning your body side-ways on the seat. [Notes from the Century Before]
Grasses
He stopped the truck and said, “Let’s take a look at these grasses. This tall one here is bluestem. This’ll grow eight feet high if it gets enough water. Bluestem is what used to grow everywhere farther east, in places like Iowa. This low, skinny grass here is prairie sand reed. If cattle graze this in the summer they’ll take it right out. We graze it more in the winter. This is thread-leaf sedge. It’s the first thing to green up in the spring. I’ve seen this greenin’ up the tenth of March. Once this was up, the Indian ponies had something to eat, and the Indians could travel. This is little bluestem. Cattle don’t eat that so much. This is eriogonum. Technically, it’s not a shrub or a grass—it’s an herb. It’s green in the spring, gold in the summer, and red all winter. This is Indian rice grass. Stock loves this, but it isn’t a real abundant grass. This is blue grama grass. It’s a low-growing little grass, but it’s nutritious. The whole plant, seeds and all, cures over the summer and makes great winter feed. Grama grasses are what the fifty million buffalo ate. That tall plant over there is soapweed. Cattle love to eat soapweed blossoms. It’s a member of the yucca family. That copper-colored bush growing up in the rocks has a great name—mountain mahogany.” [Great Plains]
More Rivers
At last the Stikine itself confronts us. It’s about the same size as the Spatsizi, but blue and breezy up here, young and emotional, jiggled and studded and glittering. It’s even swifter and more self-assured than the Spatsizi is, as exhilarating as a running sea, and, augmented, adds twenty more yards of width. The blue water brightens the sunshine. There are a hundred swallows flying and kingfishers, ouzels and other birds, even seagulls, mountains on one side and spacious forest everywhere else. The river goes along in major key. This is almost the beginning. There is no canyon yet. Life is easy for it; it’s the young champion conquering day by day. [Notes from the Century Before]
Bears
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 grazing. Not berries alone but whole bushes were going into the bear. [Coming into the Country]
Eagles
We went along the canyon a ways and stopped within sight of an eagle nest of sticks and branches built into the rock wall. The nest had enough wood in it for a football-rally bonfire, and it extended from the rock in a sketchy half-sphere. In the middle of the nest we could just see the top of the eagle, looking out like a man in a cupola. [Great Plains]
Wild Horses
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. No wild animal looks any tougher. They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries and that tight herding instinct. A roan and a white do a little kicking, and when the roan yawns, all the rest catch the yawn. [Notes from the Century Before]
Salmon
Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins. [Coming into the Country]
Trees
Cottonwood trees grow in all the valleys; suddenly there is something between you and the sun. The trees lean at odd angles, like flowers in a vase. In the summers, windrows of cottonwood-seed down cover the ground. Big cottonwoods have bark as ridged as a tractor tire, and the buffalo used to love to rub against it. In the shedding season, the river bottoms would often be ankle-deep in buffalo hair. At sunset, the shadows of the cottonwoods fall across the river and flutter on the riffles. [Great Plains]
Wolves
Her fur was in silver-fox shades and her head was larger than life. I stared at it the next day while she was being skinned. She had grim, snapping eyes set at a spellbinding slant, and a mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors. At the zoo you can watch wolves mouthing their meat like a cobbler turning a shoe in his hands or a tailor handling a bundle of clothes. Oversized as it is, the mouth can be used as a pair of hands. Wolves’ legs are long because they churn for a hundred-and-fifty miles in a line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles in another line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles, all their lives. Their shoulders are large because they fight with their shoulders. And their heads are large to contain their mouths, which are both hands and mouths. Their eyes are fixed in a Mongol slant to avoid being bitten. Nobody nowadays will see a wild wolf. They are an epitome; one keeps count because they are so exceptional a glimpse. [Notes from the Century Before]
More Bears
He picked up salmon, roughly ten pounds of fish, and, holding it with one paw, he began to whirl it around his head. Apparently, he was not hungry, and this was a form of play. He played sling-the-salmon. With his claws embedded near the tail, he whirled the salmon and then tossed it high end over end. As it fell, he scooped it up and slung it around his head again, lariat salmon, and again he tossed it into the air. He caught it and heaved it high once more. The fish flopped to the ground. The bear turned away bored. He began to move upstream by the edge of the river. Behind the big head his hump projected. His brown fur rippled like a field under wind. He kept coming. The breeze was behind him. He had not yet seen us. He was romping along at an easy walk. As he came closer to us, we drifted slowly toward him. The single Klepper, with John Kauffmann in it, moved up against a snagged stick and broke it off. The snap was light, but enough to stop the bear. Instantly, he was motionless and alert, remaining on his four feet and straining his eyes to see. We drifted on toward him. At last we arrived in his focus. If we were looking at something we had rarely seen before, God help him so was he. If he was a tenth as awed as I was, he could not have moved a muscle, which he did now, in a hurry that was not pronounced but nonetheless seemed inappropriate to his status in the situation. He crossed low ground and went up a bank toward a copse of willow. He stopped there and faced us again. Then, breaking stems to pieces, he went into the willows. [Coming into the Country]
Crows
The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. [Great Plains]
Moose
A cow moose with her calf crossed the river in front of camp. She stayed protectively at its side in the rushing water, as black as a silhouette, humped like a horse which has been built up imposingly at the shoulders and reduced at the waist. At the other bank, when the calf paused in knee-deep water to congratulate itself, the cow strode ahead into the trees. [Notes from the Century Before]
Arctic Char
Below one ledge, where water ran white from a pool, we stopped to fish. Stell Newman caught an Arctic char. Bob Fedeler caught another. They were imposing specimens, bigger than the Salmon’s salmon. They were spotted orange and broad-flanked, with lobster-claw jaws. Sea-run Arctic char. They could be described as enormous brook trout, for the brook trout is in fact a char. They had crimson fins with white edges and crimson borders on their bellies. Their name may be Gaelic, wherein “blood” is “cear.” The Alaska record length for an Arctic char is thirty-six inches, and ours were somewhat under that. I tossed a small Mepps lure across the stream, sixe zero, and bringing it back felt a big one hit. The strike was too strong for a grayling – more power, less commotion. I had, now, about ten pounds of fish on a six-pound line. So I followed the fish around, walking upstream and down, into and out of the river. I had been walking the kayak all day long, and this experience was not much different. After fifteen minutes or so, the fish tired, and came thrashing from the water. I took out my tape and laid it on him, from the hooking jaw to the tip of the tail. Thirty-one and a half inches.. Orange speckles, crimson glow, this resplendent creature was by a long measure the largest fish I had ever caught in fresh water. In its belly would fit ten of the kind that I ordinarily keep and eat. For dinner tonight we would have grilled Arctic char, but enough had been caught already by the others. So, with one hand under the pelvic fins and the other near the jaw, I bent toward the river and held the fish underwater until it had its equipoise. It rested there on my hands for a time, and stayed even when I lowered them away. Then, like naval ordnance, it shot across the stream. The best and worst part of catching that fish was deciding to let it go. [Coming into the Country]
Coyote
Along a straightaway, a coyote raced the truck, his tongue flapping beside him like a tie. [Great Plains]
Caribou
A caribou swam across the lake, buoyant and tireless all the way. She was a pretty bleached tan with two-pronged antlers in velvet, and she splashed the shallows like a filly, muzzling the bugs off her rear. [Notes from the Century Before]
Loons
In the beginning of the twilight, a pair of loons are cruising. They are beyond range. Their heads are up. Their bodies float high. They sense no danger. Their course is obliquely toward the gun. Now we can distinguish the black-and-white shingling on their necks. Silently swimming, they come nearer still. Loons. They are quick. Diving, they can suddenly be gone. He fires. He fires again. The loons elect to sprint down the surface – cacophonous, flailing – their splayfeet spading the water. A pellet or two may have touched them, but it seems unlikely. [Coming into the Country]
Sagebrush
We turned down a fence line through high sagebrush. The truck drove over bushes as high as the hood, and the smell of crushed sage rose. [Great Plains]
Deer
I saw a deer, of all scarce and unlikely things, bounding to keep me in sight as it fled. It looked like a jackrabbit in the supersized landscape, compared with the animals I was anticipating. But its feminine grace gave it importance. [Notes from the Century Before]
More Rivers
The river below us was the product of the sun, and even in autumn and from the helicopter’s high perspective it was awesome to see. Most fast rivers are white, smooth, white, smooth – alternating pools and rapids. This one was white all the way, bank to bank, tumultuous, torrential, great rushing outwash of the Alaska Range. With so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep. The color of the water, where it was flat enough to show, was actually greenish-gray, and its clarity was nil. It carried so much of what had been mountains. Glacier milk, as it is called, contains a high proportion of powdered rock, from pieces broken off and then ground by the ice. The colors of the outwash rivers are determined by the diets of the glaciers – schist, gneiss, limestone, shale. [Coming into the Country]
More Trees
Southward, the prairie grasses get sparser and sparser; sage, greasewood, prickly pear, and mesquite take over. Mesquite trees have eight-inch thorns, delicate leaves like a locust tree’s, and roots that go down a hundred and seventy-five feet. Longhorn cattle grazed on mesquite and dropped the seeds along the way on drives to the north. Today, you can trace the old cattle trails from the air by following the mesquite. When mesquite takes over a field, little else will grow. Around each low tree, the earth is brown and bare. [Great Plains]
Otter
On the way out, we spot an otter and chase its ripples around. On the bank its whole dachshund body gets in operation when it runs; its legs do the work of a centipede’s. [Notes from the Century Before]
More Mountains
The mountain is a sky of rock, seemingly all above you, looming. [Coming into the Country]
Double Rainbow
Eastern Wyoming. Grass long and mussed by wind. Clear water in creeks. Horsehead oil pumps pumping. Storm clouds piling up against Black Hills to east. Searchlight beams of sun coming through holes in clouds. Above the plain, a perfect double rainbow. [Great Plains]
Note the many brilliant figures of speech: mountains with “small glaciers slung on their hips”; crows “crossing the sky like thrown black socks”; a wolf’s mouth “like a bomber’s undercarriage”; salmon making “long, dolphinesque flights through the air”; a river “with so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep”; on and on. Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier create inspired figuration. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.
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