3 for the Sea: Action

This is the fifth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their action.

By “action” I mean the events represented in the narrative. What interests me is the way these events are conveyed, how they’re written. Here, for example, is McPhee’s description of a pirate attack:

Fast-crackling rifle shots. Bullets slamming the mangroves. A pirogue full of pirates fleeing for the swamps, pursued by more bullets. 

Very powerful boats appear. One of them circles the ship. Two lingering pirates cling to the bills of the anchor not in use. They stand on the flukes. They plunge into the river. Swiftly receding in the brown current, their heads bob. Their heads become dots in the water as they are swept away.

The pirates’ forty-horse pirogue, with stores seized from the upper forepeak, reaches a sandspit at the edge of the manglar. There are six aboard. They take off running.

That’s just a taste. To get the full kinetic effect, read the six-page description in full. Note the active verbs (“circles,” “clings,” “stand,” “plunge,” “bob”), the present tense, and the brilliant sentence fragments (“Fast-crackling rifle shots. Bullets slamming the mangroves. A pirogue full of pirates fleeing for the swamps, pursued by more bullets”) – three techniques that McPhee uses to convey immediacy. 

Not all the events in Looking for a Ship are that dramatic. Some are just routine shipboard activities. For example:

Chipping rust is a job for people made of neurological nylon. They use hand-held jackhammers – needle guns, chisel guns, Bumble Bees, triple-scalers. They dislodge rust and they create sound. Wherever they are, wherever you are, you can hear them. You can climb the flying bridge, wrap a pillow around your ears, stuff yourself in a hawsepipe, hide under a table – you cannot escape the sound. As a result, there are union rules limiting the sound to six hours a day. Depending on where you are, the chippers can seem to be hovering aircraft, they can seem to be splashing water, they can suggest a dentist drilling a cavity hour after hour. There is a rust buster so large, so heavy, so lurchingly difficult to control that Vernon McLaughlin is often the only sailor willing to accept the task. This is the Arnessen Horizontal Deck Scaler, colloquially known as the lawnmower. It looks something like a lawnmower, but if it were ever used on a lawn it would bury itself in seven seconds. After standing watch from four to eight, Mac will run the lawnmower from nine to twelve and again from one to four, while Peewee follows him, sweeping chips.

That final phrase “while Peewee follows him, sweeping chips” is wonderfully placed. McPhee’s eye for dynamic detail enlivens everything he writes, even description of such seemingly mundane tasks as chipping rust.   

Raban’s Passage to Juneau brims with action, much of it generated by wind and water:

The sea in Saratoga Passage frosted over, as the forecast wind began to fill in from the south. The wrinkled skin of the water became ridged with breaking wavelets; in less than half an hour, the waves were steep, regular, well-formed, hard-driven by the building wind. With the headsail out to starboard, the boat skidded through the sea – the winched sheet bar-taut, the sail molded into a white parabola as rigid as one of Frank Gehry’s curved concrete walls. The wind keened in the steel rigging. At my back, I could hear the forward rush of each new wave, then its sudden, violent collapse in a crackling bonfire of foam. Hauling on the wheel, driving the boat downwind as it tried to slew broadside-on, I was on a jittery high. I hadn’t had such sailing in many months. The three-step waltzing motion of the boat, the throbbing, strings-and-percussion sound of wind and water on the move, came back to me as an old, deep pleasure. But a pleasure tinged, as always, with an edge of incipient panic.

To steer a straight course was impossible. Overpressed, and unbalanced by its single sail, the boat corkscrewed downwind at 7.6 knots, held to that speed by the braking force of its own bow wave, which peeled away from the hull in a long, curling mustache of surf. The mizzenmast behind me shuddered with the strain taken by the rigging, and I was frightened that something up there was about to break. If one thing broke, so would a whole lot of things, in extremely rapid and disconcerting succession. It was a relief to gain the shelter of Strawberry Head on the Whidbey Island side, where the wind was reduced to muffled gusts and skirls, and I took in a half-dozen rolls of sail and let the boat saunter, gently, through a seascape so changed that it belonged to another nation.

A log the length of the boat was twirling slowly around on the starboard bow. I hauled the wheel to port and passed backward under the bridge – a pity, since there were half a dozen pale faces up there, and I was sorry to find myself suddenly turned into a happy spectacle of nautical incompetence. I got the boat facing the right way, yawed on a boil, slewed on an eddy, and slammed into a line of low, breaking overfalls. Somewhere, as I came out of the pass like a cork expelled from the neck of a champagne bottle, I found room in my head for the thought that I would not at all like to be doing this in a motorless cedar canoe. 

How I love that “as I came out of the pass like a cork expelled from the neck of a champagne bottle.” And that “At my back, I could hear the forward rush of each new wave, then its sudden, violent collapse in a crackling bonfire of foam” is inspired!

What is the central action of O’Hanlon’s Trawler? Six words sum it up: pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge, and yaw. So violent is the Norlantean’s motion that O’Hanlon struggles to keep his balance. Here’s what happens in his cabin:

Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva, I worked my way out of my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag and, lying back again on the bunk, I pulled on my pants, my trousers. I found my black socks (three to each foot, against the cold) and, bundling forward like a curled foetus, I lodged into my wooly carapace of a sweater. The effort of it: there was no rest anywhere, nothing would stay still … The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming into land, and a that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. Other smaller, straining engines came into life directly beneath me, and the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue, gently, very slowly, prone, through the hanging curtains of Luke’s bunk, over his flat blue sleeping-bag, out the other side – and it tipped me off and down on to his linear collection of red, blue and yellow plastic biscuit-boxes. My buttocks, I’m sorry to say, must have landed on his favourite box, his red Jacobs biscuit-box, because under me its top and sides blew-up, releasing a tight stash of small, empty, plastic screw-lid Marine Lab specimen-bottles all over the floor.

And here’s what happens in the fish-room:

Intending to clamber over the 3-foot sides of the conveyor, I began to try to hitch up the civilian trousers beneath my oil-skin trousers (there seemed to be so many belts and braces and rubber straps; and the whole outfit was so uncomfortable; and it was so difficult to keep everything up around a moving flop of stomach when the world would not stay still; and besides, my boxer shorts long ago half-shredded by jungle mould, had now decided to give up altogether and to drop, dying, around my knees). And then, for the second time – and once again, so gently, without warning, so slowly – I was weightless, I was airborne. The conveyor belt passed beneath me; someone shot me in the left shin; the travelling wave of froth and foam came curling up to wash over me and to leave me, splayed out full length, against the rusty plates of the port side of the inner hull.

When the world would not stay still – that is the Norlantean’s world. O’Hanlon evokes it brilliantly. 

Vivid action is one factor that makes these three books great. Another is their terrific sense of place. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.