3 for the Sea: Place

This is the sixth 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 description of place.

Charleston, Cartagena, Valparaiso, Balboa, Lima, Guayaquil, Jacksonville, Savannah – just some of the places that figure in McPhee’s Looking for a Ship. McPhee beautifully sketches some of them. For example: 

Glimpses of Guayaquil: Heavy construction, bamboo scaffolding … Rubber trees in the medians of streets … Shrimp cocktails in double goblets – the cooked shrimp in a glass sphere, surrounded by live, swimming fish … A checkerboard on a bicycle seat – a game being played with bottle caps, half of them upside down … In the heart of the city, the perched iguanas high in the branches of trees … The four clocks of the cathedral towers, each agreeing with the others, all correct twice a day. In the broad savannas across the Guayas, dark beans drying in the sun, green bananas beside the road. Papayas. Pineapples. Mangoes. Cane. The shrubs of coffee. The evergreen cacao. Billboards warning of “DROGADDICCIÓN.” A clear-plastic bag of what appears to be gazpacho hanging from the handlebars of a policeman’s motocycle. Since the ship sails in two hours, it is time to return to the ship.

I devour such descriptions. I wish there were more of them. But Guayaquil and the other destinations on Stella’s itinerary aren’t McPhee’s focal point. That “time to return to the ship” tells the story. The place at the heart of this narrative is the ship itself.

Here are some of the things that McPhee tells us about Stella:

“This ship is very strongly built,” Washburn says. “She’s sturdy and reliable. There’s lots of horsepower down there. She will answer the rudder. She will respond. She’s a capable and trustworthy ship. You know what she’ll do and you know her limitations. They aren’t crucial, but you can’t expect her to do things where you know she’s a little short. You can’t suddenly demand that of her and expect to get it. It isn’t there. She’s American-built. There’s good steel in the hull. Those frames are close together. She’ll roll on a following sea, but she’s got a high-raised fo’c’sle head and a sharp bow. She’s built for rough weather. She’s built for rough handling. She’s built to take seas and fight back. You cannot overpower seas. But she can deal with what’s out there. She was built to go to Scandinavia in the middle of winter. 

There is a lot of pentimento on the bows of the Stella Lykes. Former names are visible, even in fading light. The ship was built in 1964 and stretched in 1982. When she belonged to Moore-McCormack, she was called the Mormacargo. After Moore-McCormack died and United States Lines bought her, she became the American Argo. After United States Lines died, Lykes Brothers chartered her from financial receivers.

Understand: this ship is about the length of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Rockefeller Center, Pennsylvania Station, Union Square. To berth her you need almost three city blocks. With her piled-high containers divided by canyons under the jumbo boom, she is, if nothing else, labyrinthine.

McPhee roams Stella’s decks and compartments, talking to crew members, describing what he sees. Here he’s in the lookout station:

Sometimes I go on lookout with Peewee, Mac, or Calvin – go forward with a flashlight on the main deck at four, up the ladder to the fo’c’sle deck, around the windlasses and the anchor chains, and past the hawsepipes to the absolute point of the bow, where the lookout station conforms to the requirements of admiralty court, being “as far forward and as lowdown as conditions allow.” The lookout stands in a roofless cupboard. A sheet of clear plastic deflects the wind. He is not quite like a fly on a bowsprit, but somewhere near it – projected far over the water, over the nose bulb, and riding up and down the Pacific swells. He stands there, and stays there, in rain and lightning.

And here he’s in the officers’ dining room:

I remember the first time I appeared in the officers’ dining room for dinner. The captain was there, and Andy Chase, and Bernie Tibbotts. All three had been served and were eating. No one else was present. Tibbotts sat alone at a table, facing the opposite wall. The captain, at his table, sat with his back to a third wall, looking into the room, and into the space between the turned backs of Chase and Tibbotts. Franz Kafka was up in the ceiling, crawling on a fluorescent tube. No one spoke. No one so much as nodded when I came in. I sat down where I was supposed to: at a fourth table, across the room from the captain, I looked at him through the slot between the other men’s backs. I did not have – I’m here to tell you – the temerity to speak.

That “Franz Kafka was up in the ceiling, crawling on a fluorescent tube” makes me smile every time I read it. 

The first two chapters of O’Hanlon’s Trawler take place mostly on land; the rest of it happens on the ship. Our first view of the Norlantean is at the quay in Scrabster harbour:

“Another layer,” said Luke, opening the hatchback. “And oilskins.” So we pulled on our second sweaters (naval blue), took off our shoes in the slush, clambered into our oilskin trousers (his: yellow; mine: bright orange; and Luke showed me that it was possible to not to strangle yourself in the curl of rubberized braces), put on our yellow sea-boots. To our left, the sixteen wheeler articulated trucks, the giant refrigerated transports, waited in their loading bays. To our right, on the edge of the quay, a line of Herring gulls stood, at strict gull-personal-space intervals, between the big mooring-bollards, disconsolate, not in talking mode, staring out to sea, their feathers puffed up against the cold. Along to our left one of those derelict trawlers was berthed: her upper hull had once been painted orange, her wheelhouse and decking white; but she was now so streaked and stained and patterned with rust, her steel plates so bobbled with layers of paint and rust, that she seemed alive, to be herself and no one else, to have grown old and used and wrinkled, and was now, where she lay, close to death. To my surprise, I saw that the diesel-tanker truck parked on the quay beside her actually had its fuel hose extended over her stern; that men in the back of a container lorry were lobbing empty white plastic fish-boxes on to her deck.

“The Norlantean!” said Luke, quickening his pace. “Isn’t she beautiful? What a conversion! Look at that! Wow! Redmond! You’d never guess she was the old Dorothy Gray!”

We go aboard with O’Hanlon and Luke; immediately the world shrinks to the dimensions of the Norlantean’s steel decks and compartments: bridge, cabins, fish-room, galley, hold. This is where the rest of the book takes place (except for an evening ashore in Stromness before the ship heads out). Here, for example, is O’Hanlon and Luke’s cabin: 

Four bunks, in two tiers, filled the dark airless cabin. Luke said, as one practised in such matters, “Lights? Lockers? Toilets? Showers?” He threw a heavy metal switch by the door and a lamp (in industrial protective casing) came on: by its small glow we could see that the mattresses on the two lower bunks were piled high with discarded clothes, sleeping-bags, rammed-in cardboard boxes and the ship’s supply of lavatory rolls.

“A shower!” said Luke, stepping between the beds towards a cubby-hole in the bows. The door of the makeshift shower-room, crumpled in the middle as if it had taken a heavy blow to the stomach, had come off its bottom hinge and was tied back with string. In the left-hand corner of the room was a lavatory; Luke pushed down the flush-lever. “It works!” he said, delighted. And then, looking around, “Christ!” he said. And we stared at huge, inward bulge on the outward-slanting plates of the bow. “Big style!” said Luke. “Sean told me that Charlie Simpson, the second skipper, had had a ding, He hit something. But no one seems bothered … And anyway, Redmond, we’ll be fine. She’s double-hulled.”

And here, in one of the book’s most beautiful passages, is the fish-room:

“Come on, we’ll set up here.” He stepped across to the flat steel shelf beside a conveyor belt which divided the cavernous fish-room into two: a steel-sided, steel-grilled trackway that led from a tall, round, stainless-steel table (down to our left) to a closed hatch at my feet. A slosh of seawater, shin-high, washed across the dark brown swollen slippery wooden floorboards with each roll and, as the ship bent shuddering over to port, a part of the wave of slush and foam ladled itself out via the half-open drop-gate of the port scupper. As she rolled further over and down, fresh white seawater powered in, to toss and curl, as the ship righted herself, straight across to starboard, to repeat the process. “Grand!” said Luke, switching on his scales (a red light appeared to the left of the long calibrated dial). “Magic! It works – even in seas like this!” The steel ceiling of the fish-room was a confusion of pipes and cables (some encased in steel tubes, some simply slung and looped); strip lights; fuse boxes. The stainless-steel sides of the hopper occupied about one-fifth of the space, down in the left-hand corner, and from it another shorter conveyor belt led up to the circular rimmed table. To our right, to the right of the bulkhead door to the galley, lay a wide-diameter ribbed tube, an augur of sorts, a length of giant gut. Directly aft, at the end of the rectangular cavern, another open bulkhead door let dimly through to the net-deck, where the big winches for the bridle stood back-lit by the early morning light streaming in from the stern-ramp, from the bright surface of the heaped-up, following sea.

O’Hanlon’s capture of the light in that last line is ravishing!

Raban’s Passage to Juneau differs from Looking for a Ship and Trawler; it has a broader canvas. The world it describes is nothing less than the entire one-thousand-mile Inside Passage – its myriad channels, bays, and seaports. I relish Raban’s flâneurial approach: after a day on the water, he docks his boat and goes ashore for a drink or a meal or just to nose around. 

In Sidney, he has supper at a Chinese restaurant called the Phoenix, and then walks the town’s main street. At the grocery store, he buys “three grizzly-bear postcards,” and mails them to his daughter Julia at the post office.

At the Dockside Motel-Pub-Café, in Crofton, he ploughs happily through the $8.95 turkey dinner while reading a volume of Captain George Vancouver’s journal: “Vancouver was propped open between the ketchup bottle, verso, and the mustard- squirt, recto.”

In Shearwater, he attends a Saturday-night party at the recently rebuilt fishing resort: “I had to fight my way through the dancers to get to the bar, where I stood in the crush trying to signal two whiskeys. While waiting, I saw the band’s name on the face of the bass drum: the Charred Remains.” 

Vananda, Minstrel Island, Potts Lagoon, Port McNeill, Klemtu, Prince Rupert, Port Simpson, Ketchikan, Meyers Chuck, Wrangell, Petersburg, Juneau – all places that Raban visits. He has a particular fondness for the jumble of sheds, wharves and canneries lining the eastern shore of Wrangell Narrows. He writes,

The straggle of sheds and houses along the bank at last thickened into the low, pale, floating city of Petersburg, whose canneries and bunkhouses, built out on stilts over the water, were doubled by their reflections in the oily calm. Boats greatly outnumbered buildings. In the half-mile narrows, Petersburg needed no sheltering harbour wall, so the boats were scattered piecemeal along a mile of pilings, moorings, piers, and floating docks, making the town more like a fleet at anchor than a permanent settlement. The whole place rippled and shimmered. I felt faintly dizzy as I tied up among the reflections, then went to report to the harbormaster’s office. 

All three of these books are exceptional, not just in terms of their site-specificity, but in terms of their description of people. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.