3 for the Sea: Figuration

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

“Four A.M. in the cashmere blackness” – how fine that is! I wish I’d written it. It’s from McPhee’s Looking for a Ship. It’s only six words, but it’s one of my favorite lines in the book. “Cashmere blackness” – is there a more evocative way to convey the texture of a night off the coast of Colombia? I can’t think of it. Here’s another from the same book: 

To look far down over the side at light from our ship on the racing dark water was to feel the power of the weighted glide, its controlled uncontrollability. We were a bowling ball, avoiding duckpins.

The duckpins are fishing boats and merchant ships in Stella’s vicinity. 

How about this beauty, also from Looking for a Ship: “In the heavy roll, Stella’s bridge wings alternately reach for the water, like the hands of a swimmer.”

“ ‘Hey Redmond!’ said Luke, getting to his feet with excessive energy, throwing the bug-proboscis stub of his cigarette into the sink. ‘You can’t just sit there dreaming! We must go. A trawler skipper – he can’t afford to wait. Not for anyone.’ ” When was the last time you saw a cigarette stub compared to an insect’s elongated sucking mouthpart? Never, I’ll bet. It’s totally original, delightful, and memorable. It’s from Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler. A few pages later, O’Hanlon writes another cigarette metaphor equally as good: “Luke took a hard suck on his catheter tube of a cigarette.” That one makes me smile every time I read it. Trawler brims with vivid metaphors and similes. Here’s a passage containing seven of them: 

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.

That “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” is inspired! Notice also, “Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva”; “my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag”; “bundling forward like a curled foetus”; “my wooly carapace of a sweater”; and “the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue” – all wonderful metaphors that help us see, hear, and feel exactly what O’Hanlon experienced.

How about this for vivid metaphoric description:

I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal wave whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension.

That “brushfire crackle of the breaking wave” is very fine. So is the comparison with the “trustful beetle on the surface tension” of the water. The quotation is from Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau. Raban is a superb metaphorist. Here, from Passage to Juneau, are nine more examples of his art:

The terminal fell silent, except for the complaining gulls and the bronchial rattle of the generators aboard the emptied boats.

Past the lighthouse on Point Wilson, to the west of the ferry’s course, the water seethed like a pan of boiling milk.

Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water, where I let go the anchor, switched off the engine….

The sea, scored with current-lines, was like an ice-rink imprinted by the tracks of figure-skaters.

In the morning calm, this productive turbulence was revealed in the snaking S-shaped lines of kelp and driftwood that collected on the margins between eddies; in finger-sized whirlpools; in windrows of slick water that ran in twisting paths across the surface; in threads and seams of current, like whorled fingerprints.

The boat sauntered, at eight knots going on nine, through Gillard Passage and Dent Rapids – a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks.

Outside the shelter of the island, the water was like a bolt of gray silk, lightly undulating in the first intimations of the ocean swell ahead. Soon the swell was regular and well-defined; rhythmical pulses of energy, like rippling muscles, moving at speed through the windless calm.

After twenty minutes of roller-coasting sailing, there was no more than a brisk one-foot chop on a flat sea. Running before the wind, under the clearing sky, I sat back and listened to the twiggy sibilance of the bow-wave as it broke from the hull – air and water getting mashed up together like egg whites in a blender. 

Reluctant to break the windless silence, listening for animals in the brush along the shore, I let the sky revolve overhead and watched an eagle soaring on a thermal like a scrap of charred paper against the blue.

McPhee, O’Hanlon, and Raban are masters of figuration. Another aspect of their art is their keen eye for detail. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.