This is the seventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of people.“Above all, this is a book about people and place,” says Macfarlane, in the “Author’s Note” at the beginning of The Old Ways. The people who figure most centrally in his narrative embody the paths and seaways he travels – people like Ian Stephen, Finlay MacLeod, Anne Campbell, Steve Dilworth, Rajah Shehadeh, Miguel Angel Blanco, Jon Miceler. They guide Macfarlane. Stephen accompanies him on two voyages, one to the Shiants, the other to Sula Sgeir. MacLeod and Campbell help him find Manus’s way. Dilworth takes him on a pilgrimage to a sacred rock on the Isle of Harris. Shehadeh guides his walks in Palestine. Blanco walks with him through the Fuenfría valley. Miceler leads him on an expedition to Minya Konka.
They’re all wonderful guides. How does Macfarlane evoke them? At least three ways. Firstly, he describes their physical appearance. Here, for example, is his portrait of Ian Stephen:
Ian in appearance: curly silver hair, a shallow white stubble, two thin silver earrings in his left ear, too fine to be piratical. Ian in manner: sharp, fox-like, generous, mischievous. Ian in voice: lilting, Gaelic-inflected. Ian in stature: small, almost boyish. He has an air of youthfulness to him, seems younger than me, though he’s more than twenty years my senior. His physique, like his language, is compact and wiry, capable of reach and strength. Physically, he’s whipped-tight, made of hawser and halyard wire, but his character is full of flex. He passes in and out of moods of intense concentration, whose endings are marked by a quick grin, a register shift, an agile impiety. He doesn’t take well to fools or frauds. The first time we met I felt gauged, appraised, quickly read. Eyes moved up and down me. I had the same sense of apprehension as when stepping through an airport scanner. Then – clear. Green light. No improper goods. Nothing falsely hidden. A test passed, for the time being at least.
Secondly, he describes where and how they live. Here, for example, is his depiction of the kitchen of Steve and Joan Dilworth’s house in the Hebridean village of Geocrab:
Within a few minutes of arriving I was at the kitchen table with a coffee in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other, telling Steve and Joan about the night in the beehive shielings and the discovery of Manus’s path. A stuffed guillemot regarded me quizzically from on top of a wall-mounted speaker. On a three-foot-deep southern windowsill sat what looked like the bronze skull of a praying mantis, two feet long and with bulging eyes. Stacked under the window were dozens of empty bird’s-egg display cases: dark pine, glass-topped, segmented by fine wooden partitions, with cotton-wood nests ready to receive each blown dead egg, and copperplated name cards to identify the species: Sardinian Goldfinch. Greenshank. Red-Billed Tern.
And here, unforgettably, is Steve’s workshop:
On a chest freezer sat a human skull, the cheekbones of which had been partially built up with plaster and resin, but the nose of which was unreconstructed: just a blade of cartilage cutting out from the face. On a shelf was a wooden owl, with a glistening rope or cord of metal protruding from its open mouth. From a rafter, dangling from its meat hook, was the Hanging Figure.
Two of the walls were lined with workbenches. Barrels stood about as tables and desks. Every surface was cluttered with objects. Conical flasks, bell jars, retorts, syringes – the glassware of an apothecary or mad inventor. Cork-stoppered phials, film cannisters. I found a jar containing an inch or so of a red unguent, which appeared to glow from within. I picked it up and rotated it so that I could read the sticker: SEAL OIL. The oil slunk around the jar’s base, leaving a ruby tideline on the glass.
There were pots filled with feathers, mostly tail and wing, and separated roughly by species. On the benches were the tools of the job: clamps, pliers, calipers, gauntlets. A springy curl of minke baleen, a foot-long, black and polished. The cochlea of a grey whale.
At waist level on a bench in the workshop was a basket filled with horns, teeth, bones and beaks from unidentifiable creatures. Unicorns? Hippogriffs? Dragons? I lifted the basket, and underneath it was a shallow crate containing perhaps fifty hollow sand dollars, little pods of white with their cryptic dot-markings. Nestled among them was an armadillo’s shell, orangey in colour and delicately articulated, covered in pale wire-like hairs. I picked it out and held it. It sat like a bubble on my palm.
The third way Macfarlane evokes his people is by showing them interacting with the landscapes they know and love so intimately. Here, for example, is his description of Finlay MacLeod interpreting certain topographical features of the Isle of Lewis:
One of the reasons I enjoy being with Finlay is his ability to read landscapes back into being, and to hold multiple eras of history in plain sight simultaneously. To each feature and place name he can attach a story – geological, folkloric, historical, gossipy. He moves easily between different knowledge systems and historical eras, in awareness of their discrepancies but stimulated by their overlaps and rhymes. Scatters of stones are summoned up and reconstituted in his descriptions into living crofts. He took me to a green knoll in Baile na Cille in mid-Lewis, and recalled for me the scene in 1827 when a Reverend Dr. Macdonald had gathered 7,000 people around the knoll for a mass conversion to Calvinism. A crag-and-tail outcrop of gneiss in the moor drew him back into the Holocene and an explanation of how, after the glaciers had retreated from the Western Isles around 12,000 years ago, the peat began to deepen in the lees of the exposed rock-backs. To Finlay, geography and history are consubstantial. Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically.
Roger Deakin’s Waterlog features dozens of people. For example:
Sid Merry, who takes Deakin eel fishing on the Great Ouse (“Sid is a wiry, weather-beaten man of medium build who knows the Great Ouse better than anyone”);
Ernie Hall, a dart player in the Three Tuns at Welney, who tells Deakin about the times after work on hot days he and his friends “used to dive off the bridge there into the muddy Hundred Foot Drain, swim down on the ebb-tide to the Crown, three miles away, sink three pints while the tide turned, then swim back up on the rising tide to Bank Farm, where he lived”);
Deakin’s old swimming companion Dudley, who accompanies him on swim at Holkham beach (“Miles from anywhere, we came upon a waterhole that was especially long and deep, and splashed about in it like two desert travellers in an oasis”);
Deakin’s cousin Adrian, who accompanies him on a swim in a tarn in the Rhinog Mountains of Wales (“We stripped off and leapt in. It took our breath away. The pool was three or four feet deep with just enough room to swim, as in a treadmill, against the current. Every second was an eternity. Neither of us stayed in for longer than a minute but sprang out on the knife-edge between aching and glowing”);
Judith, Deakin’s host at the weir in the village of Fladbury on the River Avon (“We dived off an old stone landing-stage into sixteen-foot-deep clear water above the weir and recklessly breaststroked a few hundred yards upstream as far as a bridge”);
Deakin’s friend John, who accompanies him on a swim in a bathing place in Dartmoor where the River Dart is joined by an unusually cold moorland torrent (“My friend John and I, wearing masks, snorkels and flippers, dropped straight into deep water off some rocks and swam against the current up into the pool. What we saw there astonished us both. About ten feet down in the clear water, dappled with sunlight, lay dozens of salmon, many of them well over two feet long. They turned and nosed off languidly upstream at our approach, disappearing into the clear green bubbling river, or amongst the shadows of underwater rocks”);
Madeleine, a painter, whom Deakin meets when the two of them are swimming in Penzance’s Jubilee Bathing Pool (“Madeleine asserted confidently that swimming is better than sex, and that it is an invaluable inspiration to her painting. There was no arguing with that. Her comment was curiously in tune with the sensuous nature of these original lidos”).
Deakin’s friend Brian, who uses his boat to shield Deakin from the view of the coastguard as he swims across the mouth of the Fowey River from Polruan to Fowey and back (“Brian and his children, Holly and Joe, chatted away as we went, and I eased into a steady breaststroke, keeping to the seaward side of the boat, out of sight of the harbourmaster’s office”);
Deakin’s friend Gary, who accompanies him on a swim in a natural rock pool at Treyarnon, in Constantine Bay (“Gary and I went in too, and the retriever, called Moll, we discovered, swam over to greet us. She looked magnificent in the water and moved with instinctive grace, snout just clear of the surface, tail out as a rudder”);
Stephen Rees, who tells Deakin a story about being bitten by a pike (“Almost immediately he felt ‘a bash’ in his right arm, which was trailing in the fast water. He told me he thought for a moment he had hit it on a sunken branch. Then he looked down and recognized the head of a pike holding on to his forearm and saw the flash of its body as it spun away”);
Gavin Edwards, an Aysgarth potholer, whom Deakin encounters at Bernie’s Caving Café in Ingleton, and who tells Deakin about the existence of a wild gorge (“a deep gash in the limestone filled with white water dropping steeply for two hundred feet”) called Hell Gill, which Deakin decides to swim;
Deakin’s friends Caroline, Ruth, and Neil, who row Deakin across the loch at Ardpatrick, Argyll (“The plan was to row across from the ferry cottage to the quay on the opposite shore. I would then swim back, escorted by the boat”), and who, the following afternoon, accompany him on a swim “in 360 feet of turquoise water in a sheer-sided quarry on Belnahua”);
Denis, who takes Deakin in his boat to Gillingham Strand on the River Medway, and then escorts him on his swim across the river to Hoo Salt Marsh Island and the Folly Fort (“Sometimes Denis rowed ahead of me, sometimes to one side, and sometimes behind. Both of us had settled into the zen of rhythm by now”);
Steve, an artist camping on Hoo Salt Marsh Island, who gives Deakin a tour of Folly Fort (“Steve’s canvases were propped up around the walls or hung from a washing line like dried cod. They were a kind of collaboration between the man and the river. When we had finished our lunch and I had changed, we set off over the marsh to explore the island and see some of his work in progress”);
Somerset farmer Peter Hansford, who shows Deakin his cider shed (“Mr. Hansford drew off some of the dark nectar out of a tap in one of the barrels, and offered us a half-pint each. It was viscous, cool and sharp, then the taste of the fruit came through. It was probably vicious too, but I liked it and was soon on a second glass”);
Deakin’s friend Lucy, who invites him to swim in the outdoor pool on the grounds of her posh London flat (“I can think of no greater luxury than swimming outdoors at night in gently mulled water when there’s a chill in the air. It is like being tucked up in bed on a frosty night with the window ajar”);
Deakin’s friend Michael, who arranges Deakin’s admission to the indoor swimming pool of the Royal Automobile Club in London (“The long, green pool was a magnificent high-ceilinged Byzantine affair, all turquoise mosaic pillars and wide terrazzo floors. The pool was edged with marble and a fine spray of water played on the surface at the shallow end. The pillars sparkled with a serpentine brilliance and there was a Roman opulence to the place”);
Deakin’s friends Lucy, Madeleine, Tim, and Meg, amongst others, who join Deakin at the Hidden Hut, in Walberswicki, Suffolk, to celebrate his journey’s end with a Christmas Day swim in the North Sea (“Once fully immersed and striking out for deeper water, I experienced the intoxication of the fiery cold, and found myself splashing about and even body-surfing with manic energy”).
Macfarlane and Deakin have many friends and companions and appear to enjoy their company. I’m not sure the same can be said of Lawrence Osborne. In his The Wet and the Dry, he says repeatedly that he wants to be alone: “I am resolutely solitary at the hotel bar at ten past six, and the international riffraff have not yet descended upon its stools”; “I am alone, I think to myself, on my little lake of slightly gelatinous vodka. I am alone, and no one can touch me. I am haraam”; “But usually, as I say, I am alone, and it is this quality of aloneness that is most special. The solitude of the bar is so absolute, so gutting that you wonder why Edward Hopper didn’t paint it more often”; “Crudely but also subtly, the bottle facilitates this solitude, and the drinker knows it all too well”; “It was a place to savor life’s inevitable solitude and uncertainty”; “ ‘The bar,’ as Luis Buñuel once wrote, ‘is an exercise in solitude’ ”; “Some places are intended as a withdrawal, a penance. Places where one is doomed to be alone with the self”; “And as I sip my vodka martini in the Bristol at midnight, alone but for a bowl of salted peanuts ...”; “Back in Cairo, I spent some days alone at the Windsor, venturing nightly down to the decaying bar and its atrophied antlers and drinking cold glasses of disgusting Omar Khayyam with plates of hummus.”
Nevertheless, people do figure in Osborne’s book. There’s the Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt, with whom Osborne has lunch:
The windows were open, and we could smell the snow. On the table was a bottle of Chateau Kefraya, the wine that Jumblatt invests in. As I was seated next to him, he politely poured me a glass. The politics died down, and he seemed genuinely curious to hear what a drinker would think of his production.
There’s Osborne’s family: his father (“He liked his pint rather than his dram”); his mother (“She was a woman who had wandered almost by accident into a life she had not quite intended for herself”); his great-uncle John O’Kane (“Here was a male gorgon who stormed around the world on ‘business’ liquoring himself at a thousand bars, ‘that drunken Irish loafer,’ as my father called him, who didn’t care about gathering moss as he rolled like a stone through his ramshackle life”).
There’s Osborne’s Italian girlfriend Elena, “in all her blonde and oddly Nordic magnificence.” I like this line: “Elena crawled on top of me and said, ‘Drink or amore? Which one first?’ Amore, then, but soon after drink.”
There’s Isphanyar Bhandara, owner of the Murree Brewery in Rawalpindi. Osborne visits his office:
In wall cases stood rows of Murree products: Kinoo Orange Vodka, Citrus and Strawberry Gin, Vat No. 1 Whisky, clear rum, and beers. There were also the fruit juices and fruit malts that Murree sells to Muslims, foremost among them a thing called Bigg Apple. When Isphanyer spoke rapidly on the phone, his Urdu was mixed with urgently crisp English words: “maximize,” “incentivize,” “target,” and then “look after him!” From time to time he paused to sweep a deodorant stick into his arm pits and laughed a little nervously. He was handsome, quick, and on edge.
There’s master distiller John Campbell, who gives Osborne a tour of the Laphroaig distillery on the Isle of Islay:
We went up to the cement-floored malting room, where Laphroaig’s barley is rolled out and dried. Malting is the process of flushing barley three times with water to make it germinate over a period of fifty-two hours. The husks are then dried three times as well. Laphroaig is one of only five distilleries in Scotland that “floor malts” by hand – that is, they expose the grain to natural air by opening and closing windows. Enzymes pour through the tiny acrospire at the barley husk’s core, and at its tip an embryo begins to emerge. Campbell split one and showed it to me, adding that this means the barley is getting ready to produce sugars. But before this germination actually occurs, there’s an intermediate step: the husks are shoveled into a kiln room for the process known as peating. A peat fire belches a perfumed smoke into the kiln for fifteen hours and saturates the dried-out barley with its aromas.
There’s Osborne’s friend Sébastien de Courtois, a French scholar of Islam, who takes Osborne to the Nurettin Cerrahi Tekkesi, a little-known dervish school of the seventeenth-century saint Cerrahi Halveti, where they witness an extraordinary ceremony:
A series of circles had formed, the men holding hands. They turned slowly clockwise, their heads still turning to left and right, dipping, the bodies bending slightly to the right as they uttered the same words. In the salon, the old men seated on the sofas made the same motions with their heads, their eyes closed. They were inducted into the same trance. The sema, the ceremony. Drummers had appeared, in white turbans. At the center of the circle stood a single dervish in his tall camel-hair sikke hat symbolizing the tombstone of his ego. He was younger than the leaders conducting the chants, the mustache carefully trimmed.
The chanting ebbed and flowed, changed rhythm and speed. The men began to sweat and half-dance as they turned. Something had clicked between them, and they were now fused into a single whole. The man in the sikke began to rotate in the center of the space. His arms wide, dressed in white, he spun like a sycamore seed falling: an expression of pure intoxication.
And there are the two Lebanese winemakers Labib Kallas and Andre Hajj Thomas, who give Osborne a tour of their vineyards located some thirty miles north of Cairo:
We walked across the vineyards in cool winter sun. Vines to the horizon in every direction. The two men stopped here and there to watch the workers pruning, intervening to correct their technique. The intricate technical details of viticulture are so alien here that they have to be supervised with constant attention. The two men sometimes sleep out in the vineyards in order to do it around the clock, and over time the field hands have adapted to these peculiar demands. Yet over this whole enterprise, with its initial investment of $2 million, there hangs the inevitable uncertainty of making an alcoholic product in a country that is retreating from its secular inheritance.
Those are just some of the people in The Wet and the Dry. And don’t forget the bartenders: Time Out’s Johnny Khouris (“Beirut’s most famous bartender”) and the Windsor’s Marco (“An ancient and venerable bar must have a barman exuding those qualities. The Windsor has Marco”), to name two.
All three of these great books throng with people. I’ve identified a number of them. But, so far, I haven’t mentioned the protagonists – the authors themselves. Their “I”s are on almost every page. Can these works be read as self-portraits? That’s the subject of my next post in this series.
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