3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Conclusion

This is the sad part of the journey, my final post in this series. Today I’ll try to express what these three great books – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – mean to me.

These books are excellent examples of literary explorations of place. The locations explored – the Pine Barrens, the Meadowlands, Pine Ridge Reservation – are on the margins of society. That’s one of the things I relish. Another is the immersive way they’re explored – the walking, canoeing, driving, and roaming. McPhee climbs a fire tower to get the view:

From the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill, in Washington Township, Burlington County, New Jersey, the view extends about twelve miles. To the north, forest land reaches to the horizon. The trees are mainly oaks and pines, and the pines predominate. Occasionally, there are long, dark, serrated stands of Atlantic white cedars, so tall and so closely set that they seem to be spread against the sky on the ridges of hills, when in fact they grow along streams that flow through the forest. To the east, the view is similar, and few people who are not native to the region can discern essential differences from the high cabin of the fire tower, even though one difference is that huge areas out in this direction are covered with dwarf forests, where a man can stand among the trees and see for miles over their upper-most branches. To the south, the view is twice broken slightly – by a lake and by a cranberry bog – but otherwise it, too, goes to the horizon in forest. To the west, pines, oaks, and cedars continue all the way, and the western horizon includes the summit of another hill – Apple Pie Hill – and the outline of another fire tower, from which the view three hundred and sixty degrees around is virtually the same as the view from Bear Swamp Hill, where, in a moment’s sweeping glance, a person can see hundreds of square miles of wilderness. 

Sullivan and his friend Leo Koncher, age eighty-three, gingerly cross an old railroad bridge forty feet over the Passaic River:

Many of the railroad ties on the bridge were burnt out so that the path was like the smile of a man with no teeth. I was walking slowly in an effort to keep from falling in, and at several points we both had to get on our hands and knees to climb between faraway ties. I expressed concern. “What are you worried about” he finally asked me. I said I was worried about falling into the river. Leo shook his head in bemused disgust. When we got to the end of the bridge, he had me look up to see the elevated span stuck straight in the air like a rusted knife. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” he said. “This is really the best view.” 

Frazier attends a powwow, walks around, observes all the activity, and then suddenly decides he wants to be somewhere quiet and empty:

I maneuvered through the crowd, went by the taco and lemonade stands, out the gate in the chain-link fence, through the field full of parked cars. The carnival had shut down and the rock-and-roll no longer played, and only one generator still purringly ran. I walked to downtown Pine Ridge, past the tribal building, up the hill to the old hospital, and then onto the open field of the Path the Doctors Walk On. I went half a lap around and sat down. The grass was damp; dew had begun to fall. I could hear the amplified voice of the announcer at the powwow. Then his voice stopped, and the only sound was the singing and drumming. It came through the darkness high and strong and wild as if blown on the wind. It could have been ten voices singing or it could have been a thousand. At moments it sounded like other night noises, coyotes or mosquitoes, or like a sound the land itself might make. I imagined what hearing this would have done to me if I were a young man from Bern, Switzerland (say), travelling the prairie for the first time in 1843. I knew it would have scared and thrilled me to within an inch of my life.

Or like the sound the land itself might make – how fine that is! These books are deeply in touch with the land. That’s another thing I love about them. To me, it’s their main message. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three wonderful books. I picture it like this: the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill; Fred Brown’s house in Hog Wallow; an old and weirdly leaning catalpa tree; the ruins of the great paper factory in Harrisville; a wild blueberry bush; Chatsworth General Store; a mud-colored 1948 De Soto; a Ryan monoplane; a pine tree with a splendid green crown and a trunk that is still black from an old fire; a green wood orchid; a whippoorwill; a big red polyethylene canoe; a muskrat; Kearney Library; a carp; stalagmites of pigeon dung; a Muscovy duck; a mosquito; Leo Koncher’s workshop, with salvaged cedar stumps on the roof; the Pulaski Skyway; the PJP landfill; the old Penn Station; the Stadium Restaurant in downtown Secaucus; a catfish covered in slime; an eagle feather on a buckskin thong; portrait of Le War Lance; Big Bat’s Texaco; a sun-dance pole; a star quilt; aerial view of White Clay; page from the Billings Gazette showing full-color photo of Frazier’s car upside down in snow-filled ditch; portrait of SuAnne Big Crow; fatality marker on Interstate 90 where SuAnne’s fatal accident occurred; grove of cotton woods; spiderwort; tumbleweeds. Overlap these images and paste them at crazy angles to each other. I call my collage “Sulpheezier.” 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Figuration

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their many vivid figures of speech.

One of the tools these three great writers use to describe their subjects is figuration, i.e., metaphor and simile. In The Pine Barrens, McPhee notes the color of the pineland streams: “In summer, the cedar water is ordinarily so dark that the riverbeds are obscured, and while drifting along one has the feeling of being afloat on a river of fast-moving potable ink.” He continues, 

For a few days after a long rain, however, the water is almost colorless. At these times, one can look down into it from a canoe and see the white sand bottom, ten or twelve feet below, and it is as clear as an image in the lens of a camera, with sunken timbers now and again coming into view and receding rapidly, at the speed of the river.

In The Meadowlands, Sullivan encounters a muskrat trapper in the Kingsland Marsh: 

But after a while, he let me look into the big wicker basket he carried on his back: it was filled with muskrats. The muskrats had long thick black tails and long yellow teeth that were curved like uncut fingernails.

Describing the hundreds of ditches in the Meadowlands, Sullivan says they “intersect all the creeks and rivers like capillaries in a hungover eye.”

Canoeing across a Meadowlands marsh, Sullivan and his friend Dave see carp: 

Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.

In On the Rez, Frazier sometimes includes two similes in the same sentence, doubling its vividness. For example:

Rows of corn wound around hills in Iowa like threads on a screw; woodlots sat on the prairie horizon suspended on a shimmering, like hovercraft. 

Sometimes when he [Le War Lance] calls, his voice is small and clear, like neat printed handwriting; other times, depending on his mood and how much he’s had to drink, his voice is sprawling and enlarged, like a tall cursive signature with flourishes on the tail letters and ink blots and splatters alongside. 

One problem the Pine Ridge Reservation does not have is light pollution. The stars were like bullet holes, the galaxies like patterns of birdshot. 

Frazier is a superb describer. Note the simile at the end of this beauty:

Black cows topped with snow stood breathing steam in the whitened fields while hawks sat in cottonwoods above, their feathers so fluffed out against the cold they looked like footballs.

In my next post, the last in this series, I’ll reflect on some of the meanings I’ve extracted from these three great books.

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Nature

This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their wonderful nature descriptions. 

These books always keep contact with nature. That’s one of the things I love about them. Canoeing the rivers of the Pine Barrens, John McPhee notes the color of the water: 

The characteristic color of the water in the streams is the color of tea – a phenomenon, often called “cedar water,” that is familiar in the Adirondacks, as in many other places where tannins and other organic waste from riparian cedar trees combine with iron from the ground water to give the rivers a deep color. In summer, the color is ordinarily so dark that the riverbeds are obscured, and while drifting along one has the feeling of being afloat on a river of fast-moving potable ink. For a few days after a long rain, however, the water is almost colorless. At these times, one can look down into it from a canoe and see the white sand bottom, ten or twelve feet below, and it is as clear as an image in the lens of a camera, with sunken timbers now and again coming into view and receding rapidly, at the speed of the river.

Paddling a Meadowlands marsh, Robert Sullivan sees two carp: 

Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.

Driving the Red Shirt Table Road, Ian Frazier sees a pheasant: “A pheasant stepped from the grass, set his white-ringed neck forward like a gearshift lever, and ran across the road.” Traveling the dusty back road from Oglala to Chadron, he describes the prairie grasses (“pale ginger-brown just the color of antelopes”) and the cottonwoods (“The big cottonwoods standing here and there by themselves in the fields lose every leaf in winter and then you can see how contorted their branches really are; they look as if they had decided never to grow leaves again and were tormented by the decision”). He sees an eagle: 

Once, in the sky just west of the road I saw, two or three hundred feet up, a bald eagle holding almost motionless. The white band of its tail was visible when it turned, and gently turned again. It flew offhandedly, with careless, recreational ease, the way a winged human might fly.

These books brim with birds: “The whippoorwills dust themselves in the sand roads, and when they are approached at night their eyes blaze red” (The Pine Barrens). “We saw more carp, more muskrats, mudflats covered with sandpipers, and the frozen-in-time remains of a snapping turtle that appeared to be decapitated by a train just as it has crawled up out of the marsh” (The Meadowlands). “Black cows topped with snow stood breathing steam in the whitened fields while hawks sat in cottonwoods above, their feathers so fluffed out against the cold they looked like footballs” (On the Rez).

There’s an abundance of wildflowers:

Wherry pointed out rattlesnake ferns, cinnamon ferns, papery blueish-gray marsh ferns, bold and lacy royal ferns. Before the outing was over, the group had found Indian shoestrings, Turk’s-cap lilies, some rare pogonias, swamp azaleas, swamp hyacinths, wild magnolias, cassandras, and prickly pears – the only cactus that is native east of the Mississippi River. [The Pine Barrens]

In the spring of 1819, John Torrey, the father of American botany, toured the Jersey meadows and reported patches of white, yellow, and purple violets. In other springs around that time, there was yellow floating arum, blue veronica, and white saxifrage. In summers, botanists reported seeing blue iris, pink meadowsweet, pink marshmallow, pale purple wild hibiscus, white ladies’ tresses, purple snake’s mouth, and green and purple orchids. In the fall, there were yellow goldenrod, bright red cranberries, and the tops of the cattails turned a dark, burned-out-looking brown, anticipating future area land uses. [The Meadowlands]

After a few minutes I walked back down the incline to the fatality marker and sat beside it in the grass out of sight of traffic. When I did, I noticed wildflowers – little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins. Mid-June must be these flowers’ peak season: among the roadside grasses, lost hubcaps, and scattered gravel, the spiderwort and creeping jenny grew abundantly. [On the Rez]

The culminating paragraph of Frazier’s magnificent elegy for Suanne Big Crow is all about nature:

On down the slope, across the corner of a wheatfield, was a grove of cottonwood trees. I climbed back over the highway fence and walked to it. Perhaps because of the rolling topography, I could hardly hear the traffic here. Just a couple of hundred yards away, the twenty-four-hour-a-day noise of the interstate had disappeared into its own dimension. The cottonwoods stood in a grove of eight or ten, all of them healthy and tall, around a small pool of clear water bordered with cattail reeds and dark-gray mud. Herons, ducks, raccoons, and deer had left their tracks in the mud not long before. From the cattails came the chirring song of red-winged blackbirds, a team whose colors no other team will ever improve on. Old crumpled orange-brown leaves covered the ground around the trees, and false morel mushrooms of a nearly identical shade grew in the crotches of the roots. The cottonwoods had appeared a deep green from the highway, but seen from underneath, their leaves were silvery against the blue sky. High above the trees bright white cumulus clouds piled one atop another. They went on and on, altitude upon altitude, getting smaller as they went, like knots on a rope ladder rising out of sight.

That is one of my favorite passages in all of literature. Note the vivid figuration in the last sentence – “like knots on a rope ladder rising out of sight.” Figuration is a prime tool of all three of these writers. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Details

This is the ninth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their unique details.

These books are made of inspired details: 

The wallpaper in Fred Brown’s house (“The wall itself was papered in a flower pattern, and the wallpaper continued out across the ceiling and down the three other walls, lending the room something of the appearance of the inside of a gift box”); 

The speed-walking woman in East Rutherford (“After that, I drove west down a road bordered by factories and warehouses and ten-foot-tall reeds and only once saw a human: a speed-walking woman with kinky, orangish hair and a deep salon tan who was wearing wraparound mirrored sunglasses and neon-colored Nikes and a bright pink suit that stood out like the plumage of a tropical songbird as it swished past the monochromatic weeds”); 

The painting of an eagle covering an entire wall of Le War Lance’s Washington Heights apartment (“It was done in sketchy strokes of brown on the wall itself, and one of the legs in particular was so detailed and eagle-like, with careful feathering and sickle-shaped claws, that I thought it possible he had gotten as close to a real eagle leg as he said he had”); 

The way Fred Brown sipped whiskey (“Every so often, Fred would reach into his pocket and touch up his day with a minimal sip from a half pint of whiskey. He merely touched the bottle to his lips, then put it away. He did this at irregular intervals, and one day, when he had a new half pint, he took more than five hours to reduce the level of the whiskey from the neck to the shoulder of the bottle”); 

The carp in the marsh off the New Jersey Turnpike (“Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires”); 

The star quilt that Florence Cross Dog made for Frazier (“The quilt was like a map of the reservation, with the gravel roads and dirt lanes and one-water-tower towns and little houses in the middle of nowhere stitched together and made shiningly whole”); 

The catalpa trees of Martha Furnace (“The streets are bestrewn with green and blue glittering slag, but they are indistinguishable from the sand roads that come through the woods from several directions to the town, and if it were not for the old and weirdly leaning catalpa trees, it would be possible to pass through Martha without sensing its difference from the surrounding woodland”); 

The little leachate seep on the side of a Meadowlands garbage hill (“But in this moment, here at its birth, at a stream’s source in the modern meadows, this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. I touched this fluid – my fingertip was a bluish caramel color – and it was warm and fresh”); 

At the Pine Ridge tribal powwow, a dancer in the men’s Traditional Dance competition (“A dancer came right by me. He was a big man, and in his costume – turkey-feather bustle three feet across, feathered anklets, feathered gauntlets, beaded headband, tall roach made of a porcupine tail atop his head – he seemed magnified in every dimension, almost a spirit-being. Then I saw the wristwatch he on beneath the gauntlet and the sweat on his temple, and the concentration in his eyes”); 

The wrapping string at Chatsworth General Store (“Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter”); 

The big wicker basket that eighty-three-year-old muskrat trapper George Schilling carried on his back, filled with muskrats (“The muskrats had long thick black tails and long yellow teeth that were curved like uncut fingernails”); 

The wildflowers at the location of the fatality marker where Suanne Big Crow’s accident occurred (“Little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make a blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins”). 

Of the many wonderful details in these three great books, my favorite is the thumbprints of oil on the bologna sandwich that Le War Lance makes for Frazier: “At lunchtime Le went in the house and brought me out a sandwich made of a quarter-inch thick slice of bologna on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. The sandwich had a few faint thumbprints of oil on it but was tasty anyway.” I don’t know why, but that line makes me smile every time I read it. It’s such a great detail. 

Another aspect of these books I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.   

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Point of View

This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their point of view.

The point of view in The Meadowlands and On the Rez is first person major. The books are like personal journals: 

One day I drove across the Meadowlands to Newark to find Seth Boyden’s grave.

One spring, I flew to Newark, rented a car, and checked into a hotel with the idea of touring around and just seeing where events would lead me.

One afternoon I drove back through a field of abandoned cars and walked along the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its topography to the waste of Newark.

I was on the road by 6:45 in the morning. 

As I approached the reservation, I imagined I could feel the life expectancy drop, as palpable as a sudden drop in temperature.

At dawn, I took a back road from Hermosa to the reservation.

I went into the powwow grounds, passing through a gate in the chain-link fence that surrounded it.

A while ago I visited the site on Interstate 80 where SuAnne and Chick’s car accident occurred.

I relish sentences like these. Active, personal, experiential – they keep me reading. 

McPhee’s The Pine Barrens has its share of such sentences, but not as many as in the other two books. It’s written in the first person minor. There are stretches when McPhee’s “I” doesn’t appear – when he’s telling the history of industry in the pines, for example, and when he's telling its history of fire. It's all interesting, but my favorite parts are when his “I” is present, e.g., his visit to Chatsworth General Store:

When I first stopped in there, I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals, and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter. A glass counter top next to the wooden one had been rubbed cloudy by hundreds of thousands of coins and pop bottles, and in the case beneath it were twenty-two rectangular glass dishes, each holding a different kind of penny candy. Beside the candy case was a radiator covered with an oak plank.

We notice in accordance with who we are. McPhee notices the wrapping string running “through eyelets across the ceiling.” He’s amazingly observant. He notices things that other writers (lesser writers) overlook or disregard. Frazier and Sullivan are gifted observers, too. In my next post, I’ll highlight some of their most inspired details. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: People

This is the seventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of people.

The Pine Barrens features one of McPhee’s most vivid and eccentric “characters” – Fred Brown. McPhee introduces him in the first chapter:

I walked through a vestibule that had a dirt floor, stepped up into a kitchen, and went on into another room that had several overstuffed chairs in it and a porcelain-topped table, where Fred Brown was seated, eating a pork chop. He was dressed in a white sleeveless shirt, ankle-top shoes, and undershorts. He gave me a cheerful greeting and, without asking why I had come or what I wanted, picked up a pair of khaki trousers that had been tossed onto one of the overstuffed chairs and asked me to sit down. He set the trousers on another chair, and he apologized for being in the middle of his breakfast, explaining that he seldom drank much but the night before he had had a few drinks and this had caused his day to start slowly. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but there’s got to be something the matter with me, because drink don’t agree with me anymore,” he said. He had a raw onion in one hand, and while he talked he shaved slices from the onion and ate them between bites of the chop. He was a muscular and well-built man, with short, bristly hair, and he had bright, fast-moving eyes in a wide-open face. His legs were trim and strong, with large muscles in the calves. I guessed that he was about sixty, and for a man of sixty he seemed to be in remarkably good shape. He was actually seventy-nine. “My rule is: Never eat except when you’re hungry,” he said, and he ate another slice of the onion.”

McPhee is clearly fascinated by Fred, whom he meets purely by accident, when he stops at his house in Hog Wallow to ask for water. In the weeks that follow that first encounter, McPhee visits him many times. What fascinates McPhee is Fred’s deep knowledge of the Pine Barrens. Fred and his friend Bill Wasovwich ride with McPhee through the pines in McPhee’s car for five and six hours at a time, with Fred commenting on what they’re seeing as they go. McPhee’s description of this experience is one of the book’s highlights. Here’s a sample:

It is possible to drive all day on the sand roads, and more than halfway across the state, but most people need to stop fairly often to study the topographic maps, for the roads sometimes come together in fantastic ganglia, and even when they are straight and apparently uncomplicated they constantly fork, presenting unclear choices between the main chance and culs-de-sac, of which there are many hundreds. No matter where we were – far up near Mt. Misery, in the northern part of the pines, or over in the western extremities of the Wharton Tract, or down in the southeast, near the Bass River – Fred kept calling out directions. He always knew exactly where he was going. Fred was nearly forty when the first paved roads were built in the pines. Once, not far from the Godfrey Bridge on the Wading River, he said, “Look at these big pines. You would never think that I was as old as these big pines, would you? I seen all these big pines grow. I remember this when it was all cut down for charcoal.” A short distance away, he pointed into a high stand of pitch pines and scarlet oaks, and said, “That’s the old Joe Holloway field. Holloway had a water-powered sawmill.” In another part of the woods, we passed a small bald area, and he said, “That’s the Dan Dillett field, where Dan made charcoal.” As the car kept moving, bouncing in the undulations of the sand and scraping against blueberry bushes and scrub-oak boughs, Fred kept narrating, picking fragments of the past out of the forest, in moments separated by miles: “Right here in this piece of woods is more rattlesnakes than any place else in the State of New Jersey. They had a sawmill in there. They used to kill three or four rattlesnakes when they was watering their horses at noon. Rattlesnakes like water.... See that fire tower over there? The man in that tower – you take him fifty yards away from that tower and he's lost. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know nothing. He can’t even fry a hamburger.... I’ve gunned this part of the woods since I was ten years old. I know every foot of it here.... Apple Pie Hill is a thunderstriking high hill. You don’t realize how high until you get up here. It’s the long slope of a hill that makes a high one.... See that open spot in there? A group of girls used to keep a house in there. It was called Noah’s Ark.... I worked this piece of cedar off here.... I worked this bog for Joe Wharton once. My father used to work for Joe Wharton, too. He used to come and stay with my father. Joe Wharton was the nicest man you ever seen. That is, if you don’t lie to him. He was quiet. He didn’t smile very often. I don’t know as I ever heard him laugh out loud.... These are the Hocken Lowlands.” The Hocken Lowlands surround the headwaters of Tulpehocken Creek, about five miles northwest of Hog Wallow, and are not identified on maps, not even on the large-scale topographic maps. As we moved along, Fred had a name for almost every rise and dip in the land. “This is Sandy Ridge,” he said. “That road once went in to a bog. Houses were there. Now there’s nothing there.... This is Bony’s Hole. A man named Bony used to water his horse here.” Every so often, Fred would reach into his pocket and touch up his day with a minimal sip from a half pint of whiskey. He merely touched the bottle to his lips, then put it away. He did this at regular intervals, and one day, when he had a new half pint, he took more than five hours to reduce the level of the whiskey from the neck to the shoulder of the bottle.

That last detail is among my favorites in all of McPhee’s vast oeuvre. Fred Brown embodies the Pine Barrens: “He always knew exactly where he was going.” 

There’s a guy in Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands who is comparable to Fred Brown. His name is Leo Koncher. He’s eighty-three years old; he’s lived in the Meadowlands his entire life. Sullivan writes,

Leo is five feet eight inches tall and has silky white hair and a slightly impish grin. He is a retired machinist and he typically dresses in shirtsleeves and khakis, as if he were in the middle of an unfinished project. He is a widower, and his home is a ramshackle field station stuffed with gear and equipment for the various expeditions he regularly undertakes into the Kearny Marsh, among other places in the Meadowlands.

Leo is an intrepid Meadowlands explorer. “He knows all the channels in the reeds in the Kearny Marsh intimately,” Sullivan writes. Sullivan accompanies him on some of his expeditions. For example:

One day I went out in Leo’s canoe and we were specifically hunting for treasure. He sat in the middle on a kind of padded lawn chair. He was wearing his khakis, a long-sleeved white shirt, a red-and-white handkerchief around his neck to protect him from the sun, and a cap advertising Domino’s Pizza. The bow on Leo’s aluminum canoe said Born Free. Leo told me to sit in the back and paddle, although he became disappointed with my speed and eventually commandeered the paddle and did it himself. As Leo toured me through the marsh, he recalled canoeing in a swamp in Florida with his late wife. At one point on the trip, Leo apparently thought he was tying up their canoe to the roots of a mangrove tree but the roots turned out to be snakes. “My wife got hysterical,” he said. He also told me about the hunters he occasionally meets during duck hunting season – “It can be a war zone out here,” he said – and took me to a little hunters’ blind hidden away on an island of reeds. “Go ahead, pull up close,” he said. “I want you to see this. You may find it rather unpleasant.” When I stood up in the canoe to look in, I saw thousands of flies. I looked back at Leo. He grinned.

Sullivan calls Leo “an unofficial poet laureate of the Meadowlands”: “He has chronicled his trips on the marshes with frequent dispatches to the letters pages of local papers.” The themes of the letters are “the natural beauty of the marsh and the beauty of the creatures who live there, as told by a solitary wanderer.” Sullivan also reports that Leo “recently gave the Kearny Public Library a series of photos that he had taken at various times of the year from both his canoe and bicycle.” In one of my favorite passages, Sullivan describes the photos:

The photos are of giant huckleberry bushes on the old dumps; the marsh in the early morning when a mist covers the lakes for as far as you can see; the marsh at sunset when the reddish outline of the reeds licks the gray sky like flames; the snow-white flowers of the marshmallows, and the phragmites in fall when they turn a dusty brown. 

Ian Frazier’s On the Rez features at least two people who embody the character of Pine Ridge Reservation – Le War Lance and SuAnne Big Crow. Frazier and Le are friends. But their relationship is complicated. Frazier says, “Le and I have fallings-out from time to time. He often is not a very nice guy.” Frazier describes him vividly:

Le’s appearance has varied over the years. He is about six feet tall, and has a broad face rather like the actor Jack Palance’s. Le’s eyes can be merry and flat as a smile button, or deep and glittering with malice or slyness or something he knows and I never will. He is fifty-seven years old. I have seen his hair, which is black streaked with gray, when it was over two feet long and held with beaded ponytail holders a foot or so apart, and I have seen it much shorter, after he had shaved his head in mourning for a friend who had died. He has big hands which can grip a basketball as easily as I can hold a softball, and long arms. He is almost never able to find shirts or coats with long-enough sleeves. I’ve seen him in fancy tooled cowboy boots, in oversize Italian loafers with metal buckles, and in running shoes; in many different cowboy hats, in an orange-and-white knit ski cap bearing the name of an insurance company, and in snowmobile caps with fur earflaps. I’ve seen him fat and thin. For a while he was about 260 pounds, a pro-football heft. Then he became slim and rangy-looking. He told me he was losing weight because he had cancer. I asked what kind of cancer he had and he replied, “Generic.” He told me he would be dead in six weeks, and even gave the date on which he would die, which he said had been revealed to him in a dream. That was about eight years ago. He has gained back a lot of the weight since then.

Frazier says of Le,

He calls me every few weeks, it seems, to ask for money. It’s good that he does, I suppose, to keep me from getting sentimental when I think of him. Even now I can feel my words want to pull him in a wrong direction, toward a portrait that is rose-tinted and larger than life, while he is pulling the other way, toward reality. Sometimes when he calls, his voice is small and clear, like neat printed handwriting; other times, depending on his mood and how much he’s had to drink, his voice is sprawling and enlarged, like a tall cursive signature with flourishes on the big letters and ink blots and splatters alongside.

Frazier visits Le in his Washington Heights apartment, at the far northern end of Manhattan. His descriptions of these visits are among my favorite passages in the book. Here’s a sample:

Le was drinking a sixteen-ounce can of Budweiser beer. He asked me to sit, and he offered me one. As I got accustomed to the light, I saw sixteen-ounce Budweiser cans everywhere – not scattered around carelessly, but set upright neatly among the furniture, on the end table, in the shelves of the bookcase, under the television, in the corners; it was like a brain-teaser drawing: “How many beer cans can you find in this picture?” He introduced me to his cat, Hey Baby, and to Coyote, his dog. Coyote was small and waggy and blind in one eye. A painting of an eagle with wings spread covered an entire wall. It was done in sketchy strokes of brown on the wall itself, and one of the legs in particular was so detailed and eagle-like, with careful feathering and sickle-shaped claws, that I thought it possible he had gotten as close to a real eagle leg as he said he had. In the middle of the eagle he had pasted a poster advertising the Longest Walk, a demonstration organized by the American Indian Movement in 1973 to protest anti-tribal legislation then before Congress. Le said he had participated in the walk, which began in California and ended in Washington, D.C., and that he had worn out four pairs of boots, three pairs of tennis shoes, and two pairs of other shoes along the way. He said concrete just eats shoes up. Then he told me to look at the ceiling: a sketch of a buffalo head done in carpenter’s pencil, full face, stared down. He walked to different parts of the room and pointed up. “Here is his horns ... here is his eyes ... here is his nose ... here is his beard.” The ceiling was white; this was a sacred white buffalo, he said.

Eventually, Le moves back to Pine Ridge Reservation. Frazier decides to visit him there. This is the start of his exploration of the reservation. Here’s his description of the inside of Le’s house:

Le invited me in, and we climbed the single cinder block he used for a doorstep. His door latch was a green-and-white plastic fish stringer, which he tied to a nail inside. He asked if I’d had breakfast and offered me a beer. I replied that I had quit drinking. He said, “That reminds me – I’ve got to take my pills again.” He produced half a dozen pill bottles of various sizes and shook pills from them into his palm. Hospitably, he first offered a large orange capsule to me. “Want one?” I declined, with thanks. Then he washed them all down with a few swigs of beer. He sat on a stove log and I on the only chair. The amount of stuff in his house overthrew my attempt to take in. There was a non-working clock on the wall, and a brown hole near it where the oven pipe used to be, and a cast-iron woodstove, and a plastic milk crate full of silver tinsel Christmas wreaths, and a yellow hard hat, and a photograph of a statuesque Indian woman in a T-shirt smiling and holding a .357 Magnum revolver. (“That’s my nephew’s wife, Deborah. She’s a rowdy from the Fort Apache Reservation”), and a rolled-up section of snow fence, and a poster from the movie Incident at Oglala, and a copy of the collected short stories of Ernest Hemingway, and several sports trophies, and the paperwork from Le’s recent hospital bills. A door just behind me opened into a room filled several feet deep with suitcases, plastic picnic coolers, backpacks, baby carriers, trunks, and heavyweight canvas tote bags. I remembered when Le had just moved from New York City up to Monsey, and I had commiserated with him, saying how hard it was to move. He had replied, “It’s not hard for me. I’m nomadic.”

Le takes Frazier inside the culture of the reservation. He introduces him to members of his family – Floyd John, Florence Cross Dog, Aurelia Two Crow. He takes him to various locations – Wounded Knee, the sun-dance grounds, the rodeo grounds, the cemetery. He’s an invaluable contact and an unforgettable character. But he’s exasperating. He’s often drunk. He’s often asking Frazier for money. Through the ups and downs, their friendship endures. Near the book’s end, Frazier writes,

Eventually I drove him to Verna Yellow Horse’s house across from the Catholic church in Oglala, and we sat in my car with the engine idling and the heater on. Le told me about police officers he had fought or intimidated (one in Grand Junction, Colorado, in particular), and he went on to revile and defy all immigrants to his country, and he said this was his land, and he said, “I know who I am!” He sang some Lakota songs. He said many times that he and I are brothers. He said that there is a deep spiritual bond between us. He took my hand in the “power” shake – hands clasped upright, palm to palm – and held on to it for a long time. I was a bit uncomfortable, as I sometimes am with him. I disregarded a lot of what he said and reduced it in my mind to about 20 percent face value. But the part about us being brothers I did not discount. By different routes and for different reasons, our affections have ended up in the same place; being called Little Brother means a lot to me. Through the swerves in our relationship it took me years to discover this.

The other major figure in On the Rez is SuAnne Big Crow. She died in 1992, when she was seventeen, three years before Frazier’s first visit to the reservation. Frazier brings her alive on the page. He talks with her mother Chick Big Crow. He talks with her high school basketball coach Charles Zimiga. He talks with members of the basketball team that SuAnne played for – the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes. He describes the Lakota shawl dance that SuAnne spontaneously did at center court in a pre-game warm-up in the town of Lead. She was fourteen at the time. Lead fans were yelling at the Lady Thorpes, calling them “squaws” and “gut-eaters.” SuAnne ran out onto the court, “unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance.” She also began to sing in Lakota, “swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl.” The crowd went completely quiet. Frazier writes,

In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.” 

Most memorably, Frazier reconstructs the 1989 state Class A championship game in Sioux Falls between the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes and the Milbank Lady Bulldogs, in which SuAnne scored the winning basket in the last second of play. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s a scramble, Milbank has it for an instant, loses it; and then, out of the chaos on the floor: order, in the form of SuAnne. She has the ball. She jumps, perfectly gathered, the ball in her hands overhead. Her face lifts toward the basket, her arched upper lip points at the basket above the turned-down O of her mouth, her dark eyes are ardent and wide open and completely seeing. The ball leaves her hand, her hand flops over at the wrist with fingers spread, the ball flies. She watches it go. It hits inside the hoop, at the back. It goes through the net. In the same instant, the final buzzer sounds.

SuAnne embodies the greatness of Pine Ridge Reservation. Frazier writes, “Here was a hero – not a folk hero, a sports hero, a tribal hero, or an American hero, but a combination of all these.”

Three of the most significant people in these books are the authors themselves. Their “I”s are present on almost every page. What are they like as characters? Can these works be read as self-portraits? What are the implications of their first-person perspective? That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Sense of Place

This is the sixth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of place.

How do you evoke a place in words? As these three great books show, one way is through the power of observation – the gift of the eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger. For example, in The Pine Barrens, McPhee describes Fred Brown’s house in Hog Wallow:

Fred Brown’s house is on an unpaved road that curves along the edge of a wide cranberry bog. What attracted me to it was the pump that stands in his yard. It was something of a wonder that I noticed the pump, because there were, among other things, eight automobiles in the yard, two of them on their sides and one of them upside down, all ten years old or older. Around the cars were old refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, partly dismantled radios, cathode-ray tubes, a short wooden ski, a large wooden mallet, dozens of cranberry picker’s boxes, many tires, an orange crate dated 1946, a cord or so of firewood, mandolins, engine heads, and maybe a thousand other things.

I relish the specificity of that list. McPhee’s descriptions are triumphs of observation. Here’s another one – a depiction of Chatsworth General Store:

When I first stopped in there, I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals, and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter. A glass counter top next to the wooden one had been rubbed cloudy by hundreds of thousands of coins and pop bottles, and in the case beneath it were twenty-two rectangular glass dishes, each holding a different kind of penny candy. Beside the candy case was a radiator covered with an oak plank.

Details accrete, and a whole world springs into being. That “Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter” is wonderfully noticed. 

Accretion is Robert Sullivan’s method, too. In The Meadowlands, he describes what he sees as he and his friend Dave canoe across Kearny Marsh:

Around us there were green hills of grass-covered garbage dumps. We saw more carp, more muskrats, mudflats covered with sandpipers, and the frozen-in-time remains of a snapping turtle that appeared to have been decapitated by a train just as it had crawled up out of the marsh. We also saw a Thermos, three unopened cans of Pepsi, a beach chair sitting on another island, and a Seven Seas Red Wine Vinegar salad dressing spill. Passing over more underwater fences, we felt as if we were paddling just above Atlantis. At precisely one hour and fifty-two minutes into our trip, we saw our first abandoned appliance, a refrigerator.

Sullivan not only notices visual details; he notes sounds, smells, and textures, too:

We stood for a while beneath the tall cement legs of the turnpike. Distant airhorns blasted, set off by train track workers nowhere to be seen, and the sound seemed like the sad calls of undiscovered birds.

Dave was the first to voice concern; he spoke after we inhaled a dank, sewery smell that seemed to have been stirred up by our paddles. “I feel like I just knocked a couple of years off my life,” Dave said.

Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.

In one of my favorite passages in The Meadowlands, Sullivan touches a leachate seep, “a black ooze trickling down the slope of the hill, an espresso of refuse.” He writes,

But in this moment, here at its birth, at a stream’s source in the modern meadows, this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. I touched this fluid – my fingertip was a bluish caramel color – and it was warm and fresh. A few yards away, where the stream collected into a benzene-scented pool, a mallard swam alone.

Ian Frazier’s power of observation is immense. He, too, uses accretion of detail to convey his sense of place. Here, from On the Rez, is his description of Big Bat’s Texaco:

In Pine Ridge, Big Bat’s is the place you go. If you’re just passing through or visiting, you go to Big Bat’s because it’s one of the few places on the reservation that looks like what you’re used to in paved America. Big Bat’s has a big, highway-visible, red-and-white sign, and rows of pumps dispensing gasoline and diesel fuel, and full-color cardboard advertisements affixed to the top of the pumps, and country music playing from speakers in the canopies above; inside, it has the usual brightly lit shelves of products whose empty packages will end up on the floor of your car, and freezers and beverage coolers set into the wall, and a deli counter highlighted in blue neon and staffed by aproned young people who use disposable clear plastic gloves to put cold cuts on your six-inch or twelve-inch submarine sandwich, and video games, and TV monitors just below ceiling level showing CNN or country-music videos, and plastic tables and window booths where you can sit and eat or just sit, and a row of pay telephones. If you live on the reservation, if you’re not just passing through, you go to Big Bat’s because that’s where everybody goes.

Frazier’s descriptions of place are often lyrical, sometimes bordering on poetry. Here, for example, is his depiction of the sun-dance grounds:

We got in my car and drove a few miles north on the highway, then turned off into pasture. He said that he wanted to collect some more sage and that he knew a good place for it by the sun-dance grounds. We went through several fenced fields, Le getting out to open the gates. Then we came down a small embankment and into an open flat surrounded by cotton wood trees. In the center of it stood a sun-dance arbor – a shelter in the shape of an O, tree-limb posts supporting crossbeams laid over with a roof of bushy pine boughs – and in the center of the O stood the sun-dance pole. From the pole’s top fluttered strips of cloth in the four sacred colors, which are red, black, yellow, and white. A sun dance had taken place there a week or so before, and the grasses were still trampled down, and the dusty ground exhaled a good fragrance I couldn’t identify. There was not a scrap of litter anywhere. Near the sun-dance arbor remained the willow frame of a sweat lodge, a delicate sketch of a dome just big enough to sit under. By the lodge frame I saw a few remaining pieces of split cottonwood of a deep yellow, a heap of stones, and a sort of whisk made of long-needle pine boughs tied with baling twine. Aside from the twine, the fastenings of blue nylon cord on the sweat-lodge frame, and the cloth at the top of the sun-dance pole, everything in this ceremonial place was made from natural materials found close at hand. Most religious structures look as if they had descended upon the landscape from above; these looked as if they had risen on their own out of the ground.

That last line is quintessential Frazier – perceptive, lyrical, epiphanic. 

Description of landscape is one way to evoke place. Another is description of people. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Action

This is the fifth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their action.

By “action” I mean narrative action – physical movement through time and space. It’s an important ingredient. Without it, narrative is static. To hell with mental journeys! Give me the real thing. These three great books do exactly that. John McPhee, in The Pine Barrens, drives the undulating sand roads of the pine forest and canoes its rivers. He visits fire towers, pine towns, and factory ruins. He visits Fred Brown’s home in Hog Wallow. He observes the cranberry harvest, “when the bogs are flooded an inch or so over the vines, and the cranberries, which float, are batted free by motorized water rakes until they form a great scarlet berry boom – hundreds of thousands of cranberries bobbing and drifting with the wind or on a slow drainage current to a corner of the bog, where they are hauled in.” He accompanies the Philadelphia Botanical Club on its summer field trip in the pines:

Mrs. Evert called out to her husband, “Brooks, keep your eyes open and see if you can see the adder’s tongue fern over there.” Someone else found an adder’s tongue fern, and all the others assembled around it, on their hands and knees, as they did, moments later, around an orchid called Loesel’s twayblade. This was in Martha, and the orchid was growing on the site of the mansion that had stood in the middle of the now vanishing town. Overhead, crowded down by the pines, were the strangely twisted catalpa trees that had been planted by the people of Martha in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In one of my favorite passages, McPhee attends a tribute to the Mexican pilot Emilio Carranza, who, in 1928, was attempting a solo flight from Mexico City to Washington, when he fatally crashed in the Pine Barrens.  Each year a ceremony is held at the Carranza Memorial, which marks the crash site.  Here’s an excerpt:

Three hundred people were there, half of them Mexican. The Mexicans came from as far away as Chicago, but most of them were from New York, northern New Jersey, or Pennsylvania. They were in costume, in the main, and before the ceremony began they played strident arrangements of Mexican songs, like “Mi Patria Es Lo Primero” and “Mi Lindo Monterrey,” on a record player that was set on the tailgate of a Chevrolet station wagon. Girls in florid skirts and white blouses took thirty minutes to make up, combing and spraying one another’s hair and swaying to the sound of the phonograph. Little boys wore frilled shirts and straw hats. One man wore a green-white-and-orange sombrero, a red bandanna around his neck, and a black shirt. A Mexican colonel, tall and trim in a deep-green uniform, walked through the crowd and took a seat in a folding chair under a canopy, where people from Chatsworth and other places in the pines sat quietly in the heat, waiting. Two trucks from the state Forest Fire Service arrived, a bus and a truck from Fort Dix, and an ambulance. A fire warden came out of the woods carrying a six-foot-pine snake. Mexican children formed a circle around him, and he told them that a group of Boy Scouts had cut the head off a rattlesnake in that same part of the woods three days before. An army band from Fort Dix put the Mexican phonograph to shame with a soft and beautiful flow of Mexican melodies, notably “La Paloma” and the “Zacatecas March.” There were thirty-five men in the band, including a blonde soldier with a bowl haircut who had the touch of Granada with a pair of castanets. American Legionnaires with red-veined, waxy faces walked around saying, “Where’s the beer?” The beer was on ice in a large blue garbage can under a pitch pine, and the Legionnaires – who came from the Mt. Holy area, outside the pines – shared it with the Tabernacle Township police, one of whom was so heavy that he could not reach down into the garbage can. Brigadier-General William C. Doyle, of Fort Dix, gave an address, and said, “Here in New Jersey’s pine country, the gallant airman was grounded forever. He was not dess-tined to complete his mission.” The Honorable Donald E. Johnson, Immediate Past National Commander of the American Legion, said in the course of his speech that he had recently spent “an unprecedented hour with the President of Mexico.” He also spoke about the war in Vietnam, saying, “Any one who tells you this is a civil war is either ill-informed or uninformed or deliberately deceptive.” There was no discernible reaction from either the Mexicans or the pineys. Finally, he mentioned Emilio Carranza, saying, “Had Captain Carranza lived, his name might be forgotten today – such are the imponderables of life and death.” Another Legionnaire informed the crowd that men of the American Legion had hacked a trail twenty-five miles through the wilderness to carry Carranza’s body out to Mt. Holly. Actually, Carranza crashed beside a sand road, and his body was removed easily to Chatsworth. What the Mt. Holly Legionnaires have done, though, is to organize and maintain the annual ceremony. Ten large floral wreaths were placed around the memorial. Six United States soldiers raised rifles, a second lieutenant said, “Sergeant of the firing squad, prepare to salute the dead,” and three rounds were fired. A soldier played “Taps.” From the two flagpoles, the flags of Mexico and the United States descended. There was a contrail fifty thousand feet above the scene, and at a lower altitude a Navy jet fighter passed over it as well. A young man named Antonio Huitron, who had a child in his arms, and who lived on 176th Street in New York and had been in the United States for six years, said to me at this moment, “It was very sad, because everyone in Mexico was expecting him to come back.” 

Wow! What a marvelous passage – the surreal reality of a Mexican celebration going on deep within the wilderness of the Pine Barrens. McPhee captures it magnificently – castanets, beer, speeches, wreaths, flags, jet fighter, pine snake – the whole bizarre, exuberant show in one brilliant, concentrated six-hundred-and-sixty-four-word paragraph. 

There’s plenty of action in The Meadowlands, too. Sullivan hikes to Snake Hill. He canoes across Kearney Swamp. He canoes Berry’s Creek and Berry’s Creek Canal. He drives to Point-No-Point to wander around beneath the Pulaski Skyway. Sullivan does a lot of wandering around. It’s one of the book’s key actions. I love tagging along with him as he pokes around the Meadows, visiting places. He says, 

I like to think of the Meadowlands as an undesignated national park, where you can visit all the sites, or as a more classic tourist destination, like Paris, where instead of roaming through old streets and wandering aimlessly through cafes and shops I wander along the edges of the swamps. One spring, I flew to Newark, rented a car, and checked into a hotel with the idea of touring around and just seeing where events would lead me.

One of the book’s highlights is the canoe trip that he and his friend Dave take across the Meadowlands. Here’s a taste:

We entered our second marsh, which was similar to the first, except perhaps more reed filled. I later learned that these small bodies of impounded water were formed at random, by the construction of railroad lines and the new and old turnpikes, but from the vantage point of our canoe at that moment, this seemed as natural a way to form a body of water as any. It was here, in the second swamp, that we came upon our first stumps from the Meadowlands old cedar forest. The stumps floated like corpses, their roots disappearing in the dark water. We poked at their tentacles with our oars, as a couple of red-winged blackbirds looked on suspiciously. A few minutes later, in a spot far from roads and highways, we discovered little islands, composed wholly of reeds. One island was surrounded by bright yellow police emergency tape: CAUTION, the tape said. Another island was inhabited by a lonely six-foot stepladder. In the next marsh, before an audience of terns, we canoed past a submerged control room of a radio transmission station, its giant antenna felled in the water like a child’s broken toy. In the water below our canoe, we could just make out fences topped with barb wire. I knew this to be the remains of one of the oldest radio antennae in the Meadowlands, thought to be the first to ever broadcast the voice of Frank Sinatra. When we approached Belleville Turnpike, we pulled our canoe and all our gear up over a four-foot-wide pipe that carried the water supply of Jersey City, and then, with the boat on our shoulders, we ran, timing our dash across the highway with the break in the waves of cars and trucks. 

The action in On the Rez is similar to that in the other two books – lots of driving, walking, nosing around places, seeing what there is to see. It’s my kind of action – laidback, easygoing. But there’s one sequence that is very dramatic, in which Frazier’s life is actually at risk. It’s February; Frazier is driving the I-90, on his way home to Missoula from Pine Ridge. “Snow was thick in the air and the road had become a hard-polished white.” His car goes out of control. Frazier describes the moment:

I was suddenly skidding at 55 miles an hour backwards in the left-hand lane, then into the center divider, back across the right-hand lane, off the right-hand shoulder, and down the embankment, with plumes of snow blowing past. I crashed sideways through the freeway fence, snapping the barbed wire like string, rolled completely over, and landed on the passenger side in a ditch by an access road. 

Frazier describes the aftermath of this crash in detail – the arrival of a highway patrolman, and then, shortly after that, the arrival of a Billings Gazette reporter, who takes photos of Frazier’s damaged Blazer. Then the tow truck guy arrives and hauls the Blazer to a Sinclair station by the interstate. Frazier tells about the repairs that guys at the Sinclair do to the Blazer – raising the crumpled roof, duct-taping the cracks in the windshield, taping a piece of heavy cardboard “with a few lug-soled boot prints on it” over the broken passenger-side window. And then Frazier gets in the Blazer, drives back on the road, and continues his trip. This is where the trip gets really hairy. Frazier writes,

By now the snow was coming down so hard I could see only a short distance ahead, and when semis passed me, I could see almost nothing but the snow they swirled. The road was a dim blowing world in which headlights suddenly appeared in the rearview mirror and red taillights suddenly flew by and disappeared. The tape holding the windshield to the frame quickly came apart, and the windshield hung loose like a drapery, bouncing with every jolt and letting snow in to pile up on the dash. The car made a strange noise at speeds above thirty miles an hour and refused to go much faster than thirty-five. I anticipated the start of a skid in every shimmy and gust of crosswind. Ragged breaks in the snow berms showed where other vehicles had skidded off the road. After about forty-five miles and ninety minutes of this, I pulled off at Columbus, Montana, and went to a Super 8 Motel right by the exit. The motel had a lot of trucks in its parking lot and a long line at the check-in desk. When I finally got to the head of the line, the lady there said she had just a few rooms left. She said there had been a wreck with fatalities on the interstate some miles to the west and the truckers had heard about it on their radios and had decided to quit for the day.

But that’s not the end of the story. Frazier gets up at three in the morning and decides to get back on the road. This time he travels as far as Livingston when a driver flags him over to tell him his left rear wheel is wobbling as if it is about to come off. He goes to a nearby Tire-Rama, where they tell him his left-rear axle is bent. They don’t have the part, but they call the Tire-Rama in Bozeman, which has it. Frazier wobbles twenty-six miles over the pass to Bozeman. At the Bozeman Tire-Rama they say they can have the axle fixed by late afternoon. The story of this wild ride ends with Frazier at the Bozeman Tire-Rama leafing through a newspaper when he suddenly sees a photo of his car:

On page 1 of the B section of the Billings Gazette was a large full-color photo: my car’s intricate underside against the white of a snowscape, the winch cable connecting the capsized vehicle to the tow truck, the happy tow truck driver in the foreground. I took the page with the photo and hurried back into the Tire-Rama work bays past the CUSTOMERS KEEP OUT signs and showed it to the man working on the axle. When he finally understood what I was talking about, he was unimpressed to be working on a famous car featured on page 1 of the Gazette’s B section.

I relish this account of Frazier’s hazardous trip back home from Pine Ridge. It has nothing to do with life on the reservation. But it’s part of Frazier’s experience writing about the place. He tells it marvellously.

My next post in this series will be on how these three great books convey sense of place. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Structure

This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their structure.

The Pine Barrens and The Meadowlands are structured thematically. On the Rez flows more or less chronologically, with timeouts for historical perspective. The Pine Barrens consists of nine chapters. Each chapter has a particular theme. Here’s a table showing each chapter’s title and subject:

1. The Woods from Hog Wallow	Tells about Fred Brown, a seventy-nine-year-old Pine Barrens native, who lives in a shanty in the heart of the forest. “Come in. Come in. Come on the hell in.” Brown accompanies McPhee on road trips through the pines. “As the car kept moving, bouncing in the undulations of the sand and scraping against blueberry bushes and scrub-oak boughs, Fred kept narrating, picking fragments of the past out of the forest, in moments separated by miles....”
2. The Vanished Towns	Tells about the vanished towns of the Pine Barrens, e.g., Martha Furnace (“With the exception of the furnace mound, there is not a trace of a structure in Martha now. The streets are bestrewn with a green and blue glittering slag, but they are indistinguishable from the sand roads that come through the woods from several directions to the town, and if it were not for the old and weirdly leaning catalpa trees, it would be possible to pass through Martha without sensing its difference from the surrounding woodland”).
3. The Separate World	Tells about the people of the Pine Barrens – their work, their isolation, and their “live and let live” spirit. “The sphagnum-blueberry-cranberry-wood-charcoal cycle was supplemented in other ways as well – most notably in December, when shiploads of holly, laurel, mistletoe, ground pine, green briar, inkberry, plume grass, and boughs of pitch pine were sent to New York for sale as Christmas decorations."
4. The Air Tune	Tells about the Pine Barrens’ distinctive place names, names of plants and flowers, and folktales. “There is a plant in the Pine Barens that has velvety, magical leaves to which water absolutely will not adhere. The pineys call it neverwet.”
5. The Capital of the Pines	Tells about Chatsworth, the principal community in the Pine Barrens. McPhee visits Chatsworth General Store: “When I first stopped in there [Chatsworth General Store], I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a well shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter.”
6. The Turn of Events	Tells about three major events in Chatsworth’s history: the Chatsworth Fire, in 1954; the crash and death in the woods, in 1928, of an aviator who was known as Mexico’s Lindbergh; and a visit, in 1927, by S.E. il Principe Constantino di Ruspoli, an authentic Italian prince who happened to be a native of Chatsworth.
7. Fire in the Pines	Tells about the Pine Barrens’ high susceptibility to fire. “A remarkably common cause of fire in the pines is arson. Standing in all that dry sand, the forests glisten with oils and resins that – to some people – seem to beg for flame.”
8. The Fox Handles the Day	Tells about various animals and plants that are native to the Pine Barrens. “Twenty-three kinds of orchids grow in the Pine Barrens – including the green wood orchid, the yellow-crested orchid, the white-fringed orchid, the white arethusa, the rose pogonia, and the helleborine – and they are only the beginning of a floral wherewithal that botanists deeply fear they will someday lose.”
9. Vision	Tells about a plan to construct a jetport and city in the Pine Barrens. “We moved on to see the site of the jetport, which would cover thirty-two thousand five hundred acres and would eliminate virtually all of the Upper and Lower Plains, several ponds, a lake, an entire state forest, and Bear Swamp Hill.”

The Meadowlands is similarly structured – eleven chapters, each with its own theme. Here’s a table showing each chapter’s title and subject:

1. Snake Hill	Tells about the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall rock that “sticks out of the very middle of the Meadowlands like a geological mistake.” “At the top, I can see for miles. To the north and west, a low ridge contains the area like a bowl with a lip made of little cities and towns. To the east, I can still see the Manhattan skyline, only now it is not shouting but whispering from behind another ridge. To the south, I can see out past the refineries and their towers of smoke and flame, out past the boat-loading cranes that feed along the cargo-containered fields of the Port of Newark like huge dark insects, out toward the Atlantic Ocean.”
2. An Achievement of the Future	Tells about various plans for development of the Meadowlands, e.g., futuristic theme park, industrial city, giant dairy farm. “People were always trying to invent new uses for the Meadowlands; most people felt anything was better than what was there.”
3. Gone with the Wind	Tells about Sullivan’s exploration of the Meadowlands town of Kearny, e.g., his visit to the Kearny Library, where he views the world’s largest collection of foreign translations of Gone with the Wind.
4. Walden Swamp	Tells about two canoe trips into the Meadowlands that Sullivan took with his friend Dave. “Passing over more underwater fences, we felt as if we were paddling just above Atlantis. At precisely one hour and fifty-two minutes into the trip, we saw our first abandoned appliance, a refrigerator.”
5. Valley of the Garbage Hills	Tells about the Meadowlands’ dumps. “One afternoon I drove back through a field of abandoned cars and walked along the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its topography to the waste of the city of Newark.”
6. Skeeters	Tells about attempts to control the swarms of Meadowlands’ mosquitoes. “Touring mosquito-infested areas of New Jersey with Victor is like touring a red-light district with a vice squad detective.”
7. Treasure	Tells about canoeing the Meadowlands with Leo Koncher, searching for treasure. “Leo Koncher is always searching for something when he goes out on expeditions into the swamp. One thing he searches for is a relic of one of the old plank roads that once crossed the Meadowlands. Specifically, he looks for remnants of the old road from Jersey City to Belleville.”
8. Digging	Tells about people and things buried in the Meadowlands, e.g., Jimmy Hoffa. “The morning that Dave and I set out to dig for Jimmy Hoffa was beautiful and sunny, and as we drove through Jersey City, we got lost and circled underneath the Pulaski Skyway a couple of times and wondered for a brief moment if a van full of Korean churchgoers might be following us.”
9. Bodies	Tells about exploring the Meadowlands with a retired detective from Kearny named John Watson. “Watson has a voracious appetite for all facts pertaining to the Meadowlands, facts that he is always willing to share.”
10. The Trapper and the Fisherman	Tells about two rival Meadowlands environmentalists – Bill Sheehan and Don Smith. “One day I took one of Sheehan’s eco-tours. I thought it was going to be ponderous and National Geographic special-like, but it had a good-natured feel of an afternoon on a fishing boat and I found myself hankering for a beer.”
11. Point-N0-Point	Tells about a visit that Sullivan made to the very tip of Bayonne, to the bottom of the Meadowlands, to the farthest point down he’d ever been. “On the coast of old Bayonne or in the junkyards that are on the Newark side of the sealike Newark Bay, I can’t seem to find a way in anywhere. I can’t get up the nerve to plunge into the particular breed of junkyard that grows there, through the particular kind of rubble, through the particular fields of weeds.”

On the Rez’s structure differs from the other two books. It’s more chronological. It unfolds sequentially in the order of Frazier’s visits to the Pine Ridge Reservation. It consists of fifteen untitled chapters. Two chapters – 1 and 5 – are historical. They tell the story of the Indians’ resilience in the face of mass destruction. The remaining chapters are an account of Frazier’s visits to the rez over a four-year period (1995-1999). Here’s a table summarizing what each chapter is about:

1.	Tells about Frazier’s admiration for Indians. “Of course I want to be like Indians. I’ve looked up to them all my life. When I was a young man my number-one hero was the Oglala leader Crazy Horse.”
2.	Tells about Frazier’s friendship with Le War Lance. “He calls me every week, it seems, to ask for money. It’s good that he does, I suppose, to keep me from getting sentimental when I think of him. Even now I can feel my words want to pull him in the wrong direction, toward a portrait that is rose-tinted and larger than life, while he is pulling the other way, toward reality. Sometimes when he calls, his voice is small and clear, like neat printed handwriting; other times, depending on his mood and how much he’s had to drink, his voice is sprawling and enlarged, like a tall cursive signature with flourishes on the tail letters and ink blots and splatters alongside.”
3.	Tells about Frazier’s first visit to Pine Ridge Reservation, August, 1995. “At dawn, I took a back road from Hermosa to the reservation. There was no one else about. I had the radio tuned to KILI, the Pine Ridge radio station, which broadcasts from the reservation near the village of Porcupine. It was playing Lakota singing and drumming. Under an overcast sky, the prairie looked drained of color. Here and there I saw burned patches, the black extending in tongues where the wind had pushed it. In the middle of one burned patch was a car seat, also burned. A wheel rim with shreds of tire still on it hung from a fence post. Two rows of tires lay flat on the roof of a turquoise-colored trailer, anchoring the roof against the wind. I followed the road into a wide valley, crossed a bridge over the Cheyenne River, and was on the reservation.”
4.	Tells about Frazier’s first day on the rez, traveling with Le and Floyd John, visiting various places, e.g., Big Bat’s Conoco and Wounded Knee. “We coasted down the hill to the Wounded Knee junction. Just ahead of us was a Volkswagen bus with oval license plates. It hesitantly turned left, then inched onto the drive that led up to the massacre monument and the site of the Catholic church. The driveway to the monument at America’s most famous massacre site is a deeply rutted single-lane dirt track so unpromising as to give any car owner pause. History here has had little time to reflect; it seems to be waiting for further developments, perhaps Wounded Knee III or IV.”
5.	Tells about the history of various American Indian tribes, e.g., the Kickapoo, Cherokee, Iroquois, and Navajo. “As fighters, the Iroquois were fierce. Their large and far-ranging war parties reduced to misery Indian nations as distant as the Illinois on the shores of the Mississippi, the Huron north of Lake Superior, and the Erie south of the lake that has their name. The Iroquois enjoyed torturing captives. Returning from their conquests, they usually made an event of it, with the women and children joining in. To incapacitate enemy warriors immediately after capture, the Iroquois would break the captives’ fingers with their teeth.”
6.	Tells more about Frazier’s first visit to the rez. He attends a rodeo (“The first event, the folksy rodeo announcer said, would be Mutton Bustin’, a bucking-sheep-riding contest for kids. At an end of the arena the small contestants assembled in a line, many in hats so big and pants so pegged they looked like tacks. One at a time they climbed into the bucking chutes, got aboard, and came out on sheep who flung themselves around more vigorously than I would have believed sheep could move. Some of the kids were quite little and got bucked off quickly. A few began to cry and ran for their dads to the accompaniment of the announcer’s uncomforting folksy commentary. Other kids hung on like burrs until the sheep quit bucking, and a swell of applause and honking car horns rose from the spectators”). Another afternoon, Frazier and Le visit Le’s sister Aurelia Two Crow. Another day, he, Le, and Floyd John drive to PTI Propane, south of Pine Ridge almost to the town of White Clay, to get Le’s propane fuel tank refueled. The filler hose ruptures and propane gas spews out all over. Fortunately, there’s no explosion. Frazier sees Le and Floyd John laughing. When they get in the car, Frazier asks them what they were laughing about. Le tells him they made some joke about almost getting blown up. Frazier says he doesn’t think it’s very funny. Le says, “Well, that’s the Indian way. We’d rather laugh about still being alive than moan about how we almost died.”
7.	Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez, November, 1995. Describes the town of White Clay. “White Clay. White Clay! Site of so many fistfights, and of shootings and beatings and stabbings! Next-to-last stop of so many cars whose final stop was a crash! Junkyard, dusty setting for sprawled bodies, vortex consuming the Oglala Sioux! Sad name to be coupled with the pretty name of Nebraska! White Clay, White Clay!”
8.	Tells about the many old Indian bars in towns and cities across the U.S., many of which have vanished without a trace. Visits some of the bars that still exist, e.g., the Longhorn Saloon, in Scenic, South Dakota (“The wind-scoured South Dakota sky over the badlands was bright blue that afternoon, but in the Longhorn Saloon cigarette smoke hung thick. A column of sunlight slanting through it from a window made a luminous gray shaft above an unoccupied table piled with perhaps three dozen empty Budweiser cans”). Visits the town of Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, where there’s an old bar called the Stockman. Tells the story of the fatal stabbing of an Oglala man named Wesley Bad Heart Bull, at the Stockman (then called Bill’s Bar), January 21, 1973, and the violent intervention of the American Indian Movement in the trial of the man accused of the murder.
9.	Tells about Le’s visit to Frazier’s home in Missoula, late January, 1996. Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez soon after. On his return home, he gets in a car accident. Tells about the accident and his harrowing drive through a blizzard. “By now the snow was coming down so hard I could see only a short distance ahead, and when semis passed me, I could see almost nothing but the snow they swirled. The road was a dim blowing world in which headlights suddenly appeared in the rearview mirror and red taillights suddenly flew by and disappeared. The tape holding the windshield to the frame quickly came apart, and the windshield hung loose like a drapery, bouncing with every jolt and letting snow in to pile up on the dash.”
10.	Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez, summer of 1996. He attends powwow. “The men sat on metal folding chairs in a circle around the drum, hitting it hard with leather-wrapped drumsticks and singing a traditional song in loud, high-pitched unison, above which a single higher voice occasionally rose. Full dark had fallen by now, and the overhead lights had come on, but many corners of the powwow ground were half-lit or in shadow. Shadows made it hard to see all the singers’ faces. In a circle around them, intent white people watched and listened, some holding microphones to catch the sound. The observers’ faces were wide-eyed, but the singers, as they leaned into the light and back out of it, had their eyes screwed shut and their mouths wide open in song. Some of the singers held a hand to one ear to plug it, the way musicians in recording studios do. They sang at full-voice, from deep inside themselves, all of them hitting each note and word with vehemence and exactly the same time. The singing, a survival from hundreds of years ago, filled the arena and echoed to the prairie sky.”
11.	Tells more about Frazier’s 1996 summer visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Tells about his discovery of the SuAnne Big Crow Heath and Recreation Center and the room inside dedicated to the memory of SuAnne Big Crow. “At the end of the hallway on the right was a smaller room with glass trophy cases along the walls. The trophies all were from the athletic career of SuAnne Big Crow, the teenage girl in the photos, the person for whom the center was named. I looked at the trophies, I watched a short video of playing on a VCR in the room, I read some framed news stories about SuAnne Big Crow, and a sense of discovery came over me. Here was a hero – not a folk hero, a sports hero, a tribal hero, or an American hero, but a combination of all these. I had thought that Oglala heroes existed mostly in the past. But a true Oglala hero appeared in the late 1980s, while the rest of the world was looking the other way, in suffering Pine Ridge, right under everyone’s noses: SuAnne Big Crow.”
12.	Tells about the heroic life of SuAnne Big Crow. Frazier talks with her mother, Chick Big Crow. He talks with her high school basketball coach, Charles Zimiga. He talks with members of the basketball team that SuAnne played for – the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes. He describes the Lakota shawl dance that SuAnne spontaneously did at center court in a pre-game warm-up in the town of Lead. She was fourteen at the time. Lead fans were yelling at the Lady Thorpes, calling them “squaws” and “gut-eaters.” SuAnne ran out onto the court, “unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance.” She also began to sing in Lakota, “swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl.” The crowd went completely quiet. Frazier writes, “In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.”
13.	Tells more about SuAnne Big Crow. Tells about the 1989 state basketball tournament held in Sioux Falls, in which SuAnne scores the winning basket for Pine Ridge in the final second of the championship game. “There’s a scramble, Milbank has it for an instant, loses it; and then, out of the chaos on the floor: order, in the form of SuAnne. She has the ball. She jumps, perfectly gathered, the ball in her hands overhead. Her face lifts toward the basket, her arched upper lip points at the basket above the turned-down O of her mouth, her dark eyes are ardent and wide open and completely seeing. The ball leaves her hand, her hand flops over at the wrist with fingers spread, the ball flies. She watches it go. It hits inside the hoop, at the back. It goes through the net. In the same instant, the final buzzer sounds.”
14.	Tells more about SuAnne Big Crow. Tells about her tragic death in a car accident, February 9, 1992. Frazier visits the site on Interstate 90 where the accident occurred. “After a few minutes I walked back down the incline to the fatality marker and sat beside it in the grass out of sight of traffic. When I did, I noticed wildflowers – little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins. Mid-June must be these flowers’ peak season: among the roadside grasses, lost hubcaps, and scattered gravel, the spiderwort and creeping jenny grew abundantly.”
15.	Tells about Frazier’s subsequent visits to the rez, including one in December, a couple of weeks before Christmas. “At lunchtime Le went in the house and brought me out a sandwich made of a quarter-inch-thick slice of bologna on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. The sandwich had a few faint thumbprints of oil on it but was tasty anyway. I sat on an upended stove log in the sun and looked at the stuff in the yard – an armchair, a pink plastic bottle in the shape of a baby’s shoe, a pile of shingles, an old-fashioned TV antenna, beer cans, a rusting John Deere swather. Across the open field to the east, a flock of pheasants flew low and almost in a straight line. I counted twelve of them. Le took a 12-volt auto battery from the trunk of the Celebrity and sat down cross-legged by it on the ground and began to clean the battery posts with a rag. On his back under the car, Floyd John wrenched and tapped. At the side of the house, Gunner, the dog, growled away at a section of deer ribs Le had thrown her. Two kittens, one yellow and one black, chased each other around. A warm wind blew. For a moment, we might have been sitting in front of a tipi in an Oglala camp along the North Platte River 150 years ago, braiding lariats and making arrows and gazing off across the Plains.

All three of these books are artfully structured. I confess I prefer On the Rez’s chronological structure slightly more. It’s more journal-like. For me, the journal structure is the most mimetic of the way real life actually unfolds. 

All three of these books contain an immense amount of action – walking, driving, canoeing. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.