3 for the Road: Conclusion

This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts on my three favourite travelogues – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989). Today, I’ll try to sum up my reading experience.

When I started this project, I said I wanted to get to know these books better. I feel I’ve accomplished that. But I also feel I’ve failed to do them justice. In my concentration on their formal properties – structure, action, imagery, detail – I neglected their meaning. What do these books mean? What is their message? To one degree or another, they’re all concerned with loss. In Notes from the Century Before, it’s loss of wilderness (“It’s as though the last bit of ocean were about to become more dry land, planted and paved … The loss is to people unborn”) and loss of the pioneers who hiked the wilderness trails (“These walks were just about the last go-round – the last exploration of the continent by foot that we’ll ever have”). In Coming into the Country, it’s about preservation versus development (“With the pipeline, however, Alaska suddenly had more development than it could absorb. It suddenly had manifold inflation and a glut of trailer parks. It had traffic jams”; “To be sure, I would preserve plenty of land as well. My own margin of tolerance would not include some faceless corporation ‘responsible’ to a hundred thousand stockholders, making a crater you could see from the moon”). In Great Plains, the underlying theme is massive loss and destruction:

This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the gold and rebury it in vaults someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrants’ dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean, ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and springs, deep-drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats.

So each of these books delivers a serious message. They aren’t just description for description’s sake, detail for detail’s sake. But you know what? I love description for description’s sake, detail for detail’s sake. That’s why I read them. I love them for their writing as pure writing, for the sheer pleasure of their sentences. Three examples:

The scow up front is fun to ride because it slides vibrationlessly, but so is the galley of the Judith Ann, where the floor jangles in frenzy and the glasses and plates deafen the floor. [Notes from the Century Before]

To the palate of a travelling Martian – which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye? [Coming into the Country]

I slept beneath the mercury lights of highway rest areas where my lone car was visible for six miles in any direction and the inside of the men’s room looked as if it had been sandblasted with tiny insects, and on the streets of small towns where the lawn sprinklers ran all night, and next to damned-up waters of the Missouri River where the white top branches of drowned trees rose above the waters. [Great Plains]

I’d give my left testicle to have written any one of those three inspired lines. And there are plenty more where they came from. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three great books. I picture it like this: a bright, multi-hued totem pole topped with a hatted ruling raven; a silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick; a grizzly whirling a salmon around his head; a moose head roasting over a campfire; a de Havilland Twin Otter; a tumble weed; a D9 Caterpillar; a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling; Crazy Horse; a blue mountain slung with white snow; a bleached caribou antler; a double Klepper kayak; a white canvas tipi; a Grumman Goose; a rusty red fifty-five-gallon steel drum. Overlap these images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and across the whole assemblage paint three wide wavy stripes – a gray-green one for the Yukon, a blue-green one for the Stikine, and a tan one for the Missouri. I call my collage “McHoagzier.”

3 for the Road: Details

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their quality of observation – their details.

What an astonishing density of detail there is in these three books! Everything is noted, named, and particularized. For example, in Notes From the Century Before, Hoagland, roaming around the town of Wrangell, meets totem-pole carver Tom Ukas. Ukas takes Hoagland to a shed in back of his house and shows him a totem pole he’s created. Hoagland describes it in detail: 

The totem is made of a fresh, beautiful, pale yellow wood. I’m amazed by it. Completely filling the shed, lying on several supports, it thrusts like a rocket, many times taller than me. Carving from the bottom upwards, he has finished all but the hat at the top, even the long Raven beaks which attach separately. The little tools rest on a bench. He walks back and forth, touching the segments with a certain humility, this probably being the last totem pole he will have enough energy for and the last anybody in Wrangell will carve. He is delaying finishing – an hour’s chipping at the hat would take care of it. The wood is red cedar, and it will stand in front of the post office, a marvellous huge piece with six succinct figures. At the top sits the hatted, ruling Raven. At his feet is the Power Box (like a box), holding the Tide Control and the Daylight Control for the moon and the sun. Under the box is the Raven again, though only his head, with a bright halo disk around it – this representing the Raven in his special capacity as Creator. Below the Creator Raven, scrunched up, is a kewpie-doll Man, and underneath Man is the Raven Mother, whose beak is carved to lie on her chest, not stick out grandly like the Raven Creator’s. At the bottom, under the Raven Mother, sits the Tide Control, who escaped from his box and triggered the flood and is personified by a big beaver. It’s all magnificently bright and incisive, as I try to tell him mainly by my excitement.

Details accrete and a marvellous totem pole is bodied forth. McPhee, in his Coming into the Country, works the same way, adding detail after animate detail until a bear or a river or a cabin or a mountain is re-created on the page. Here’s his memorable depiction of prospector Joe Vogler’s truck: 

Vogler travels the mining district in a big three-axle truck so much the worse for wear it appears to have been recently salvaged after a very long stay at the bottom of the Yukon. He drives it on what roads there are and, where roads do not exist, directly up the beds of rushing streams. Lurching, ungainly, it is a collage of vehicular components – running gear from one source, transmission from another – that Vogler selected and assembled to be “good in the brush.” The front wheels are directly under the cab, and the engine mount (high off the ground) is cantilevered a full eight feet forward to become a projecting snout, probing the way toward gold. The cab and engine are military fragments, artifacts of the Second World War. The frame was taken from a twenty-five-year-old tractor trailer. The long flatbed reaches out behind and is towered over by a winch and boom. There are no fenders. Much of the engine’s cowling is gone. The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes. Enfeebled as the rig looks, it has six-wheel drive and, thunking up ledges and over boulders, is much at home in a stream.

That “The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes” is pure McPhee. No one could've thought of that analogy but him.

Many of McPhee’s details are inspired! This one, for example:

We collected a marten that had climbed up a pole-set for a grouse wing and was now hanging by a leg in a life-like pose, frozen stiffer than taxidermy, its forepaws stretched as if leaping for prey, its eyes, at fifteen below zero, like white chick-peas.

And this:

On his head was a brown Stetson – the only Stetson I’ve ever seen that was made of hard plastic. It had a crack in it that was patched with grout. 

And this:

On the stove is a tin can full of simmering tea, under a sheet-metal lid that is a piece of a fuel can with a scorched clothespin clipped to it as a handle.

One of the most memorable details in Frazier’s Great Plains is the tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick that he finds in the front yard of an abandoned house near Wellington, Texas, a house that figures in the legend of Bonnie and Clyde:

In front of the house was an old slippery-elm tree – once a friendly tree in a yard, now just a tree – with big roots knuckling up through te ground. The roots were skinned and smooth from people sitting on them, and on the bare dirt in between I spotted a silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick. The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges, of a shade of reddish-pink which its manufacturer calls Fuchsias Pearl. I thought about the kids who dropped it. They probably come here sometimes to park and make-out. Bonnie Parker would have been happy to find this lipstick. She would have opened it and sniffed it and tried the color on the back of her hand. As I examined it, my own hand seemed for a moment as ghostly as hers. I made a mark on a page of my notebook with the lipstick, recapped the tube, and put it back on the ground.

That “The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges” is brilliant! The whole book is like that – an extraordinary feat of attention. 

In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books.

3 for the Road: Figuration

This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their many original, beautiful figures of speech.

One of the tools these three great writers use to describe their subjects is figuration, i.e., metaphor and simile. In Notes From the Century Before, Hoagland says of a band of wild horses, “They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries.” He describes a mountain range as “a thicket of peaks, like a class holding up their hands.” A wolf’s mouth is “like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” A man stands in his garden, “bent in the wind like an oyster shell as he looked at his beans.” A woman has “eyelids like poplar leaves.” Old-timers “pull the human language like a sticky taffy out of their mouths.” Of thousands of salmon trapped in a river canyon, he says, “I thought of shark fins, except that there was a capitulation to it, a stockade stillness, as if they were prisoners of war waiting in huddled silence under the river’s bombarding roar.” A fence “squanders the cleared trees in a zigzag course end to end and atop one another like clasped fingers.” The rib cage of a butchered cow “looked like a red accordion.” The smell inside a tent “curled, as violent as a fire, lifting my hair, quite panicking me, and seemed to be not so much that they didn’t bathe as it was the smell of digestion failing, of organs askew and going wrong.” How about this beauty, a description of the interior of a smokehouse: “The smoke comes from small piles of fireweed burning under two washtubs with holes punched in them, but the red fish make the whole barn seem on fire – salmon from floor to ceiling, as thick as red leaves.” And this: “His lips are so swollen from the sun that he can’t adjust them into an expression. They’re baked into testimonial form, or a sort of art form, like the curve of a fishbone on a beach.” One more: “The dog shambles off like a huge bottled genie with a bland, soapstone face.”

Hoagland’s words call up vivid pictures, as do McPhee’s and Frazier’s. In Coming into the Country, McPhee describes a map of Alaskan mountains as looking “like calves’ brains over bone china.” He says of a grizzly, “His teeth would make a sound that would carry like the ringing of an axe.” He likens salmon to zeppelins (“Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins”). He says of caribou antlers: “Bleached white, the antlers protruded from the tundra like the dead branches of a buried tree.” Of a fisherman: “With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river.” Of the sound of a river: “In a canoe in such a river, you can hear the grains of mountains like sandpaper on the hull.” Of Labrador tea: “The leaves of Labrador tea, crushed in the hand, smelled like turpentine.” Of a bear getting ready to hibernate: “On a bed of dry vegetation, he lays himself out like a dead pharaoh in a pyramid.” Of arctic char: “They were spotted orange and broad-flanked, with lobster-claw jaws.” Of a grizzly: “His brown fur rippled like a field under wind.” Of Mount McKinley: “The mountain is a sky of rock, seemingly all above you.” He describes a river with “so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep.” He says, “People throng the post office like seagulls around a piling, like trout at the mouth of a brook.” Great floes coming on from upriver “roll, heave, compile; sound and surface like whales.” He describes riverborne ice: “big masses pounding into one another with the sound like faraway thunder, or, often, like faraway surf.” I love this one: “He picked up and tossed idly in his hand a piece of dry wolf feces with so many moose hairs in it that it looked like a big caterpillar.” And this: “On a cold, clear aurorean night with the moon and Sirius flooding the ground, the sound of the sled on the dry snow is like the rumbling cars of a long freight, well after the engine has passed.” And this amazing image:

A butchered grizzly: Burgundy is the color of the grizzly’s flesh. With the coat gone, its body is an awesome show of muscular anatomy. The torso hangs like an Eisenhower jacket, short in the middle, long in the arms, muscles braided and bulging. The claws and cuffs are still there. A great deal of fat is on the back. The legs, still joined, suggest a middle linebacker, although the thought is flattering to football. The bear was two years old.

Like an Eisenhower jacket? That’s an arresting, quasi-surreal point of reference. I guess we all remember who Eisenhower was. But did we know he wore jackets “short in the middle, long in the arms”? Who but McPhee could imagine the torso of a butchered grizzly resembling an Eisenhower jacket? No one. It’s an extraordinary simile conjured by an extraordinary writer.

Speaking of extraordinary, consider these gorgeous figures of speech from Frazier’s Great Plains: 

Away to the skies of sparrow hawks sitting on telephone wires, thinking of mice and flaring their tail feathers suddenly, like a card trick! 

The Great Plains are like a sheet Americans screened their dreams on for a while and then largely forgot about. 

Beyond the road were foothills, clear-cut of timber in patches, like heads shaved for surgery, and beyond the hills were mountains. 

This one is crazy-good:

The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks.

And this:

A moth glanced off the edge of the windshield, and in the sunset the dust its wings left sparkled like mascara.

This one makes me smile every time I read it:

Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain.

And this:

Along a straightaway, a coyote raced the truck, his tongue flapping beside him like a tie.

And this:

Maybe you’ll hear a good bluegrass song, like “Blue-Eyed Darlin’,” by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, that comes at you like a truckload of turkey gobblers.

Here’s an ingenious one:

Up ahead, in North Dakota, storm clouds came all the way down to the ground like an overhead garage door.

I love this:

Canvas tipis as white as water-cooler cups stood among the trees.

And this:

From the wooden floor came a dust that smelled like small towns.

How about this beauty:

Then the road twists to follow a river valley, and cottonwood leaves pass above, and someone has been cutting hay, and the air is like the inside of a spice cabinet.

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

3 for the Road: Nature

This is the ninth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their wonderful nature descriptions.

Part of the deep pleasure these books provide is a thrilling contact with first nature:

Mountains

The mountains go 6,000 to 10,000 feet, to gunsight peaks and to sailing, razory needle peaks. They’re blue, cut with shadows and loaded with snow, and they carry small glaciers slung on their hips. [Notes from the Century Before]

Rivers

We drifted down the Yukon through a windless afternoon. The fast-flowing water was placid and – with its ring boils – resembled antique glass. Down one long straightaway, framed in white mountains, we saw ten full miles to the wall of the coming bend. [Coming into the Country]

Foothills

Beyond the road were foothills, clear-cut timber in patches, like heads shaved for surgery, and beyond the hills were mountains. [Great Plains]

Lakes

The lakes were black, in strange, disorderly Rorschach shapes [Notes from the Century Before]

More Mountains

Now, off to the left of the Twin Otter, the Talkeetna Mountains, behind Larson Lake, were topped with a dusting of snow, and along the whole range the snowline was drawn absolutely level somewhere near five thousand feet, as if someone painting a wall had carefully cut in with a brush to whiten just the high part. [Coming into the Country]

Forest

The forest itself grew taller and vast. The low intervals of brush, the marshes, the pea-vine openings and meadows were stopped up. It was a lightless, impenetrable forest: it was the prototype forest which presents a mad sea-net of heaped, angular, tree-sized sticks as its face. You don’t think of going in; you just look at it, turning your body side-ways on the seat. [Notes from the Century Before]

Grasses

He stopped the truck and said, “Let’s take a look at these grasses. This tall one here is bluestem. This’ll grow eight feet high if it gets enough water. Bluestem is what used to grow everywhere farther east, in places like Iowa. This low, skinny grass here is prairie sand reed. If cattle graze this in the summer they’ll take it right out. We graze it more in the winter. This is thread-leaf sedge. It’s the first thing to green up in the spring. I’ve seen this greenin’ up the tenth of March. Once this was up, the Indian ponies had something to eat, and the Indians could travel. This is little bluestem. Cattle don’t eat that so much. This is eriogonum. Technically, it’s not a shrub or a grass—it’s an herb. It’s green in the spring, gold in the summer, and red all winter. This is Indian rice grass. Stock loves this, but it isn’t a real abundant grass. This is blue grama grass. It’s a low-growing little grass, but it’s nutritious. The whole plant, seeds and all, cures over the summer and makes great winter feed. Grama grasses are what the fifty million buffalo ate. That tall plant over there is soapweed. Cattle love to eat soapweed blossoms. It’s a member of the yucca family. That copper-colored bush growing up in the rocks has a great name—mountain mahogany.” [Great Plains]

More Rivers

At last the Stikine itself confronts us. It’s about the same size as the Spatsizi, but blue and breezy up here, young and emotional, jiggled and studded and glittering. It’s even swifter and more self-assured than the Spatsizi is, as exhilarating as a running sea, and, augmented, adds twenty more yards of width. The blue water brightens the sunshine. There are a hundred swallows flying and kingfishers, ouzels and other birds, even seagulls, mountains on one side and spacious forest everywhere else. The river goes along in major key. This is almost the beginning. There is no canyon yet. Life is easy for it; it’s the young champion conquering day by day. [Notes from the Century Before]

Bears

The bear was about a hundred steps away, in the blueberries grazing. The head was down, the hump high. The immensity of muscle seemed to vibrate slowly – to expand and contract, with grazing. Not berries alone but whole bushes were going into the bear. [Coming into the Country]

Eagles

We went along the canyon a ways and stopped within sight of an eagle nest of sticks and branches built into the rock wall. The nest had enough wood in it for a football-rally bonfire, and it extended from the rock in a sketchy half-sphere. In the middle of the nest we could just see the top of the eagle, looking out like a man in a cupola. [Great Plains]

Wild Horses

Coming back across a grassy range, I meet a loose troop of horses, who slide out of reach like so many fish, wheeling in a flat, careful curve as if they were tied head to haunch: insouciant, bonehead horses, sinister in the face. No wild animal looks any tougher. They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries and that tight herding instinct. A roan and a white do a little kicking, and when the roan yawns, all the rest catch the yawn. [Notes from the Century Before]

Salmon

Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins. [Coming into the Country]

Trees

Cottonwood trees grow in all the valleys; suddenly there is something between you and the sun. The trees lean at odd angles, like flowers in a vase. In the summers, windrows of cottonwood-seed down cover the ground. Big cottonwoods have bark as ridged as a tractor tire, and the buffalo used to love to rub against it. In the shedding season, the river bottoms would often be ankle-deep in buffalo hair. At sunset, the shadows of the cottonwoods fall across the river and flutter on the riffles. [Great Plains]

Wolves

Her fur was in silver-fox shades and her head was larger than life. I stared at it the next day while she was being skinned. She had grim, snapping eyes set at a spellbinding slant, and a mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors. At the zoo you can watch wolves mouthing their meat like a cobbler turning a shoe in his hands or a tailor handling a bundle of clothes. Oversized as it is, the mouth can be used as a pair of hands. Wolves’ legs are long because they churn for a hundred-and-fifty miles in a line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles in another line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles, all their lives. Their shoulders are large because they fight with their shoulders. And their heads are large to contain their mouths, which are both hands and mouths. Their eyes are fixed in a Mongol slant to avoid being bitten. Nobody nowadays will see a wild wolf. They are an epitome; one keeps count because they are so exceptional a glimpse. [Notes from the Century Before]

More Bears

He picked up salmon, roughly ten pounds of fish, and, holding it with one paw, he began to whirl it around his head. Apparently, he was not hungry, and this was a form of play. He played sling-the-salmon. With his claws embedded near the tail, he whirled the salmon and then tossed it high end over end. As it fell, he scooped it up and slung it around his head again, lariat salmon, and again he tossed it into the air. He caught it and heaved it high once more. The fish flopped to the ground. The bear turned away bored. He began to move upstream by the edge of the river. Behind the big head his hump projected. His brown fur rippled like a field under wind. He kept coming. The breeze was behind him. He had not yet seen us. He was romping along at an easy walk. As he came closer to us, we drifted slowly toward him. The single Klepper, with John Kauffmann in it, moved up against a snagged stick and broke it off. The snap was light, but enough to stop the bear. Instantly, he was motionless and alert, remaining on his four feet and straining his eyes to see. We drifted on toward him. At last we arrived in his focus. If we were looking at something we had rarely seen before, God help him so was he. If he was a tenth as awed as I was, he could not have moved a muscle, which he did now, in a hurry that was not pronounced but nonetheless seemed inappropriate to his status in the situation. He crossed low ground and went up a bank toward a copse of willow. He stopped there and faced us again. Then, breaking stems to pieces, he went into the willows. [Coming into the Country]

Crows

The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. [Great Plains]

Moose

A cow moose with her calf crossed the river in front of camp. She stayed protectively at its side in the rushing water, as black as a silhouette, humped like a horse which has been built up imposingly at the shoulders and reduced at the waist. At the other bank, when the calf paused in knee-deep water to congratulate itself, the cow strode ahead into the trees. [Notes from the Century Before]

Arctic Char

Below one ledge, where water ran white from a pool, we stopped to fish. Stell Newman caught an Arctic char. Bob Fedeler caught another. They were imposing specimens, bigger than the Salmon’s salmon. They were spotted orange and broad-flanked, with lobster-claw jaws. Sea-run Arctic char. They could be described as enormous brook trout, for the brook trout is in fact a char. They had crimson fins with white edges and crimson borders on their bellies. Their name may be Gaelic, wherein “blood” is “cear.” The Alaska record length for an Arctic char is thirty-six inches, and ours were somewhat under that. I tossed a small Mepps lure across the stream, sixe zero, and bringing it back felt a big one hit. The strike was too strong for a grayling – more power, less commotion. I had, now, about ten pounds of fish on a six-pound line. So I followed the fish around, walking upstream and down, into and out of the river. I had been walking the kayak all day long, and this experience was not much different. After fifteen minutes or so, the fish tired, and came thrashing from the water. I took out my tape and laid it on him, from the hooking jaw to the tip of the tail. Thirty-one and a half inches.. Orange speckles, crimson glow, this resplendent creature was by a long measure the largest fish I had ever caught in fresh water. In its belly would fit ten of the kind that I ordinarily keep and eat. For dinner tonight we would have grilled Arctic char, but enough had been caught already by the others. So, with one hand under the pelvic fins and the other near the jaw, I bent toward the river and held the fish underwater until it had its equipoise. It rested there on my hands for a time, and stayed even when I lowered them away. Then, like naval ordnance, it shot across the stream. The best and worst part of catching that fish was deciding to let it go. [Coming into the Country]

Coyote

Along a straightaway, a coyote raced the truck, his tongue flapping beside him like a tie. [Great Plains]

Caribou 

A caribou swam across the lake, buoyant and tireless all the way. She was a pretty bleached tan with two-pronged antlers in velvet, and she splashed the shallows like a filly, muzzling the bugs off her rear. [Notes from the Century Before]

Loons

In the beginning of the twilight, a pair of loons are cruising. They are beyond range. Their heads are up. Their bodies float high. They sense no danger. Their course is obliquely toward the gun. Now we can distinguish the black-and-white shingling on their necks. Silently swimming, they come nearer still. Loons. They are quick. Diving, they can suddenly be gone. He fires. He fires again. The loons elect to sprint down the surface – cacophonous, flailing – their splayfeet spading the water. A pellet or two may have touched them, but it seems unlikely. [Coming into the Country]

Sagebrush

We turned down a fence line through high sagebrush. The truck drove over bushes as high as the hood, and the smell of crushed sage rose. [Great Plains]

Deer

I saw a deer, of all scarce and unlikely things, bounding to keep me in sight as it fled. It looked like a jackrabbit in the supersized landscape, compared with the animals I was anticipating. But its feminine grace gave it importance. [Notes from the Century Before]

More Rivers

The river below us was the product of the sun, and even in autumn and from the helicopter’s high perspective it was awesome to see. Most fast rivers are white, smooth, white, smooth – alternating pools and rapids. This one was white all the way, bank to bank, tumultuous, torrential, great rushing outwash of the Alaska Range. With so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep. The color of the water, where it was flat enough to show, was actually greenish-gray, and its clarity was nil. It carried so much of what had been mountains. Glacier milk, as it is called, contains a high proportion of powdered rock, from pieces broken off and then ground by the ice. The colors of the outwash rivers are determined by the diets of the glaciers – schist, gneiss, limestone, shale. [Coming into the Country]

More Trees

Southward, the prairie grasses get sparser and sparser; sage, greasewood, prickly pear, and mesquite take over. Mesquite trees have eight-inch thorns, delicate leaves like a locust tree’s, and roots that go down a hundred and seventy-five feet. Longhorn cattle grazed on mesquite and dropped the seeds along the way on drives to the north. Today, you can trace the old cattle trails from the air by following the mesquite. When mesquite takes over a field, little else will grow. Around each low tree, the earth is brown and bare. [Great Plains]

Otter

On the way out, we spot an otter and chase its ripples around. On the bank its whole dachshund body gets in operation when it runs; its legs do the work of a centipede’s. [Notes from the Century Before]

More Mountains

The mountain is a sky of rock, seemingly all above you, looming. [Coming into the Country]

Double Rainbow

Eastern Wyoming. Grass long and mussed by wind. Clear water in creeks. Horsehead oil pumps pumping. Storm clouds piling up against Black Hills to east. Searchlight beams of sun coming through holes in clouds. Above the plain, a perfect double rainbow. [Great Plains]

Note the many brilliant figures of speech: mountains with “small glaciers slung on their hips”; crows “crossing the sky like thrown black socks”; a wolf’s mouth “like a bomber’s undercarriage”; salmon making “long, dolphinesque flights through the air”; a river “with so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep”; on and on. Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier create inspired figuration. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

3 for the Road: First Person

This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of the first person.

All three of these books are written in the first-person major. That, for me, is a compelling aspect of their style. They aren’t second-hand reports (except when they're recounting other people's stories or telling about historical events). Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier were actually there, in northern British Columbia, in Alaska, on the Great Plains, walking trails, canoeing rivers, driving back roads. They’re writing from personal experience, which, for me, is the most concrete form of reality. 

But each of them has a distinctive way of “being there.” Their “I”s differ from each other. Hoagland is much more self-revealing than the other two. He discloses intimate details of his private life. For example,

I’ve been too busy and happy to be lonely, and I must say I’ve missed neither friends nor family, other than my former wife, whom I haven’t seen for two years now anyway, and have been missing right along. Sexually, instead of her, at night I visualize the English girl I lived with in Greece, whom I haven’t seen for nearly a year. She was a lean, dreamy, athletic blonde, born during the Blitz and frozen at the age of nineteen, it seemed to me, though she was five or six years older than that. She dreamed of love and being rich, mostly, and when we went to Izmir from Samos and lived it up, riding in horse-drawn cabs and so on, she crossed her tawny long legs and turned as creamy and smooth as a queen. The populace lined the curbs as we passed. She was loyal and sweet to me, but towards the end of the period we became choked with umbrages and unable to speak to each other except on the politest level. She ran away to another island on a night boat at one point, and after anguishing in uncertainty, I finally went to the police, imagining her death was on my head – I saw us as the petrifying snake and the bird. They thought that I might have murdered her and put a detective on my trail until she came back. Even so, as wordless as we grew after that, we made love better and better, my penis as big as a surfboard underneath us. Whether as the snake or not, from my window I watched her sunbathe and swim much of the day.

There’s nothing even remotely like that in Coming into the Country and Great Plains. McPhee and Frazier stick to what they observe. They look outward, not inward. Occasionally, they tell how they’re feeling:

Tracks suggest that it is something of a trail. I am mildly nervous about that, but then I am mildly nervous about a lot of things. [Coming into the Country]

I made sure I had a place to turn around, and then we started out. I was afraid I’d never get up the steep gully, but I did, my rear wheels tiptoeing along the edges of the ruts. [Great Plains]

Like pictures from pages riffled with a thumb, all these things went through my mind there on the mountainside above the grazing bear. I will confess that in one instant I asked myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” There was nothing more to the question, though, than a hint of panic. I knew why I had come., and therefore what I was doing there. That I was frightened was incidental. I just hoped the fright would not rise beyond a relatively decorous level. [Coming into the Country]

Whenever you see an abandoned house, you wonder. Usually, I was too shy to stop the car and go closer. The way a man in Texas looked at me when he drove up the driveway of an abandoned house as I was peering through the window and writing in my notebook (“busted air conditioner / empty Field Trial high-protein dog food bags / electric-fence transformer / pair of white water skis in corner”) gave me an idea of the way ghosts in these houses might look at me if they existed and could take shape for a moment. [Great Plains]

The trees finally end. I am pleased to see the big river. I make a bench of driftwood, eat cashews and apricots, and wait for Sarge. The walk took a little less than two hours. I don’t feel elevated by that journey, nor am I shy to describe it – just happy that it is complete. I scarcely think I was crazy to do it, and I don’t think I was crazy to fear it. Risk was low, but there was something to fear. Still, I am left awry. I embrace this wild country. But how can I be of it, how can I move within it? I can’t accept anymore the rationale of the few who go unarmed – yet I am equally loath to use guns. If bears were no longer in the country, I would not have come. I am here, in a sense, because they survive. So I am sorry – truly rueful and perplexed – that without means of killing them I cannot feel at ease. [Coming into the Country]

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn’t end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on train, slept in a boarding house, ate at table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going to where he expected to die; because, although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as Red and Spotted Tail as Spot, they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena that our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate. [Great Plains]

(Note that last quotation is all one sentence – a 325-word tour de force that bespeaks Frazier’s deep love for Crazy Horse.)

All three books are self-portraits, as much about the beholder as the beheld. Frazier, in his “Carving Your Name on the Rock,” an essay on the writing of Great Plains (included in the 1991 collection They Went, edited by William Zinsser), calls Great Plains “an internal landscape, a memoir.” He says, “Of course, what you’re really writing about is yourself – Great Plains is an internal landscape, a memoir.” This is true of Notes from the Century Before and Coming into the Country, too.

What selves are portrayed? Hoagland, in his Notes from the Century Before, describes himself as a rhapsodist (“I’m a novelist, not a historian, but at best I’m a rhapsodist too – that old-fashioned, almost anachronist form”). Rhapsodic passages abound. This one, for example:

Swaying and bucking as on a life raft, we scraped over a further series of ridges and peaks. This was the highest flying we had done: we were way up with the snow so that the cabin was cold. But the sunlight washed the whole sky a milky blue. Everywhere, into the haze a hundred miles off, a crescendo of up-pointing mountains shivered and shook. A cliff fell away beneath us as we crossed the lip. The lake down at the base of it was oil-green. We passed over a glacier – blue ice nestled into a saddle. There was no chance to watch for game, the plunging land was life enough. It was a whole earth of mountains, beyond counting or guessing at, colored stark white and rock-brown. To live is to see, and although I was sweating against my stomach, I was irradiated. These were some of the finest minutes of my life.

McPhee rhapsodizes, too, but in a different key – less euphoric, more humorous:

When I have stayed with the Gelvins, I have for the most part occupied a cabin toward the far end of the airstrip – a place acquired not long ago from an old-timer named Curly Allain, who was in his seventies and went south. He had no intention of returning, but he left his cabin well stocked with utensils, food, and linen – a tin of coffee close to the pot, fifty pounds of flour, five pounds of Danish bacon, firewood in three sizes stacked beside the door. Outside, some paces away, I have stood at a form of parade rest and in the broad light of a June midnight been penetrated in the most inconvenient place by a swarm of indecent mosquitoes, and on the same spot in winter, in a similar posture at the same hour, have stared up in darkness from squeaky snow at a green arch of the aurora, green streamers streaming from it all across the sky. At home, when I look up at the North Star I lift my eyes but don’t really have to move my head. Here, I crane back, lift my chin almost almost as far as it will go, and look up at the polestar flirting with the zenith. The cabin is long and low, and its roof is loaded white – mantled eighteen inches deep. Its windows are brown-gold from the light of burning lamps. The air is so still I can hear the rising smoke. Twenty-two degrees below zero. Balls of ice are forming in the beard. I go back inside and comb it off, and jump into a bag of down.

That “The air is so still I can hear the rising smoke” is very fine.

Frazier’s rhapsodies are like arias, soaring, thrilling, passionate: see, for example, the Nicodemus passage I quoted previously. Here’s another one – Great Plains’ extraordinary opening paragraph:

Away to the Great Plains of America, to that immense Western short-grass prairie now mostly plowed under! Away to the still-empty land beyond newsstands and malls and velvet restaurant ropes! Away to the headwaters of the Missouri, now quelled by many impoundment dams, and to the headwaters of the Platte, and to the almost invisible headwaters of the slurped-up Arkansas! Away to the land where TV used to set its most popular dramas, but not anymore! Away to the land beyond the hundredth meridian of longitude, where sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn’t, where agriculture stops and does a double take! Away to the skies of sparrow hawks sitting on telephone wires, thinking of mice and flaring their tail feathers suddenly, like a card trick! Away to the air shaft of the continent, where weather fronts from two hemispheres meet, and the wind blows almost all the time! Away to the fields of wheat and milo and sudan grass and flax and alfalfa and nothing! Away to parts of Montana and North Dakota and South Dakota and Wyoming and Nebraska and Kansas and Colorado and New Mexico and Oklahoma and Texas! Away to the high plains rolling in waves to the rising final chord of the Rocky Mountains!

All three writers are artists to the tips of their fingernails. All three are superb describers of nature. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.

3 for the Road: People

This is the seventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of people.

Everywhere they go in these great travelogues, Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier make a point of talking with people. Hitchhikers, old-timers, fishing guides, woodsmen, fur trappers, miners, bush pilots, park wardens, camp cooks – the authors never miss a chance to talk with whomever they encounter. For Hoagland, especially, talking with frontiersmen and recording their stories is the main point of his journey. He says, “I would be talking to the doers themselves, the men whom no one pays any attention to until they’re dead, who give the mountains their names and who pick the passes that become the freeways.”

To get some idea of the number of individuals peopling these books, consider this table:

Book	People
Notes from the Century Before	Lew Williams (editor of the Wrangell Sentinel); Joel Wing (Wrangell magistrate); George Sylvester (Wrangell roofer and fisherman); John Ellis (Wrangell outboard motor repairer, who takes Hoagland on an exhilarating boat ride); Tom Ukas (Wrangell totem-pole carver); Edwin Callbreath (Captain of the Judith Ann that takes Hoagland up the Stikine); Alec and Dan McPhee (Telegraph Creek old-timers); Gus Adamson (Telegraph Creek “river snagger”); Mr. Wriglesworth (Telegraph Creek old-timer); Mike Williams (Telegraph Creek old-timer); John Creyke (Telegraph Creek old-timer); A. J. Marion (Telegraph Creek old-timer); Benny Frank (Casca resident); Emma Brown (Benny Frank’s friend); Willie Campbell (“He’d been everywhere within three or four hundred miles, roaming alone. He’d seen all the lost, hidden lakes, crossing through notches, and killed every shade of grizzly, from silver to brown”); Bob Henderson; Steele Hyland; Lou Hyland; Cliff Adams; Armel Philippon; Hans Anderson (“an admirable old river bargeman”); Frank Pete; Alec Jack; Dogan Dennis; Jimmy Dennis; Jack Lee; Marty Allen (“Marty is a burned-faced fellow with sloping shoulders and a Roman nose, an Alberta nose”); Merv Hesse; Mr. Tommy Walker (“The delight of a hunt should be the stalk. The kill only puts a period to it, Walker says”); pilot Danny Bereza (“He’s a chattery, prim, preoccupied guy, and he popped through a pass from nowhere, materializing magically over Cold Fish Lake”); Jim Abou; Jim Morgan (“the last of a breed”); Rick Milburn; Walter Sweet (Atlin old-timer); Robert Craft (Atlin old-timer); George Edzerza (guide); Evelyn Jack (“eyelids like poplar leaves in a round flat face, and stiff black hair. Her nose is straight and short and her mouth, wild and cruel, turns down at the sides like a turtle’s mouth”); Norman Fisher; Bill Roxborough; Jim Nolan; Charlie Gairns; Father Decamp; Tahltan chief Eddy Frank; Surveyor General Gerry Andrews; Frank Swannell (“abrasive voice, a terse mind”); E. C. Lamarque (“still wearing the baggy wool pants of a woodsman”).
Coming into the Country	Bob Fedeler (“He would resemble Sigmund Freud, if Sigmund Freud had been a prospector”); Stell Newman; Pat Pourchot; John Kauffmann; Gene Parrish; Jack Hession; Willie Hensley (“Detached humor played across his eyes”); Richard and Dorothy Jones; bush pilot Cliff Hudson (“Bearded, bespectacled, with tousled thinning curly hair, Hudson flew in ten-inch boots and a brown wool shirt that had seen a lot of time on his back”); Carol and Verna Close; Evil Alice Powell; William Corbus; C. B. Bettisworth (“he had a backpackery, environmental look”); Earl Cook; Austin Ward; Barry Quinn;  William Pyle; Louise Kellogg; Robert Atwood; Ed Crittenden; Bill Ray (“He had heavy eyelids, and was a little figgy in the jowls”); Don and Patty Bender; Arliss Sturgulewski; Donna Kneeland; Dick Cook (“acknowledged high swami of the river people”); Eagle mayor and postmaster John Borg; Steve Ulvi; Louise and Sarge Waller; Viola Goggins; Elmer and Margaret Nelson; Dale and Gloria Richert; Jim Dungan; Wyman Fritsch; Ed Gelvin (“Trapper, sawyer, pilot, plumber, licensed big-game guide, welder, ironworker, mechanic, carpenter, builder of boats sand sleds, he suffered no lack of occupation”); Ginny Gelvin; Stanley Gelvin; Brad Snow; Lily Allen; Leon Crane; Charlie Edwards; Rich Corazza; Barney Hansen; Joe Vogler; Wayne Peppler; Fred Wilkinson;  Henry Speaker; Bill Lamoreaux; Earl Stout (“He came to the upper Yukon fifty years ago”); Jack Boone; Diana Green; Jim Scott (“face of an overweight hawk”); Elva Scott; Michael John David (“He laughs aloud – a long, soft laugh. His voice is soft, too – fluid and melodic, like nearly all the voices in the Village”); Mike Potts (“relaxed in the pleasure of his chosen life”).
Great Plains	National Park Ranger Gerard Baker (“Gerard Baker had a double-bladed throwing ax, and he and I spent an hour or so fooling around with it”); Gerhard Stadler; Lydell White Plume; Jim Yellow Earring; Le War Lance; George Scott; Mrs. Homer Lang; Bill Gwaltney, seasonal Park Service Ranger; Moses McTavish (“Moses McTavish asked me if I wanted to see his tipi”); Kathleen Claar, founder and curator of the Last Indian Raid in Kansas Museum; Ephriam Dickson III; Alan and Lindi Kirkbride; Buzz Mauck; Alvin Bates; Juanita Robinson and her daughters Kathleen, Karen, Kaye, Kolleen, Krystal, and Karmen; airman D. Moir; Staff Sergeant John Swift (“His eyes roved beyond his listeners as he spoke, like a man at a cocktail party hoping to spot a closer friend”).

I want to emphasize that all these people are real. They actually existed. Most of them are likely gone now. But on the page they still live, and will continue to live so long as there are eyes to read. The writers have preserved them, rescued them from oblivion. That, for me, is one of the cardinal achievements of these three great books.    

Many of these folks appear only briefly. Nevertheless, each is individually sketched – two or three artful lines and, voilà, a singular figure springs to life:

At last Willie turned up, a stooped twisted man on a cane with a young tenor voice and another of those immense Tahltan faces, except that his was pulled out as long as a pickaxe and then bent at the chin. A chin like a goiter, a distorted cone of a forehead. He looked like a movie monster; he was stupendous. [Notes from the Century Before]

He is a big man, whose woolly beard and woolly crewcut surround pale-blue penetrating eyes. There is often a bemused smile. His voice is smoothly rolling and timpanic. He seems to drive it, like a custom-built car, to play it like a slow roll of drums. [Coming into the Country]

George is tall, red-haired, freckled, with deep squint-lines at the outside corners of his blue eyes. He drinks six or seven Pepsis a day. All the men in his family stick their tongues out to one side and bite them when they concentrate, like boys building models in old-time illustrations. [Great Plains]

He’s a lean-knit half-breed with high cheeks, walnut skin and a delicate nose – he looks like a honed Indian. His lips are so swollen from the sun that he can’t adjust them into an expression. They’re baked into testimonial form, or a sort of art form, like the curve of a fish backbone on a beach. [Notes from the Century Before]

The skin of his face was hickory brown – tight skin, across sharp peregrine features, wrinkled only with a welcoming grin. He wore hip boots, overalls, and gold-colored monkey-fist gloves. On his watchband were rubies embedded in an egglike field of placer gold. On his head was a brown Stetson – the only Stetson I’ve ever seen that was made of hard plastic. It had a crack in it that was patched with grout. [Coming into the Country]

Bill Gwaltney was wearing a Missouri River boatman’s shirt with bloused sleeves, white cotton broadfall trousers from an Amish clothing-supply house in Indiana, and a strand of red-and-blue glass beads of a design about three hundred years old. [Great Plains]

The heroes of these books get fuller treatment - more like oils than sketches. Here, for example, is Hoagland’s portrait of riverman Jim Morgan, “the last of a breed,” “the last of the wolfers”:

He is what he does. He’s a difficult man to convey on paper because he’s got nothing to say for himself. He’s like Willie Campbell. He’s the very best, the obscure common hero. He’s the man you want to see mountains named after, and yet he leaves it at that, he’s antidramatic. Answering my questions is not even much of a chore for him because he doesn’t connect up with them; he lives on a wavelength of silence. When we’re in the skiff, he drinks from his hat brim, dipping it into the river, and he moves through the muskeg and brush using none of my lunging motions, but with small ministeps. He splits firewood with a few quiet taps with one hand, holding the axe head. He keeps a blaze in the cook stove throughout the day, though our weather is up in the eighties, and he also wears long underwear: let the temperature change instead of him. He holds up his pants with suspenders. In one shirt pocket he carries his cigarette papers and in the other his bug repellent, which, like most old-timers, he seldom takes out. He has the same clear, extraordinary eyes as Armel Philippon and Alex McPhee, only more so. When these touch something they light on it. It’s mot that their big; it’s that their wide. They’ve seen nothing they couldn’t look at, and this not, I think, from innocence but rather because of all they have seen. Nobody has seen the whole world, but this is the quality of equilibrium with what one has seen. Of course a city man might have to go about with a half squint, if only to keep the soot out of his eyes. Morgan isn’t a smiler. Like Creyke, like Wriglesworth and Roy Callbreath and Jack Lee, he’s got swollen black lips that look as if they had been chapped for so many years that they’re almost impossible to adjust in any comfortable way. It’s hard enough opening and closing them, let alone trying to smile, and yet without moving his mouth, he’s another blithe man.

He is what he does - action is character. McPhee describes two of his heroes – the father-son team of Ed and Stanley Gelvin – in terms of their amazing resourcefulness and self-reliance. In one of Coming into the Country’s most memorable scenes, he shows Stanley Gelvin skilfully operating an enormous bulldozer in a remote area of Alaskan bush:

The sluice box should have a slope of exactly ten degrees. The D9 – larger than most cabins, lurching over mounds of its own rubble – seemed an unlikely instrument for so precise a job. Stanley – in his high seat, hands and feet in rapid movement among the multiple controls – suggested a virtuoso on a pipe organ even more than a skinner on a Cat. Gradually, a smooth ramp appeared. He had wired a carpenter’s level to the deck of the machine and had shimmed one end of it so the bubble would center when the Cat was on a slope of ten degrees. As he finished, and drove his fifty-five tons of yellow iron up the ramp, from bottom to top the bubble scarcely moved. Clanking off to fetch the sluice box, he hitched it to the rear of the big bulldozer, and pushed it backward down the narrow top of the dike. The sluice box weighs a couple of tons. He gently eased it down the ramp. Then he went and got the slick plate, and backed that down the top of the dike, too. He was grouchy – had been crabby all through the day – because he had no snoose. He was trying to quit, and had been six days without a dip of Copenhagan. Repeatedly, he shook his head in apparent dismay and made despairing remarks about the way things were going – heard mainly by the roaring Cat. The mouthpiece on the slick plate is nearly four feet wide and was designed to fit into the sluice box with very little clearance. Stanley backed the slick plate down the ramp. It weighs three tons, and he moved it steadily – without hesitation, without a pause for adjustment (just ran it downhill backward) – until the mouthpiece entered the box. It had not so much as brushed either side. The clearance was five-quarters of an inch one way and three-eighths of an inch the other. The day’s work finished, father and son flew home.

That brilliant passage is both a description of action and a portrait of Stanley Gelvin. McPhee admires the Gelvins enormously. He says,

The relationship between this father and son is as attractive as anything I have seen in Alaska – both of them self-reliant beyond the usual reach of the term, the characteristic formed by this country. Whatever they are doing, whether it is mining or something else, they do for themselves what no one else is here to do for them. Their kind is more endangered every year.

One of Ian Frazier’s heroes is Le War Lance. We first meet him in Great Plains. Frazier writes:

One day, on the street in front of my apartment building in New York (this was before I moved to Montana), I met a Sioux Indian named Le War Lance. I had just been reading a study of recent economic conditions on Sioux reservations. The authors seemed puzzled that so few Sioux were interested in raising sugar beets working in a house-trailer factory. As I waited for the light to change, I noticed that the man standing next to me resembled many pictures of Sioux that I had seen. I said, “Are you a Sioux?” He smiled and said, “I’m an Oglala Sioux Indian from Oglala, South Dakota.” He said his name and asked for mine. He had to lean over to hear me. He was more than six feet tall. He was wearing the kind of down coat that is stuffed with something other than down—knee-length, belted around the waist, in a light rescue orange polished with dirt on the creases—blue jeans lengthened with patches of denim of a different shade from knee to cuff, cowboy boots, a beaded-leather ponytail holder. His hair was straight and black with streaks of gray, and it hung to his waist in back. After I saw him, I never cut my hair again. In one hand he was holding a sixteen-ounce can of beer.

Le War Lance is one of Frazier’s greatest “characters." He figures centrally in Frazier’s On the Rez (2000), a sort of sequel to Great Plains. 

For me, the most significant people in these three 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 for the Road: Place

This is the sixth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of place.

How do you evoke places as vast as Alaska, the Great Plains, and northern British Columbia? One way is by immersing yourself in them and describing the experience. That’s what Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier do in these three great books. What do I mean by immersion? Consider this:

Incredible spoked sundials are set up along shore where the big cottonwoods have been undermined and have fallen over with their bleached roots exposed. The Katete debouches through a thick screen of swamp. A wide valley funnels back to mountains and saddles which encircle the end. The Ikut, the largest tributary on the Stikine, is next, even more barricaded behind islands and sloughs. It’s a classic straight corridor through a vast steep valley of virgin trees, each as straight as if it had been plumbed. The Stikine weaves, like the highway it is. As we approach the mountains before us, they slowly open a gap, which closes again after we pass. We feel our way over the snags, often nuzzling so closely against an island that we can hear the songbirds over the noise. Crossing again, we slip backwards eerily for what seems along time, only just succeeding in holding our slant. The scow up in front is fun to ride because it slides vibrationlessly, but so is the galley of the Judith Ann, where the floor jangles in frenzy and the glasses and plates deafen the floor. The river is often a mile across, an eddying gale of gray water. A half-skinned cedar floats by with flesh-colored protrusions where the limbs were. Great Glacier, in its majestic slash of a valley, takes two hours to pass. Mud Glacier, two hours more. This is the spine of the coast range. The mountains go 6,000 to 10,000 feet, to gunsight peaks and to sailing, razory peaks. They’re blue, cut with shadows and loaded with snow, and they carry small glaciers slung on their hips. A sudden slide wipes out a waterfall before our eyes, and the black and white patterns of snow that are left are like dramatic couturier’s dresses. 

That’s from Hoagland’s marvellous Notes from the Century Before. He’s traveling up the Stikine, on his way to Telegraph Creek. And he, like the river, is in full flood. His words call up pictures: the bleached roots of fallen cottonwoods like “incredible spoked sundials”; “thick screen of swamp”; a tributary “barricaded behind islands and sloughs”; virgin trees “each as straight as if it had been plumbed”; the river “often a mile across, an eddying gale of gray water”; a floating half-skinned cedar “with flesh-colored protrusions where the limbs were”; a glacier “in its majestic slash of a valley”; mountains “blue, cut with shadows and loaded with snow, and they carry small glaciers slung on their hips.” We are plunged into a world of rivers, mountains, valleys, islands, swamps, glaciers, waterfalls, and snow. We aren’t just looking at a river; we are on it (“We feel our way over the snags, often nuzzling so closely against an island that we can hear the songbirds over the noise”). Note the specificity of language, particularly the use of proper nouns (“Katete,” “Ikut,” “Stikine,” “Judith Ann,” “Great Glacier,” “Mud Glacier”). Above all, note that sublime “but so is the galley of the Judith Ann, where the floor jangles in frenzy and the glasses and plates deafen the floor.” All the ingredients of Hoagland’s bravura immersive style are here: specificity, vivid figuration, perceptual rapture. Page after glorious page, this is the way he evokes the Stikene’s wild, labyrinthine world.

Let’s stick with rivers, but now it’s the Salmon of the Brooks Range, and we’re in John McPhee’s superb Coming into the Country:

My bandana is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head, and now and then dip it into the river. The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving. This has done away with the headaches that the sun caused in days before. The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good. Meanwhile, the river – the clearest, purest water I have ever seen flowing over rocks – breaks the light into flashes and sends them upward into the eyes. The headaches have reminded me of the kind that are sometimes caused by altitude, but, for all the fact that we have come down through mountains, we have not been higher than a few hundred feet above the level of the sea. Drifting now – a canoe, two kayaks – and thanking God it is not my turn in either of the kayaks, I lift my fishing rod from the tines of a caribou rack (lashed there in mid-canoe to the duffel) and send a line flying toward the a wall of bedrock by the edge of the stream. A grayling comes up and, after some hesitation, takes the lure and runs with it for a time. I disengage the lure and let the grayling go, being mindful not to wipe my hands on my shirt. Several days in use, the shirt is approaching filthy, but here among grizzly bears I would prefer to stink of humanity than of fish.

Talk about immersion! That is the opening paragraph of the book. Immediately, we are there, with McPhee, in a canoe, on the Salmon, in northern Alaska. Note how he palpably conveys temperature: “The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving.” He writes from an immediate sensation of things: “The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good.” Through his description of his sensory experience, McPhee gets us as close as he can to the Salmon’s physical reality. That paragraph is my favorite beginning in all of literature. (I first read it when “The Encircled River” appeared in The New Yorker, May 2, 1977.)

Continuing our river motif, consider this passage from Ian Frazier’s Great Plains:

Among the rivers of the Great Plains are the Cimarron, the Red, the Brazos, the Purgatoire, the Trinity, the Big Sandy, the Canadian, the Smoky Hill, the Solomon, the Republican, the Arikaree, the Frenchman, the Little Blue, the South Platte, the North Platte, the Laramie, the Loup, the Niobrara, the White Earth, the Cheyenne, the Owl, the Grand, the Cannonball, the Heart, the Knife, the Little Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Powder, the Tongue, the Bighorn, the Musselshell, the Judith, the Marias, the Milk, the Missouri.

You might say, well, that’s just a list. Yes, but what a list! It’s certainly a sign that Frazier is interested in rivers. In the next paragraph, he describes their reality:

The rivers of the southern plains are dry much of their length, much of the year. All-terrain-vehicle tracks cross the white sand in the bed of the North Fork of the Red. As you go north, the rivers are more likely to have water. Descending from the flat benchland into their valleys can be like walking off a hot sidewalk into a spa. Cottonwood trees grow in all the valleys; suddenly there is something between you and the sun. The trees lean at odd angles, like flowers in a vase. In the summers, windrows of cottonwood-seed down cover the ground. Big cottonwoods have bark as ridged as a tractor tire, and the buffalo used to love to rub against it. In the shedding season, the river bottoms would often be ankle-deep in buffalo hair. At sunset, the shadows of the cottonwoods fall across the river and flutter on the riffles. Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain. Sandbar willows grow as straight as dowels in the gray-black mud along the banks. Game trails six inches wide wind through the willows. For a while, the air is smarting with mosquitoes, and weird little bugs that don’t bite but just dive right for your eyes. Later there are stars, and silence. At dawn, birds pipe the light through the trees.

God, who would not want such exquisite writing to go on forever? I love the immediacy of that “Cottonwood trees grow in all the valleys; suddenly there is something between you and the sun.” It puts me right there in the cottonwood shade! The last line is inspired! The whole passage is inspired! I relish the way it blends arresting historical detail (“In the shedding season, the river bottoms would often be ankle-deep in buffalo hair”) and vivid personal observation (“Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain”). Frazier is a phenomenal describer. 

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 for the Road: Action

This is the fifth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their action. 

Travelogues are inherently active. The writer moves through time and space and describes what he or she sees. But the three travel books I’m considering here are active in another way. Their authors aren’t simply passive observers; they’re participants. 

“John Ellis gets through work, gobbles a meal, and from six to nine o’clock we head off to pick up the bear which he shot yesterday.” So begins a wonderful action sequence in Notes from the Century Before. It’s exactly the kind of adventure I relish. Hoagland is in Wrangell, British Columbia, waiting for the boat that will take him up the Stikine River to Telegraph Creek. While in Wrangell, he meets Ellis, “a young fellow who repairs outboard motors.” Ellis invites him on this bearskin-retrieving mission, and off they go:

The skiff whirls and scuds over the water at 30 mph, with its bow high. We pass Dead Man’s Island, where the early Chinese cannery workers were buried; also Dairy Island, and Farm Island, five miles by fifteen, which splits the mouth of the Stikine. A boy of eight named Timmer is along, so John shows him the remains of the homestead on a point of the mainland where his mother grew up. We stop to look at a gold-rush message cut on a rock at the edge of the water. Only the simple numerals of the date are still legible. And an old bridge crosses a slough – two logs fitted onto a rock-packed frame, wide enough for a wagon. We whip and zoom into and out of the principal channel, which builds into slanting slopes of water against the sandbars. It’s as wide as the Hudson but is a rich brown-gray, littered with floating trees and boiling and pimpled with miniature whirlpools, with circles of surface water spinning and intersecting. Stunting for Timmer and me, Ellis shoots into the narrowest sloughs, curving with them and out at the end, after a mile between the close-set  walls of the rain forest. Mink, moose, beaver tracks. Cottonwood Island, Government Island. Government Island lies off the cove where the customs man had his cabin in the old days, in a thicket of tall hemlock trees and windfalls and brush. The roof has fallen in from the weight of the winters of snow. Nearby is the bearskin, about five feet long, representing an animal of two hundred pounds. John was watching a cow and calf moose in a slough, trying to photograph them, when the bear showed up on the opposite side and started across. He left the head intact when he skinned, and the mouth is still biting a mouthful of grass, the tongue is out, the lips are red-flecked. The ears are floppy, personable ears and the muzzle is well proportioned, the eyes not too small – a likeable face. Fine, unblemished fur, prime-of-life claws. Gracing the prow, stretched out, the skin makes the skiff look very big, but to me it’s a sad memento, and as he says it’s the sixth bear he’s killed, he begins to sound as if it were sad to him too. 

Again we skylark between the drift piles and swampy islands and crocodile logs, making the seething brown river a raceway, an obstacle course. The sun is low. The thick shoreline is that of a jungle river. Hundreds of great trees are stranded about in the shallows, so that parts of the estuary look like a naval graveyard. We swing near a beaver house, and swing near an eagle plunked in a tree. From time to time a seal surfaces and dives – whole herds go upriver during the salmon run. Besides the continual gulls, we start up a flock of ducks every couple of minutes, thirty or forty ducks, and since the boat zips along as fast as they do, we wheel them towards shore like a troop of horses, until they gradually outdistance us. 

It’s hard to stop quoting. The passage goes on for another three paragraphs, each a teeming run of exuberant eventfulness: “We visit the Farm Island farm, swerving up a creek, planing along”; “On the way out, we spot an otter and chase its ripples around”; “Then the river’s mouth again, with seals surfacing, and eagles and fleeing ducks, the snowing horizon – a profusion, a gushing of life.” It ends magnificently: “I goggle and grin quite helplessly, for this was the way the world was made.” The prose enacts the profusion, the gushing of life. Note the abundance of vivid, active verbs: “whirls,” “scuds,” “whip,” “zoom,” “shoots,” “swing,” “dives,” “wheel.” Note that wonderful “skylark”: “Again we skylark between the drift piles and swampy islands and crocodile logs, making the seething brown river a raceway, an obstacle course.” My god, I love that sentence! The whole book moves like that.

John McPhee, in his Coming into the Country, is also observer-participant. In one of my favorite passages, he watches Dick Cook, an outstanding woodsman, trapper, and dogsledder, ready his dogs for a trip to Eagle:

Dick goes out on the leveled stream and lays down harnesses in the snow. The sled is packed, the gear lashed under the skins. Everything is ready for the dogs. They are barking, roaring, screaming with impatience for the run. One by one, Donna unchains them. Out of the trees they dash toward the sled. Chipper goes first and, standing in front, holds all the harnesses in a good taut line. Abie, Little Girl, Grandma, Ug – the others fast fill in. They jump in their traces, cant’s wait to go. If they jump too much, they get cuffed. Wait another minute and they’ll have everything so twisted we’ll be here another hour. Go! The whole team hits at once. The sled, which was at rest a moment before, is moving fast. Destination, Eagle; time, two days.

Several paragraphs later, McPhee himself drives Cook’s dog team:

Dick has sometimes handed the sled over to me for two and three miles at a time, he and Donna walking far behind. On forest trails, with the ground uneven, the complexity of the guesswork is more than I’d have dreamed. We come to, say, a slight uphill grade. I have been riding, standing on the back of the sled. The dogs, working harder, begin throwing glances back at me. I jump off and run, giving them a hundred-and-fifty-pound bonus. The sled picks up speed in reply. Sooner or later, they stop – spontaneously quit – and rest. Let them rest too long and they’ll dig holes in the snow and lie down. I have learned to wait about forty-five seconds, then rattle the sled, and off they go. I don’t dare speak to them, because my voice is not Cook’s. If I speak, they won’t move at all. There are three main choices – to ride, to run behind, or to keep a foot on the sled and push with the other, like a kid propelling a scooter. The incline has to be taken into account, the weight of the sled, the firmness of the trail, the apparent energy of the dogs, the time since they last rested, one’s own degree of fatigue. Up and down hill, over frozen lakes – now ride, now half ride, run. Ten below zero seems to be the fulcrum temperature at which the air is just right to keep exertion cool. You’re tired. Ride. Outguess the dogs. Help with one foot. When they’re just about to quit, step off and run. When things look promising, get on again, rest, look around at the big white country, its laden spruce on forest trails, its boulevard, the silent Yukon. On a cold, clear aurorean night with the moon and Sirius flooding the ground, the sound of the sled on the dry snow is like the rumbling cars of a long freight, well after the engine has passed. 

Mm, that last line is crazy good! I relish the way the whole passage moves. It puts me squarely there with McPhee, now riding, now half-riding, now jumping off and running, now jumping back on, looking around “at the big white country, its laden spruce on forest trails, its boulevard, the silent Yukon.” Its immediacy is thrilling! 

There’s action aplenty in Frazier’s Great Plains, too. The killing of Crazy Horse, the slaughter of Custer and the 7th Calvary at Little Big Horn, the capture of a runaway yearling – these events are vividly described. As for first-person action, well, there’s lots of driving. In my post on structure, I mentioned Frazier and Jim Yellow Earrings’ wild ride to Sitting Bull’s cabin. That’s one of my favorites. Another is when Frazier and a friend are driving on the plains and get stuck in mud:

Suddenly we crossed the path of one of the rainclouds, and the hard dirt road turned to glue. Mud began to thump in the wheel wells, and the car skidded sideways, went off the road, and stuck. We got out in cement-colored mud over our ankles. Two pieces of harvesting machinery sat in a field nearby; other than that, there was no sign of people anywhere. I tried to drive while my friend pushed, then she drove while I pushed, then I left it in gear and we both pushed. We whipped the mud to peaks. It clotted on the wheels until they became useless mudballs. Finally I took a flat rock and got down on all fours and scraped the mud off each wheel. Then my friend drove carefully in reverse for one wheel turn until the wheels were covered again. Then I scraped the mud off again, and we drove another revolution. We kept doing this over and over until we made it back to dry ground. It took about two hours. Another event early travellers mentioned in their diaries was miring their wagons in the gumbo mud of the Great Plains. Now I knew what they meant. When I got back in the car, I was all-over mud and my fingernails were broken. From her purse, my friend produced a freshly laundered white cotton handkerchief. 

That “We whipped the mud to peaks” is excellent. Note the action-verbs – “skidded,” “pushed,” “clotted,” “scraped,” “whipped.” Frazier’s nouns and adjectives are also pretty damn effective. By the end of the passage, I felt as though I’d experienced “the gumbo mud of the Great Plains,” too. 

Action is a prime feature of all three of these great books. Another one is acute sense of place. That will be the focus of my next post in this series.