5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #5 "Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog

This is the fifth and concluding post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (The New Yorker, December 15, 2003; included in McPhee’s 2006 collection Uncommon Carriers). 

In this superb piece, McPhee retraces the waterways of Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). It artfully blends two trips in one: Thoreau’s 1839 trip and McPhee’s 2003 trip on the same rivers. Hence the title of the piece when it appeared in The New Yorker: “1839/2003.” It’s also posted on newyorker.com as “Paddling After Henry David Thoreau.” But I prefer the title that McPhee gave it when he collected it in Uncommon Carriers – “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.”

The piece unfolds in seven untitled segments. Segment one covers the first day of McPhee’s trip. It starts on August 31, 2003, in Concord, Massachusetts. McPhee and his long-time friend Dick Kazmaier launch their canoe (an Old Town Penobscot 16) on the Sudbury River, from the same location, according to Thoreau scholars’ best guess, that Thoreau and his brother John launched their boat (a fifteen-foot-long skiff they’d built themselves). McPhee and Kazmaier paddle down the Sudbury to Egg Rock, where it joins the Concord River, then down the Concord to where it enters the Merrimack River, then up the Merrimack as far as Tyngsborough, where Kazmaier bids McPhee farewell and yields his place to McPhee’s son-in-law, Mark Svenhold, for the rest of the trip. McPhee and Svenhold overnight in Tyngsborough at a resort hotel called Stonehedge. 

Segment two describes in greater detail what McPhee and Kazmaier saw, did, and thought as they paddled the Concord that first day. McPhee writes,

Sunday morning and “the air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture. . . . We were uncertain whether the water floated the land, or the land held the water.” In 2003, the Concord was similar for us that Sunday afternoon. Blue herons lined it like gargoyles. Who knows what pious thoughts they were thinking. Thoreau says that on this day “the fishes swam more staid and soberly, as maidens go to church,” and “the frogs sat meditating, all Sabbath thoughts, summing up their week.” Like the Thoreaus’ dory, our canoe moved through flat-calm water that reflected the surrounding world. Thoreau says, “It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water . . . for only Nature may exaggerate herself.” The water we rudely broke with our paddles was as clear as the air and the reflection. Moreover, in eleven miles on the Concord we saw one beer can (afloat), one orange-and-white plastic barrel (in the alders), and no other flotsam or jetsam. The Clean Water Act of 1972 was among the highest legislative accomplishments of the twentieth century. It owed more than a little to thought set in motion by Henry David Thoreau.

Note the artful way McPhee interweaves Thoreau’s observations with his own. The whole piece is like that – the two trips blending, almost as if McPhee and Thoreau are traveling together, which, in a sense, they are. 

Segment three chronicles the second day of McPhee’s journey, as he and Svenvold continue up the Merrimack. They go under the Tyngsborough Bridge. An hour later, they cross into New Hampshire. McPhee describes the river:

The river was peaceful, mostly silent, secluded. From time to time, we heard the surf of highways we could not see. We saw kingfishers along the Merrimack, and blue herons, the fisher kings. Eight Canada geese came in, splat, for belly-flopping crash landings—the only kind of landing they can manage. We saw a shopping cart, a truck muffler, a dolly, dead sweepers full of Styrofoam debris. 

They encounter a wastewater treatment sprayer:

Far ahead and near the west bank, a small geyser was shooting white water straight upward in the otherwise flat river. The eruption was only a couple of feet high but in that apparently motionless riverscape it had the focal effect of a natural phenomenon. It drew us toward it—the ultimate orifice of the Nashua Wastewater Treatment Facility, spinning great concentric swirls of white foam on the river, like half an acre of cappuccino. This hideous sight was enough to frighten a shipful of Vikings, as Mark Svenvold was prepared to affirm. The discharge smelled like laundry detergent and chlorine, nothing worse, but in this place more than anywhere else—including all the rocks and rapids to come—I preferred that the canoe remain upright. 

That “spinning great concentric swirls of white foam on the river, like half an acre of cappuccino” is wonderfully vivid.

In segment four, day two of the journey continues. McPhee writes,

Passing under a pair of high bridges, we came to the mouth of the Nashua River not long after noon. Turning into it, we pulled up the canoe on a sandy beach among boulders, and, under red maples, ate Stonehedge-prepared club sandwiches laced with avocado. The Nashua was clear, smooth, and fast—not white water but a firm current coming down through a railroad bridge whose bowstring trusses enhanced a lovely scene. The Nashua River, near its mouth, bisects the city, flourishing three oxbow bends before debouching into the Merrimack. The Thoreaus, after passing under a covered bridge and arriving at the Nashua, were not much interested. Henry praises the tributary for its “elm-shaded meadows” at Groton, but says that “near its mouth it is obstructed by falls and factories, and did not tempt us to explore it.” It tempted Mark and me, and we took off for the public library, digging hard against deceptive currents. A week earlier, for training purposes, we had gone a mile and a half against the upper Delaware at a stage near flood. But this was more difficult, possibly because the Nashua was shallow and we were not poling. Working off the avocado, we got around a meander bend and under the 101 bridge, almost a mile up. Then we came to a small island, beyond which were another railroad bridge and a dam. On our left was the spire of St. Casimir’s Catholic Church, dark-red brick, 1857. St. Casimir’s is on Temple Street near Scripture. Scripture is one-way. On our right was a brick mill, fourteen years old when the Thoreaus went by, with three large arches standing in the river, framing a pitch-black watery cavern. We fought up past the arches to the top of the island, where we decided to let the Nashua return us to the Merrimack.

That “working off the avocado” made me smile. McPhee’s humor abounds in this piece.

This segment is also notable for its structural analysis of Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. McPhee quotes scholar Linck Johnson, who calls it a “complex weave.” McPhee comments, “The first image that came to my mind was a string of lights—or any linear structure with things hanging on it, like a heavily loaded clothesline.” McPhee himself has used this type of structure: see, for example, “A Forager” (The New Yorker, April 6, 1968; included in his 1968 collection A Roomful of Hovings). 

Segment five covers day three of the trip, from Nashua to Reeds Ferry. On this stretch of the Merrimack, McPhee and Svenhold see vestiges of the lock and canal that the Thoreaus and the floating freight carriers of the time used to circumvent a ledge. McPhee writes,

The lock doors, of course, were wooden and perishable, but some of the remains include hinges. The guide wall stood on the easterly side. Opposite was a large part of the long wall that led boats to the lock, just as the long walls of the Ohio, the Illinois, the Tennessee, the upper Mississippi lead thousand-foot tows past the bullnoses of guide walls and into locks today. In boulders along the Merrimack we saw iron rings, where canal boats, in the heavy traffic, were tied up to wait for their turns in the lock. 

And when they stop for lunch on an island, McPhee, connoisseur of golf balls, finds and identifies two of them (“In the sand at our feet were two golf balls—each a Strata zero”).

In segment six (day 3 of the trip), McPhee and Svenvold pick their way through a daunting set of six distinct falls. Here’s McPhee’s description of their passage through one of them – Coos Falls:

As we approached Coos, we were again confronted by the chimeric stone wall, making the river look impassable. At each big rapid, a wing dam had been a component of the engineering—an oblique arm sticking far up into but not all the way across the river, its purpose to divert water through the canals and locks. The wing dam at Moore’s Falls had been thirty-two hundred feet long, at Coos twenty-five hundred. That’s a lot of rock to pile up. Now scattered through the rapids, it appears from a distance to be as integral as it once was, and from nearby to be the rocks of a riverbed on Mars. The Coos canal had been framed by the east bank and an island, and now consisted of two small pools separated by isthmuses of high dry rock. It was certainly no thoroughfare, but it seemed preferable to the souse holes, standing waves, and growing water that reached across the river from the west side of the island. We carried the canoe up and over the first isthmus, paddled the second pool, and carried the canoe across the boulders to the north end of the island. There was still a lot of white water in front of us and no way to paddle it, so I walked upcurrent with the fifty-foot rope and, when it was straight, turned and pulled the canoe up to me. Three good pulls and it came on its own, or so it seemed—just picked its way around the boulders, up ledges, and through the little rips until I had to stop it with my hand. Mark came up and held the canoe while I made my way upstream another fifty feet with the rope. I turned and pulled. That got us to the pool above Coos Falls.

They stop for lunch at Griffin’s Falls. McPhee’s wife, Yolanda, joins them. After lunch, McPhee and Svenhold continue upriver to Stark Landing (“further up all the rapids than we had thought we’d ever get”). They keep going. They pole, walk, and line their way through “boulder gardens and bygone weirs” to Merrill’s Falls in Manchester. (“I found three golf balls in Merrill’s Falls," McPhee says.) 

Segment seven covers the fifth and final day of the trip. McPhee writes,

Making good time on the motionless water, we had soon covered more than five miles, were back in the wooded isolation characteristic of the river, and were looking up a straight shot of two and a half miles to a small distinctive mountain, or, in Thoreau’s words, “We could see rising before us through the mist a dark conical eminence called Hooksett Pinnacle.” After passing under three bridges, two of them abandoned, we would come to the end of our trip at A.J. Lambert Riverside Park, Hooksett Village, below Hooksett Dam—a spectacular scene colluding natural white cascades with water falling over the dam and plunging from the powerhouse.

The above is a very rough summary of one of McPhee’s most intricate, beautiful pieces. What makes it intricate is the way the two journeys are so closely interwoven. What makes it beautiful is the writing – both McPhee’s and Thoreau’s. The combination is double bliss. 

5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #4 "Farewell to the Nineteenth Century"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog

This is the fourth post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “Farewell to the Nineteenth Century” (The New Yorker, September 27, 1999; Chapter 4 of McPhee’s fascinating The Founding Fish, 2002). 

In this absorbing piece, McPhee and his friend John McPhedran canoe down a fifteen-mile stretch of Maine’s Kennebec River, from Waterville to Augusta, through a landscape that until only a few days previous had been under water for a hundred and sixty-two years. The trip is McPhee’s way of exploring the subject of dam removal. 

The piece unfolds in three segments. In segment one, McPhee and McPhedran put their canoe in the river. McPhee writes,

With John McPhedran, I carried a canoe around a ballfield in Waterville, Maine, and on into the woods. The terrain fell away there sharply. The boat was heavy but its skin was indestructible, and we dragged it, bumping on roots. So much for the loving care reserved for canvas, bark, and Kevlar canoes. This one had no need of it. Its makers promote its type with pictures that show one being thrown off the roof of their factory in Old Town. So we twitched it downhill like a log. On the threshold of the year 2000, this was just one of the countless ways of saying farewell to the nineteenth century. 

A few days earlier, we would not have had to choose a model so tough. We put it into Messalonskee Stream, which carried us into the Kennebec River, which, in this stretch, had suddenly lost about five million tons of water as a result of deliberate demolition. Fifteen miles downstream, in Augusta, Edwards Dam, two stories high and more than nine hundred feet wide, had been breached on the first of July. 

As they paddle, McPhee describes what they see:

Beside the second rip we came to was a sofa bed, its skirts showing the stains of fallen water. We expected more of the same. We expected grocery carts. This, after all, was not Township 13, Range 11, of the North Woods, where nearly half the State of Maine consists of nameless unorganized townships. This was settled, supermarket Maine, but in the fifteen river miles upstream of Augusta we would see one beer can, no grocery carts, and three tires. Now we saw a mallard, a pewee, goldfinches. We heard song sparrows, a wood thrush, a veery. I wouldn’t know a veery from a blue-winged warbler, but John McPhedran is acute on birds. I had known him since he was seventeen, seventeen years before. Since then, he had become a botanist, a general field naturalist, and a freelance water-quality consultant working for the Maine Department of Transportation. We saw sticking up from a large and newly emergent river boulder an iron bolt fully an inch and a half in diameter and capped with a head like a big iron mushroom. I knew what that dated from – the log drives of the Kennebec, which began in colonial times and came to an end in 1976. Put a chain around that bolt and you could stop a raft of logs.

They come to Six-Mile Falls, a rapid that was covered by the rising impoundment in 1837. McPhee describes the scene:

Six-Mile Falls was a white riverscape of rock and plunge pools, small souse holes, tightly coiled eddies, and noisy, staired cascades. As we approached, we had to stand up and look for the thread of the river. The place was making scenery lifted from the dead. For six, seven, eight generations, it had been as withdrawn from the world as Debussy’s cathédrale engloutie, but now, as in the time long gone, it was making its own music. Its higher rock, in broad, flat segments, was covered with filamentous algae, which under water have the look of long grass, combed straight by the current. These algae were in thick brown mats, opened to the sky by the breaching of the dam and on their way to removal by the wind. We picked what seemed to be the most promising chute. The canoe slipped through it. We spun around and hung in an eddy. From riverbank to riverbank, water was falling in a hundred different ways.

Segment two cuts away from the canoe trip; it flashes back twelve days to July 1, 1999, when Edwards Dam was breached – the first big dam in a major American river to be ordered out of existence by the federal government. McPhee was there. He describes the moment:

On the cofferdam near the west bank sat Reggie Barnes, of Alton, Maine, at the levers of a Caterpillar 345 backhoe with a two-and-a-half-yard bucket and a thirty-nine-foot ground-level reach. Even from across the river, it looked Cretaceous, its head above the trees. Facing east, it swung right, and it bit a few tons of gravel. After swinging farther to the right and dropping the load, it went back for more. It was eating the cofferdam. It ate from south to north, toward the restrained water. Swing left. Bite. Swing right. Drop. Swing left. Bite. The machine was opening a chasm, and the north end of the chasm was becoming a pillar of gravel separating air from water. Bite. The pillar thinned. Frankly, I had not imagined this moment in history to be dramatic – the engineering was so extensive, monumental, and controlled. I mean, a Stuka wasn’t dropping one on the crest and flying off to Frankfurt. But this backhoe, positioned on the very structure it was consuming – swinging to and fro on the inboard end of the cofferdam – was hypnotizing a thousand people. It hadn’t far to go. The bucket had not reached water before water reached the bucket. From a thousand feet away, even through binoculars, not much could be seen yet but occasional splashes in motion, south. They were occasional enough to cause Reggie Barnes to roll his treads and get the big backhoe out of there, fast. It scooted off the cofferdam and partway up a hill. A bottle of champagne had been cracked on the bucket before it all began, and now from beneath a mass of hard hats came a cheer that might have been audible in Portland. While the hard hats watched and the Nature Conservancy watched with the leaders of American Rivers, the licks and splashes increased in frequency and height above the cofferdam, which was now being eaten by the Kennebec River.

Rapidly, it widened and deepened its advantage. It became a chocolate torrent. It shot through the gap in the western end of the dam itself and smashed into the foundation wall of the gatehouse, once the entry to the power canal. The foundation wall of the gatehouse consisted of very large blocks of granite. The liberated currents caromed off it and angled into the lower river. A milky brown plume spread through the clear water there and nearly reached the eastern shore, a thousand feet away. In eight minutes, the Kennebec, completely in charge of everything now, melted down the cofferdam until a channel had opened seventy feet wide. The rage of high water seemed to fly through the air before hitting the granite wall and exploding back into the river. In the Tree-Free Parking Lot, the assembled phalanges of the environmental movement were standing as one, standing on their chairs for a line of sight through a forest of elbows apexed with binoculars, framing Babbitt on a cell phone before the frothing river. The volume of the rapids grew. After the initial blowout of sediments, the thundering water turned white and the slicks were cordovan glass. The Kennebec River in Augusta, after a hundred and sixty-two years in the slammer, was walking.

That “forest of elbows apexed with binoculars” is inspired. The whole passage is inspired – quintessential McPhee action-writing. 

Segment three cuts back to the canoe trip down the liberated Kennebec. Evidence of the breaching is everywhere apparent. McPhee notes a concrete boat launch that had launched its last boat. “Its lower lip was many yards back from the river and much higher than the surface of the water.” “Broad shingle flats had become exposed here and there.” “Small hanging streams and small hanging falls were cutting fresh canyons to the river.” “Standing high in the river now like stockade towers were the rock-filled cribs of the log drives.” “An island, high and elongate, sat up like a warship on its hull of rock, with twenty-three towers leading to it and five away from its downstream end.” 

He points out that, in order for the Kennebec to be completely free, at least another hundred dams in its watershed above Augusta would have to be removed. Nevertheless, the removal of Edwards Dam is significant. He writes,

In the resurrected rapids of this stretch above Augusta, its fifteen miles seemed both modest and momentous. It was about the length of Manhattan Island. A lot of fish could spawn there. In its possibilities as a state park, its beauty and seclusion, it rallied the nineteenth century. From no river in the country of the Kennebec’s size or stature had a dam ever been removed. 

The last paragraph brings both journey and narrative to beautiful conclusion:

On the fresh current, we rounded a final bend. Down the long thoroughfare of water and trees we now saw – three and a half miles away and rising from mid-river like the blade of a gunsight – the bronze and granite Capitol of Maine. To left and right, above the trees, were the spires of two churches. With John’s father, Alexander McPhedran, we had scouted early in the morning for a place to end the trip, and, with some difficulty, had found one, about a quarter of a mile through the woods from a small roadside park. We had left a white-birch log on a rock to mark the spot. Seeing it now, a mile down, John McPhedran rummaged in his pack, removed a cell phone, and asked his father to pick us up. 

5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #3 "The Encircled River"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog

This is the third post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 and 9, 1977; Book I of McPhee’s wonderful Coming into the Country, 1977).

“The Encircled River” is one of McPhee’s most famous pieces, and deservedly so. It chronicles a nine-day canoe-and-kayak trip he took in August, 1975, with a five-man study team, down the Salmon and Kobuk Rivers in northwestern Alaska. The team is trying to determine whether the Salmon should become a national wild river – to be set aside with its immediate environs as unalterable wild terrain. 

The piece consists of eight untitled segments. In the first segment, the group is already five days into the trip. Here’s the opening paragraph:

My bandanna is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head and now and again 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 my 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 fish rod from the tines of a caribou rack (lashed there in mid-canoe to the duffel) and send a line flying toward 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.

That’s one of my favorite passages in all of literature. I love the use of the present tense. I love the first-person perspective. I love the detail, especially that lifting of the fishing rod “from the tines of a caribou rack.” I love the way temperature is tangibly indicated. McPhee not only tells us the river is cold (“The water is forty-six degrees”); he puts us in physical contact with it (“Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving.... Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good”). 

The next paragraph is equally transfixing. McPhee writes,

Paddling again, we move down long pools separated by short white pitches, looking to see whatever might appear in the low hills, in the cottonwood, in the white and black spruce – and in the river, too. Its bed is as distinct as if the water were not there. 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 their 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.

Like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins – what an incredible image! A double simile: river like sky; salmon like zeppelins. Looking over the side of the canoe, we see their oval shapes floating there. The sentence is brilliantly visual – the perfect finish to an extraordinarily evocative paragraph.

Segment one introduces us to four of the five-member study team: Bob Fedeler, Stell Newman, Pat Pourchot, and John Kauffmann (yes, this is the same John Kauffmann who was in “The Keel of Lake Dickey”). The fifth member, Jack Hession, doesn’t appear until segment five. McPhee says of Fedeler, “He is compact, sturdy, not particularly tall, with a wide forehead and intelligent brown eyes. He would resemble Sigmund Freud, if Sigmund Freud had been a prospector.” 

In another bravura passage in this segment, McPhee describes Kauffmann fishing:

Something in the general drift now has John Kauffmann on his feet and off to the river. He assembles his trout rod, threads its eyes. Six feet three, spare, he walks, in his determination, tilted forward, ten degrees from vertical, jaws clamped. He seems to be seeking reassurance from the river. He seems not so much to want to catch what may become the last grayling in Arctic Alaska as to certify that it is there. With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river. His shirt is old and red. There are holes in is felt hat and strips of spare rawhide around its crown. He agitates the settled fly. Nothing. Again he waves the line. He drops its passenger on the edge of fast water at the far side of the pool. There is a vacuum-implosive sound, a touch of violence at the surface of the river. We cheer. For two minutes, we wait it out while Kauffmann plays his fish. Adroitly, gingerly, he brings it in. With care, he picks it up. He then looks at us as if he is about to throw his tin star in the dust at our feet. Shame – for our triple-hooked lures, our nylon hawsers, our consequent stories of fished-out streams. He looks at his grayling. It is a twenty-five-ounce midget; but it will grow. He seems to feel reassured. He removes the fly, which has scarcely nicked the fish’s lips. He slips the grayling back to the stream. 

That “With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river” is very fine, as is “He agitates the settled fly,” and “There is a vacuum-implosive sound, a touch of violence at the surface of the river.” McPhee is a master describer.

Segment one ends with the group camping for the night at the confluence of the Kitlik and Salmon Rivers. McPhee writes,

I look up through the mesh of the tent window past spruce boughs and into the sky. Twilight sky. The sun is down. It is falling nine minutes earlier per day. In three months, it will have ceased to rise. Now though, in the dead of night, the sky is too bright for stars. I cannot quite read by the light at two.

Segment two tells about the Kobuk Valley National Monument proposal, the Alaska Statehood Act, and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which opened the way to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, but also provides for the preservation of some eighty million acres of “national-interest lands.” In this segment, the group travels to the mouth of the Salmon, where it joins the Kobuk. The men stop to fish. McPhee describes Pourchot fishing: 

He borrows Fedeler’s rod and sends the lure on its way. He reels. Nothing. He casts again. He reels. Nothing. Out in the river, there may be less water than salmon, but that is no guarantee that one will strike. Salmon do not feed on the spawning run. They apparently bite only by instinctive reflex if something flashes close before them. Pourchot casts again. Nothing. He casts again. The lure this time stops in the river as if it were encased in cement. Could be a boulder. Could be a submerged log. The lure seems irretrievably snagged – until the river erupts. Pourchot is a big man with a flowing red beard. He is well over six feet. Blonde hair tumbles across his shoulders. The muscles in his arms are strong from many hundreds of miles of paddling. This salmon, nonetheless, is dragging him up the beach. The fish leaps into the air, thrashes at the river surface, and makes charging runs of such thrust that Pourchot has no choice but to follow or break the line. He follows – fifty, seventy-five yards down the river with the salmon. The fish now changes plan and goes upstream. Pourchot follows. The struggle lasts thirty minutes, and the energy drawn away is almost half Pourchot’s. He wins, though, because he is bigger. The fish is scarcely larger than his leg. When, finally, it moves out of the water and onto the gravel, it has no hook in its mouth. It has been snagged, inadvertently, in the dorsal fin. Alaska law forbids keeping any sport fish caught in that way. The salmon must take the lure in its mouth. Pourchot extracts the hook, gently lifts the big fish in his arms, and walks into the river. He will hold the salmon right side up in the water until he is certain that its shock has passed and that it has regained its faculties. Otherwise, it might turn bottom up and drown.

That is quintessential McPhee – precise, vivid, rhythmic, kinetic. It’s one of my favorite passages of the piece.

In segment three, the group travels down the Kobuk. They see wolf tracks. They see a cow moose. They encounter forest Eskimos coming up the river in outboard-powered boats. McPhee discusses the Eskimos’ subsistence way of life, pointing out, among other things, their dependence on caribou: “They use the whole animal. They eat the meat raw and in roasts and stews. They eat greens from the stomach, muscles from the jaw, fat from behind the eyes. The hide goes into certain winter clothing that nothing manufactured can equal.” That “fat from behind the eyes” memorably reappears several paragraphs later in the form of a question. Describing the breakfast that he and the rest of the group are having at their campsite, McPhee writes,

Breakfast in the frying pan – freeze-dried eggs. If we were Kobuk people, one of us might go off into the watery tundra and find fresh eggs. Someone else might peel the bark from a willow. The bark would be soaked and formed into a tube with the eggs inside., and the tube would be placed in the fire. But this is not a group of forest Eskimos. These are legionaries from another world, talking “scenic values” and “interpretation.” These are Romans inspecting Transalpine Gaul. Nobody’s skin is going to turn brown on these eggs – or on cinnamon-apple-flavored Instant Quaker Oatmeal, or Tang, or Swiss Miss, or on cold pink-icinged Pop-Tarts with raspberry filling. For those who do not believe what they have just read, allow me to confirm it: in Pourchot’s breakfast bag are pink-icinged Pop-Tarts with raspberry filling. Lacking a toaster, and not caring much anyway, we eat them cold. They invite a question. To a palate without bias – the palate of an open-minded Berber, 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?

I nominate that last sentence as one of the most surreal, inspired lines McPhee has ever written. (And he’s written more than a few of them.) It makes me smile every time I read it.

Segment four is the key structural component of the entire piece. It’s both an ending and a beginning. It completes the present-tense narrative of the last four days of the trip. The group arrives in the river village of Kiana – the endpoint of their journey down the Salmon and the Kobuk. The trip seems done. But the narrative isn’t. In the breath of one sentence, time shifts, the narrative flashes back to day one and begins an account of the journey’s first four days. Here’s the sentence: “Children were fishing when we were here before.” Note the past tense. From here to the end of the piece, McPhee will write retrospectively. 

The remainder of segment four tells about the group’s helicopter ride from Kiana to the gravel bar on the upper Salmon River, where they intend to start their journey. The ride does not go well. The pilot loses his way. McPhee writes, 

He turned one-eighty and headed downstream. Spread over his knees was a Nome Sectional Aeronautical Chart, and he puzzled over it for a while, then he handed it to me. Maybe I could help figure out where we were. The map was quite wonderful at drawing straight lines between distant airstrips, but its picture of the mountains looked like calves’ brains over bone china, and the scale was such that the whole of the Salmon River was only six inches long. The chopper plowed on to the south. I held the map a little closer to my eyes, studying the blue veiny lines among the mountains. The ludicrousness of the situation washed over me. I looked back at Kauffmann and the others, who seemed somewhat confused. And small wonder. A map was being handed back forth between a man from New Jersey and a pilot from Louisiana who were amiss in – of all places – the Brooks Range. In a sense – in the technical sense that we had next to no idea where we were – we were lost.

Eventually, after much searching, with fuel running low, they find their landing spot. They unload their boats and gear. The helicopter takes off. McPhee writes, “Now we were alone between fringes of spruce by a clear stream where tundra went up the sides of mountains. This was, in all likelihood, the most isolated wilderness I would ever see, and that is how we got there.”

Segment five contains the dramatic high point of the piece – an encounter with a grizzly. It’s day two of the trip. The men are still encamped on the gravel bar, where the helicopter deposited them. They spend the morning assembling their kayaks. After lunch, they set off on foot for a look around. McPhee goes with Fedeler and Hession. They hike north up the river some miles and then up the ridges to the east. Making their way down a hill dense with blueberry bushes, they come upon a grizzly just ahead of them. McPhee writes,

Fedeler stopped walking. He touched my arm. He had in an instant become even more alert than he usually was, and obviously apprehensive. His gaze followed straight on down our intended course. What he saw there I saw now. It appeared to me to be a hill of fur. “Big boar grizzly,” Fedeler said in a near-whisper. 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 the grazing. Not berries alone but whole bushes were going into the bear. He was big for a barren-ground grizzly. The brown bears of Alaska (or grizzlies; they are no longer thought to be different) do not grow to the size they will reach on more ample diets elsewhere. The barren-ground grizzly will rarely grow larger than six hundred pounds.

McPhee’s description of the grizzly encounter is masterful. He weaves his response to the bear’s presence with arresting facts about what grizzlies are like, how they kill, what they eat:

If a wolf kills a caribou, and a grizzly comes along while the wolf is feeding on the kill, the wolf puts its tail between its legs and hurries away. A black bear will run from a grizzly, too. Grizzlies sometimes kill and eat black bears. The grizzly takes what he happens upon. He is an opportunistic eater. The predominance of the grizzly in his terrain is challenged by nothing but man and ravens. To frustrate ravens from stealing his food, he will lie down and sleep on top of a carcass, occasionally swatting the birds as if they were big black flies. He prefers a vegetable diet. He can pulp a moosehead with a single blow, but he is not always lusting to kill, and when he moves through his country he can be something munificent, going into copses of willow among unfleeing moose and their calves, touching nothing, letting it all breathe as before. He may, though, get the head of a cow moose between his legs and rake her flanks with the five-inch knives that protrude from the ends of his paws. Opportunistic. He removes and eats her entrails. He likes porcupines, too, and when one turns and presents to him a pygal bouquet of quills, he will leap into the air, land on the other side, chuck the fretful porpentine beneath the chin, flip it over, and with a swift ventral incision, neatly remove its body from its skin, leaving something like a sea urchin behind him on the ground. 

McPhee writes, 

Like pictures from pages riffled with a thumb, all of these things went through my mind there on the mountainside above the grazing bear. I confess that in one instant I asked myself, “Wha 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. I sensed that Fedeler and Hession were somewhat frightened, too. I would have been troubled if they had not been. Meanwhile the sight of the bear stirred me like nothing else the country could contain. What mattered was not so much the bear himself as what the bear implied. He was the predominant thing in that country, and for him to be in it at all meant that there had to be more country like it in every direction and more of the same kind of country all around that. He implied a world. He was an affirmation to the rest of the earth that his kind of place was extant.

This whole segment – from the men’s first sighting of the grizzly, to their retreat up the hill, to their long hike back to camp – is amazing! In detail after glorious detail, McPhee evokes a world that is “wild to the limits of the term.”

In segment six, it’s day three on the Salmon, and the group embark on their trip downriver: “Pool to riffle, pool to riffle, we rode a little and then got out and walked, painters in our hands. The boats beside us were like hounds on leashes, which now and then stopped and had to be dragged.”

In the afternoon, they stop to fish. McPhee describes catching an Arctic char:

I tossed a small Mepps lure across the stream, size zero, and bringing it back felt s 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. 

There are many wonderful touches here: the naming of the lure (“Mepps”); the immediacy (“now”); the fish’s action (“came thrashing from the water”), the detail (“hooking jaw,” “orange speckles,” “crimson glow”), the vivid figuration (“like naval ordnance, it shot across the stream”), the compelling first-person perspective (“I tossed,” “I took,” “I bent,” “I lowered”).  

The men move on downstream. They stop for the night below a bedrock pool. They eat steamed Arctic char. They see another bear:

Looking up from dinner, we saw a black bear, long and leggy, crossing a steep hillside at a slow lope. It stopped to graze for a time, and then, apropos of nothing, suddenly ran and took a crashing leap into a stand of willow and alder, breaking its way through, coming out the other side onto a high plain of pale green caribou moss.

Segment seven, and its onwards down the Salmon. McPhee and Kauffmann are paddling the double Klepper (“somewhat less maneuverable than a three-ton log”), which the group have dubbed Snake Eyes. Kauffmann talks about designating the Salmon as a national wild river. He favors locking it up for conservation purposes. He says, “This is the last big piece of magnificent mountain wilderness we have left. First it was the Appalachians, then the Rockies, then the Sierra Nevada, then Alaska, and this is the last part of Alaska. This is America’s ultimate wilderness; it goes no farther. This is our last opportunity to provide, admittedly in a contrived way, the chance to go adventuring in country so wild that valleys and mountains are without names.” 

They come to a curve in the river – “a bending chute with a cut bank on one side and an apron of gravel on the other. Over the cut bank a sweeper had recently fallen, a spruce whose trunk reached into the river. Its green boughs spread over the white water.” They try to skirt the sweeper, but end up hitting it. McPhee writes, 

Kauffmann was still reminding me that this was our last opportunity to save the final American wilderness when Snake Eyes bought the river. The thought occurred to me as I pitched head first into the rushing water that I had not often involuntarily overturned on a river trip, and that on almost all the occasions when I had the last thing I had seen on my way to the bottom was Kauffmann. Tact restrained me from mentioning this to him until he had come up out of the river. Meanwhile, I jumped to my feet. The water was waist deep, cold as a wine bucket. I retrieved Kauffmann’s hat. Under the gin-clear water, his head, with its radical economy of hair, looked like an onion. Snake Eyes was upside down. I wrenched it right side up, then took its painter and hurried out of the river. From the moment we spilled until I was standing on dry gravel, scarcely fifteen seconds went by. Kauffmann was soaked, but I was not. My rain gear had been drawn tight at the neck and had elastic cuffs. I was half wet – in harlequin patches, and not much on the chest or the back. A piece at a time, we floated our duffel out of Snake Eyes – sleeping bags, clothes, bags. Then we dumped out the water, repacked the duffel, and got back onto the river.

Segment eight concludes the piece, ending where segment one began. It contains another memorable bear encounter:

Rounding bends, we saw sculpins, a pair of great horned owls, mergansers, Taverner’s geese. We saw ravens and a gray jay. Coming down a long, deep, green pool, we looked toward the riffle at the lower end and saw an approaching grizzly. He was young, possibly four years old, and not much over four hundred pounds. He crossed the river. He studied the salmon in the riffle. He did not see, hear, or smell us. Our three boats were close together, and down the light current on the flat water we drifted toward the fishing bear.

He picked up a 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 his 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.

That “His brown fur rippled like a field under wind” is inspired. The whole passage is inspired – a superb piece of action description.

Writing this review, I strongly sense I’m assessing a classic. “The Encircled River” is built to last. Sublime subject, exquisite structure, ravishing writing – it’s triple bliss. 

5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #2 "The Keel of Lake Dickey"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog

This is the second post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “The Keel of Lake Dickey” (The New Yorker, May 3, 1976; included in McPhee's 1979 collection Giving Good Weight).

This piece chronicles McPhee’s 100-and-some-mile canoe trip down the wild, remote St. John River, in northern Maine. In late spring, 1975, he and seven others (Mike Moody, John Kauffmann, Tom Cabot, Lev and Dick Byrd, Dick Saltonstall, and Sam Warren) fly in three float planes from Greenville, Maine, and set down at the south end of Baker Lake. McPhee beautifully describes their flight:

We were brought in by air – in three float planes from Greenville, at the foot of Moosehead Lake. I was in the third plane. In the air, the two in front seemed to hang without motion, pontoons pendent – canoes tied to the pontoons. In the shallows of Moosehead we could see clearly the rocks of the bottom. There were whitecaps over the deeps. Off to the right, with more altitude, we saw Allagash Mountains, Caucomgomoc Lake, Chesuncook Lake, the West Branch of the Penobscot River, and beyond all, the Katahdin massif, aglint with ice and snow. Moving north-northwest, we flew about sixty miles over streams and forest, and set down at the south end of Baker Lake, downstream a few miles from the string of ponds that are the headwaters of the St. John River. 

That “pontoons pendent – canoes tied to the pontoons” is very fine, exemplifying McPhee’s eye for vivid detail. Note also his wonderful use of place names – Moosehead, Allagash, Caucomgomoc, Chesuncook, Penobscot, Katahdin. There’s poetry in those names!

The purpose of the trip? McPhee writes, “For us, just being out here – in this country, on this river – is the purpose of the journey.” 

The piece is structured in seven untitled segments. The first segment, in typical McPhee in medias res form, plunges us directly into the action. It’s May 28. The men are four days into their journey. They’re approaching Seven Islands, about to shoot Big Black Rapid. McPhee writes,

The rapid is beautiful, boulder, and bending – the forest rising steeply from the two sides. It is called the Big Black Rapid because it is near the mouth of the Big Black River, which flows into the St. John a mile downstream. There is nothing black about the rapid. It is blue and mostly white, running over big rocks and ledges, with standing waves on long diagonals, like ranges of hills. The wind is so still now it is tearing spray off the tops of the waves. The rapid curves left, then right. 

The men assess the rapid and plan their course:

The plan is that I will lead (paddling an eighteen-foot Grumman, with Mike Moody. John Kauffmann will follow [in a red Royalex canoe], with Tom Cabot. Lev and Dick Bird, in their fifteen-foot Grumman, will go next. And Dick Saltonstall, with Sam Warren, in a big E. M. White canoe with mahogany gunwales, will sweep.

McPhee describes their passage:

We shove off. One by one, the four canoes describe an easygoing, bobbing S down the rapid. The Byrds hit a rock and add a deep, tympanic bass to the contralto of the rapid, but they do not stick (as aluminum canoes too often will). No one else comes even close to buying the river. At the foot of the rapid, the aggregate water in all the canoes is maybe five or ten quarts.

That “The Byrds hit a rock and add a deep, tympanic bass to the contralto of the rapid” is superbly evocative. 

The second segment flashes back to the start of the trip – the flight to the south end of Baker Lake and the first night of camping. McPhee humorously describes an “equipment shootout” between him and Dick Saltonstall. He tells about shopping at L. L. Bean with John Kauffmann. Most notably, he introduces the piece’s major theme – the fate of the St. John River:

In Congress each year, a debate takes place about the fate of the St. John, and whether the Army Corps. Of Engineers can or cannot have another year’s funds for the advancement of a project that would backflood the river from a dam at Dickey, the first village one encounters after going downriver through the woods.

Segment two concludes with this beautiful passage:

The shadow continued to cover the moon until just a small brightness, like a spot of yolk, remained; and then that, too, was gone. In the crystal sky, the moon was totally eclipsed, and appeared to be hanging there in parchment. When the last of its bright light was cut off, millions and millions of additional stars seemed to come falling into the sky. The Milky Way became as white as a river. Sam Warren said skies were like that up here on clear, moonless nights in winter. With the passing of the shadow and the return of the light, the stars of lesser magnitude evanesced as quickly as they had come into view. The air was down to freezing now. In the morning, there was frost over the ground, mist curling from the lake, and ice solid in our cups. 

God, I wish I could write like that. McPhee is known as a meticulous structuralist. But he’s much more than that. His rhythm is impeccable; his word choices are inspired.

In the third segment, the group paddles down the river to Nine Mile Bridge. McPhee describes the river, developing his theme:

The St. John is the only Maine river of any size that has not been dammed. From its highest source – First St. John Pond, above Baker Lake – the St. John goes free for two hundred miles, until it breaks out into Canada, where it has been both dammed and, in places, polluted on its way through New Brunswick to the sea. It ends, incidentally, with a flourish, a remembrance of its upper waters – a phenomenal rapid. The phenomenon is that the rapid turns around and thunders back toward the source. The white water flows alternately in two directions – down with the river and up with the tide.

I know that rapid well, or at least I feel I do. It’s known as the Reversing Falls. For a couple of years when I was a kid, my family and I lived in Saint John, on Douglas Avenue, in a house that overlooked the river just above the Falls. And before that, we lived on Gibson Street, Fredericton, a couple of blocks from the St. John. And later, when I was a teen, my family bought a cottage on Oromocto Lake. The drive to the Lake took us along the St. John from Fredericton to Longs Creek. I feel a close connection with the St. John, even though I’ve never been on it in a boat. But the St. John that I know is the lower part, the developed part. The St. John that McPhee writes about in his piece is the “natural” upper section that runs through Maine.

In the fourth segment, McPhee and his companions paddle from Nine Mile to Seven Islands, where they spend the rest of the day fishing. They join a couple of other campers there – Richard Barringer and Herbert Hartman, who, together, constitute Maine’s Bureau of Public Lands. McPhee is impressed with Hartman’s canoeing prowess. He writes,

He had a black-spruce setting pole, full of spring and glistening with boiled linseed oil, and with it he could move his big twenty-footer at a handsome clip upstream, even against a stiff current. Standing in the stern, the twelve-foot pole in his hands, he looked like a gondolier, with the difference that he was jabbing his pole against the bottom of the pure St. John and not sculling the cess of Venice. To move the canoe, he reached forward, set the pole (point on the bottom), and then seemed to climb it like a gymnast on a rope. Sometimes – waxing fancy – he twirled it, end over end, on the recovery. To correct his course, he now and again poled behind his back.

Also in this segment, McPhee sounds his theme again – the destruction of the river, if Dickey Dam is built:

In the low light and mists of that early morning, Seven Islands was even more beautiful than it had been the afternoon and evening before. The bottoms of clouds were touching the plains of grass. I thought of all the water that had fallen in the night, and of the engineered flood that would stop the river. Seven Islands, not far from the head of Dickey Lake, would at times be under fifteen feet of water. At other times, as the dam made its electricity and coped with the river’s irregular contributions of water, the surface of the lake would go down as much as forty vertical feet, and Seven Islands would then emerge, like the engulfed cathedral, coated with mud.

In segment five, the group continues downriver, heading for Chimenticook Stream:

A bend or two, and Sam Warren sees a yearling moose. He gets out of the canoe and goes after it, on a dead run up the riverbank. He learns that he is slower than the moose. He wanted to ride it. We have seen otters, ospreys, black ducks, mergansers, loons. No bears. There is ice this morning in the river – small chunks from big pieces on the bank, near trees with shredded bark. It is sixty hours to June. 

In segment six, they reach Big Rapid. McPhee sets the scene:

The four canoes stop on the left bank, and we study the rapid. It does not look forbidding or, for the most part, fierce. It will not be like crossing a turnpike on foot. It is a garden of good choices. Overwhelmingly, it is a spectacular stretch of river – big and white for a full mile before continuing white, it bends from view. The river narrows here by about a third, pressed between banks of rock, but it is still hundreds of feet wide – big boulders, big submarine ledges, big holes, big pillows, big waves, big chutes, big eddies. Big Rapid. 

The men tackle the rapid in two stages. Here’s stage one: 

And so we’re in it. We make choices, and so does the river. We shout a lot above the roar. Words coordinate the canoe. My eye is certainly off the mark. I underestimated the haystacks. They are about as ponderous as, for this loaded canoe, they can safely be. I look steeply down at Moody in the bottoms of the troughs. But the route we picked – generally to the left, with some moves toward the center, skirting the ledges – is, as Kauffmann would say, solving the problem. We are not playing with the Big Rapid. We are tiptoeing in and hoping it won’t wake up. Under the slanting birch, we swing into the eddy and stop. Two. Three. Four. Everybody home, and we bail many quarts.

Here's stage two:

The run this time is more difficult – the bow kicking high into the air and returning to the surface in awkward slaps. We dig for momentum, sidestep rocks, but not nimbly, for the canoe is sluggish with shipped water. Anxious to get into the calm below the maple, I try a chute that is just about as wide as the beam of the canoe. It’s a stupid and almost unsuccessful move, and I get out of the canoe and climb up on a boulder to wave the others around the chute. 

All four canoes make it through without incident. Standing on shore, looking back up river, the men see another canoe coming through the rapid, bouncing in the waves. Half a mile above them, it rolls over and begins to wash down. McPhee and his companions run up the bank, but as they get nearer the capsized canoe, they realize there’s nothing they can do. It’s near the middle of the rapid. The two paddlers are afloat and are hanging on. McPhee’s group watches them helplessly. Eventually the two men and their canoe wash downriver to a place where McPhee and his party can haul them out. The incident underscores the danger of the rapid and what can happen if it's misread.

In the seventh and concluding segment, the men complete their journey, camping on Gardner Island, where the Allagash River enters the St. John. Facing upriver, McPhee describes the scene and artfully sounds his theme for the final time: 

The river is framed in hills, the one on the right rising steeply some eight hundred feet above the St. John, the one on the left set back a mile from the river across the low, marshy ground at the end of the Allagash. The scene is a big one, but nothing of the size of what the imagination now superimposes on it. Outlined in the air between the hills and above the rivers is the crestline of Dickey Dam. It is more than three hundred feet above us, and it reaches from hill to hill. The dam is two miles wide. It plugs the St. John. It seals the Allagash marshland. Smaller than Oroville, bigger than Aswan, it is the twelfth largest dam on earth. It contains what were once Aroostook mountains (Township Fifteen, Range Nine), blasted to shards and reassembled here. It’s long downstream slope – the classic profile of the earth-fill dam – moves up before us to the crest. If we could put our canoes on our backs and portage up that slope, we’d see fifteen miles of whitecaps in the wind – a surging sea, but just a bay of Lake Dickey, whose main body, bending around a point to the left, reaches fifty-seven miles over the improved St. John. Paddles dipping, we fly the Big Rapid at three hundred feet, and, where the native trout have departed, we fish – thirty-five fathoms above Chimenticook Stream – for stocked Confederate bass. Chimenticook Bay is a five-mile reach, and Big Black Bay is thirty. In all, the lake bottom includes some ninety thousand acres of stumps, and, because Lake Dickey is one to three miles wide, no bridge is contemplated or economically feasible, two hundred thousand acres of standing timber are isolated from the rest of Maine. The lake fills up in spring, and the water is mined for power during the rest of the year, gradually revealing – along three hundred and fifty miles of shore – thirty thousand acres of mud. From the dam, and through the St. John-Allagash north Maine woods, runs a transmission line, continuing for four hundred and fifty miles to southern New England, and carrying seven hundred and twenty-five megawatts of electricity for two and a half hours a day. That’s all. That is the purpose of the Dickey Dam. It is a soupçon, but anything more would drain the lake.

It's an appalling vision. It’s also a polemical tour de force, vividly imagining the scale of destruction (“ninety thousand acres of stumps,” “thirty thousand acres of mud”), putting us squarely there on the crest of the dam, looking out at “fifteen miles of whitecaps in the wind.” 

Art is in the details. My summary of this remarkable piece doesn’t do it justice. It omits dozens of McPhee’s felicitous touches, e.g., his description of Hartman fishing (“Hartman dropped anchor occasionally, picked up a bamboo rod with an English reel, and began to massage the air with sixty feet of line”), his portrait of Tom Cabot (“Listening to him is like listening to a ballgame on the radio, and in the canoe he makes the hours fly”), his observation on drinking rum in the rain (“Certainly, gin has good loft and weather repellence. But this rum – a hundred and fifty-one proof – is watertight”). 

“The Keel of Lake Dickey” is a great canoe trip down a great river. It's also a perfect illustration of the use of narrative as a subtle form of argument. McPhee doesn’t rail at the dam builders. He simply shows the magnificent beauty of the upper St. John and what would be lost if the Dickey Dam were built. It’s a powerful piece of advocacy. Apparently, it was effective. Three years after the piece appeared in The New Yorker, the U.S. House Committee on Public Works voted to kill the project. 

5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #1 "The Survival of the Bark Canoe"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy's Blog

This is the first post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” (The New Yorker, February 24 & March 3, 1975).

This superb piece chronicles McPhee’s one-hundred-and-fifty-mile canoe trip through the North Maine Woods in August, 1974. He travels with four others – Henri Vaillancourt, Vaillancourt’s friends Rick and Mike Blanchette, and McPhee’s friend Warren Elmer – in two bark canoes. The canoes were made by Vaillancourt, a young man in his mid-twenties, who is a master builder of bark canoes. 

The piece unfolds in twelve sections. In the first two, McPhee visits Vaillancourt at his home in Greenville, New Hampshire, and observes him building a canoe. Here’s his description of Vaillancourt shaping the stempiece, the part that establishes the profile of the bow or the stern:

He plunged the laminated end of the piece into a bucket of water and left it there for a while, and then he built up the fire with scraps from the floor. In a coffee can he brought water to a boil. He poured it slowly over the laminations, bathing them, bathing them again. Then he lifted the steaming cedar in two hands and bent it. The laminations slid upon one another and formed a curve. He pondered the curve. It was not enough of a curve, he decided. So he bent the piece a little more. “There’s an awful lot of it that’s just whim,” he said. “You vary the stempiece by whim.” He liked what he saw now, so he reached for a strip of basswood bark, tightly wound it around the curve in the cedar, and tied it off. The basswood bark was not temporary. It would stay there, and go into the canoe. Bow or stern, the straight and solid part of the stempiece would run down from the tip, them the laminated curve would sweep inward, establishing the character of the end – and thus, in large part, of the canoe itself.

I relish descriptions like that – descriptions of process. McPhee is a master of them. In his hands, they’re like prose poems. This piece features several of them.

In Vaillancourt’s yard, McPhee sees two completed canoes. He writes,

Their bark, smooth and taut, was of differing shades of brown, trellised with dark seams. I guess I had expected something a little rough, rippled, crude, asymmetrical. Their color was pleasing. Turn them over – their ribs, thwarts, and planking suggested cabinetwork. Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable. In the sunlight of that cold November morning, they were the two most beautiful canoes I had ever seen. 

Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable – I love that line. As McPhee points out, Vaillancourt’s canoes are modeled on the canoes of the Malecites: 

So Henri Vaillancourt builds Malecite canoes. Before all other design factors, he cares most about the artistic appearance of the canoes he builds, and he thinks the best-looking were the canoes of the Malecites. The Malecites lived in New Brunswick and parts of Maine. Vaillancourt builds the Malecite St. John River Canoe and the Malecite St. Lawrence Canoe. He builds them with modifications though.

At the end of section two, Vaillancourt mentions that he’s planning a canoe trip in Maine – down the Penobscot River and on to the Allagash lakes. McPhee asks if he can go with him. Vaillancourt agrees, but adds a condition: “Bring your own food.” It’s a hint of another side of Vaillancourt, an unattractive side, one that emerges more fully on the trip and nearly ruins it.

True to form, McPhee doesn’t start his account of the canoe trip at the beginning. Instead, he plunges in, in medias res: “It is five-fifteen in the morning, August 12th, and Henri is up splitting wood.”

Incidentally, that mention of the date (August 12) is the only indication in the piece of when this trip occurred. There’s no mention of the year. The piece appeared in The New Yorker in two parts – February 24 and March 3, 1975. My guess is that the trip occurred in August of the previous year. This is consistent with what McPhee says about Vaillancourt’s age. He says that Vaillancourt built his first canoe in 1965, when he was fifteen, and that he’s “in his mid-twenties now.”

The crew put their canoes into the West Branch of the Penobscot River. They paddle down the Penobscot to Chesuncook Lake. They camp on Gero Island. The move north on the northernmost arm of Chesuncook Lake. They go up Umbazooksus Stream. They cross Umbazooksus Lake. They portage at Mud Pond Carry. They paddle the Allagash Lakes – Chamberlain, Eagle, Churchill – fighting the north wind all the way. 

Here's a taste of the group’s growing frustration with Vaillancourt, particularly with his insistence on pushing onward even though neither canoe is very good in heavy wind: 

We dig into the lake. We paddle and bail, bail and paddle – draining the bilge with drinking cups. We are struggling to get to the north end, about three miles away, and gambling that the wind will not rise to an even higher level before we are in the lee of the north-end woods. Why do we need these miles now? Why does Henri have this compulsion to move? Is he Patton? Sherman? Hannibal? How could he be, when the only regimentation he can tolerate is the kind he creates as he goes along? These are thoughts not composed in tranquility but driven into the mind by the frontal wind. Why do we defer to him? Why do we look to his decisions? Is it only because he made the canoes, because the assumption is that he knows what is best for them and knows what they can do and ought not to do? His judgment draws attention to itself, right enough. On the Penobscot River, he went “out for a spin” in heavy, gray dusk and was gone long after dark – much longer than he wished or intended. What was he doing? He was struggling to pick his way through boulders and up a set of minor rapids he could not see. A camper on the riverbank, that same day, asked him if his canoe was not too low in the freeboard for paddling on open lakes, and he said, “Not really. They don’t really ride low. You can design a canoe to do anything.” But here he is on Chamberlain Lake, bailing six inches of water from between his knees and whisking with his paddle, while Warren, like a tractor, pulls the canoe. A suspicion that has been growing comes out in the wind: Henri’s expertise stops in “the yard”; out here he is as green as his jerky.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. McPhee has a caustic side; it seldom appears in his writing. But once it’s triggered, as it is in this piece, watch out!  

Notice, in the above passage, McPhee’s use of the present tense (“We dig into the lake. We paddle and bail, bail and paddle – draining the bilge with drinking cups”) – one of his favorite techniques for conveying immediacy. It’s one of my favorite aspects of his writing.

The five men make it to the end of Chamberlain Lake. They portage half a mile to Eagle Lake. The wind and the white caps are even worse there than they were on Chamberlain. Their shore location is an ugly one – the junk-littered site of a former logging track. McPhee describes it:

Unfortunately, this is a bad place to spend a night, because the mechanized loggers gave it a century’s fouling and the century isn’t over yet. Rust is everywhere – rusty spikes, rusty hunks of the conveyor. To accommodate incoming logs, landfill was shoved into the lake, so the shore is artificial and swampy and strewn with boulders and still jagged with the corpses of water-killed trees.

They stay there and wait for the wind to decline. Three hours later, the wind seems to calm down. Vaillancourt decides it’s time to move. It’s at this point that disaster strikes. McPhee vividly describes the moment:

With everything aboard, the three of us prepare to step in. We do not know that two iron spikes set in timber, stand upright underwater, the tip of each less than an inch from the underside of the floating canoe. We step in, one at a time, and we give the canoe a shove. It does not move. Water spurts upward in fountains, fast enough to swamp us instantly. 

Jumping out, we shout to Henri. We unload the canoe, lift it ashore, and roll it over. Rick is struggling to his distress. His canoe, a treasure to him, has two ugly holes in it, large enough and ragged enough to make one wonder how it can continue the trip. Henri, examining the wounds, curses Rick for negligence, for irresponsibility, for failure as custodian of a bark canoe. Rick does not try to demur.

Now, all at once, Henri stops his harangue and changes utterly. The man who has been pouting, sucking grass, and cursing the wind all afternoon is suddenly someone else – is now, in a sense, back in his yard, his hands on a torn canoe. The lacerations are broad., and the bark around them is in flaps with separating layers. “Make a fire,” he says, and Warren and I off move off for wood. “Rick, Mike, get bark. Get strips of bark. A cut a green stick.”

Vaillancourt performs remarkable surgery on the canoe. McPhee describes his performance in detail. Here’s a sample:

It was now too dark for him to see. He calls for the flashlight, and I get it from my pack and shine it on the canoe as he works. He removes the pot from the fire and – with a flat stick – paints the entire damaged area with pitch while the Blanchettes, one at each end, hold the canoe level. Henri pulls out the tail of his shirt and cuts it off. It is broadcloth, and he cuts out of it a circular piece, which he presses down onto the pitch. Calling for the pot again, he paints on more pitch, until the cloth is completely covered. Then, as the pitch cools, he presses it repeatedly with his thumb, licking his thumb as he goes along to keep it from sticking. The finished patch is a black circle, about six inches in diameter. It is in the center of the bottom of the canoe. “At home I’ll cut an eye of bark and put a rim around it,” Henri says. “Then the patch, you know, will look better.”

The next morning, the men load their canoes and head out. The lake is calm. They’re almost across when the wind suddenly reappears. Waves rise quickly. McPhee writes,

Henri has begun to bail with exceptional vigor. His canoe is showing trouble – taking in more water than before. The land widens again to either side, and we move onto Churchill Lake, where the waves are as high and the wind as strong as they were at any time on Chamberlain. The lake inclines to the northeast, and the wind is quartering on us now. A thousand yards out, Henri turns to face it. He cannot take even the small amount of extra water that comes with quartering waves. His canoe is filling up. Racing a serious leak, he and Warren cut straight through the wind. Ahead of them is a strip of sand-and-pebble beach. Bailing as they go, they make it. We are two and a half hours, and nine miles, from breakfast – not bad against a rising head wind and with another sick canoe.

The leak is due to a flaw in the canoe’s construction: 

A longitudinal seam connecting two pieces of bark below the waterline has broken its sewing, and a gap has opened. When he made the canoe, he sewed that area too close to the edge of the bark, and the root stitching has now broken through to the edge. It is a wonder the canoe did not founder.

Again, Vaillancourt is able to make the repair. McPhee describes his procedure beautifully. Here’s an excerpt:

Henri takes a close look at the position of the break in the seam and is pleased to find that it is directly under a rib. “Good,” he says. “The repair won’t show.” And he taps the rib aside. His awls are at home, but he has picked up a nail somewhere, and he uses it now to bore holes through the planking and the bark. The root is soon moving through the planking and out through the bark and back again in a set of cobbler’s stitches – Henri reaching around the canoe, hugging it, to draw the sewing tight. He is sewing not only bark to bark (near the original seam) but also bark to planking, to give the repair increased authority. When the sewing is finished and tied off, bright sutures mar the planking, but Henri taps the rib back in, and – as he said it would – it completely hides the job.

The expedition continues via lake, portage, and stream to remote Allagash Lake. They paddle toward the lake’s south end. In one of my favorite passages of the piece, McPhee describes the scene:

On the water, in the post-dawn light, the canoes slide across a mirror so nearly perfect that the image could be inverted without loss of detail. The lake is absolutely still, and mist thickens its distance and subdues in gray its islands and circumvallate hills. Warren and Henri are perhaps a hundred feet farther out than we are, and appear to be gliding through the sky: Henri’s back straight, his hand moving forward on the grip of his paddle, his dark knitted cap on his head, his profile French and aquiline; Warren under the bright tumble of hair, his back bending. Their canoe was alive in the forest only months ago, and now on the lake it is a miracle of beauty, of form and symmetry, of dark interstitial seams in mottled abstractions of bark.

We’re in the final chapter of the piece now. It’s been quite a trip! And it’s not over yet. From Allagash Lake, the group has to go another twenty miles to get to the roadhead at Caucomgomoc Lake. Three of the twenty miles are grueling portage. Henri behaves miserably. He falls in the mud. He curses McPhee for failing to guide him. He’s terse and angry. On Caucomgomoc Lake, he plows his canoe directly into the waves. McPhee writes,

We round the last bend and swing into Caucomgomoc. It is two miles wide, and we have about six miles to go – to its far, northwestern corner. Coming directly at us across the lake are the highest waves we have seen yet, driven by a western wind. Henri, in his own drive for the finish, moves straight out onto the water and begins to plow headlong for the farther shore. His caution – what there was of it on Eagle and Chamberlain – is gone. To me, it seems a certainty that we are going to swamp, that we will complete the day with a long, slow swim, dragging the canoes to shore. I check my boots, my pack, to make sure they are firmly tied. I am ready to shrug and see what happens. Warren, however, is not. Having absorbed Henri in silence for something like a hundred and fifty miles, he now turns suddenly and shouts at the top of his lungs, “You God-damned lunatic, head for shore!” The canoes turn, and head for shore.

It's an unforgettable scene. Writing about it thirty-seven years later, in a piece titled “Editors & Publishers” (The New Yorker, July 2, 2012), McPhee discloses that his description of the incident isn’t quite accurate. What Warren Elmer really said was “You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!” For the 1975 piece, to get it published in The New Yorker, edited at that time by the finicky William Shawn, McPhee had to tone down the profanity slightly.

My summary of “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” outlines the main stages of its journey, but fails to do justice to its artistry. The piece is structured like a bark canoe. The center thwart is the trip; the ribs are the many topics that McPhee touches on along the way, e.g., loons, Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, birch bark, the history of the fur trade, voyageurs, James Dickey’s Deliverance, deer, log-driving, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm’s The Penobscot Man, freeze-dried food. Here, for example, is his wonderful description of the cry of the loon:

But it is with another sound – a long cry in the still of the night – that the loon authenticates the northern lake. The cry is made with the neck stretched forward, and it is a sound that seems to have come up a tube from an unimaginably deep source – hardly from a floating bird. It is a high, resonant, single unvaried tone that fades at the end toward a lower register. It has caused panic, because it has been mistaken for the cry of a wolf, but it is far too ghostly for that. It is detached from the earth. The Crees believed that it was the cry of a dead warrior forbidden entry to Heaven. The Chipewyans heard it as an augury of death. Whatever it may portend, it is the predominant sound in this country. Every time the loon cry comes, it sketches its own surroundings – a remote lake under stars so bright they whiten clouds, a horizon jagged with spruce.

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of McPhee’s best. 

On the Horizon: 5 McPhee Canoe Trips

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy's Blog

In homage to one of my all-time favorite New Yorker writers, John McPhee, I’m launching a new series – an appreciation of five of his best pieces, each of which is about a canoe trip he took.

The five pieces are “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” (February 24 & March 3, 1975), “The Keel of Lake Dickey” (May 3, 1976), “The Encircled River” (May 2 & 9, 1977), “Farewell to the Nineteenth Century” (September 27, 1999), and “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (December 15, 2003). 

I’ll focus on one piece each month, examining what it’s about, how it’s made, and why I’m drawn to it. A new series then – “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – starting April 7, 2024.