Homage to Hoagland: "Tiger Bright"

This is the third post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Tiger Bright” (included in Hoagland’s 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River).

Hoagland loved circuses. He worked in one for a few months in the spring of 1951, when he was eighteen. The experience made a lasting impression: see “Calliope Times” (The New Yorker, May 22, 2000; chapter 3 of his 2001 memoir Compass Points). In “Tiger Bright,” he writes about circus tigers and their trainers. The trainer he most admires is Gunther Gebel-Williams, “who constitutes a circus all by himself.” Hoagland calls him “the best animal trainer alive.” 

Hoagland’s descriptions of Gunther’s tiger act are extraordinary. For example:

Gunther’s tigers are mostly males, because a male, though surly and slow, is bigger – “more tiger,” as he says, measuring with his arms. They smell like rye bread smeared with Roquefort cheese. He chants and sings like Glenn Gould as he works with them, swinging back and forth, drawing murmuring rumbles and air-blast roars. Tigers growl softly but roar far more explosively than lions do. He spreads his arms wide so the animals have both of them to keep track of, as well as watching his face; it’s like having two assistants in the ring. He holds his whips in one hand, butt and lash reversed, and pets tiger chins with the other, grinning like a lapsed angel, a satyr – it’s a lean V face, the flat planes cut for mischief and glee, or a big-eyed lemur’s, a tree-dweller’s face. Singing and chattering, he composes their ladylike lunges into a fluttering of stripes, touching his forehead with his fingers in a Hindu salute to acknowledge applause, and kneels theatrically while the tigers sit. Throwing sawdust on their turds so that he won’t slip, he pitches his whip like a jokester, his crucifix bouncing on his bare chest, his eyes big and round, organizing them into a jungle trot. They look bulky as bulls, but when he bats them they rise into a pussy pose, paws up. “Ziva!” he calls, running to one, mimicking the twitch of her white cheeks and black mouth, and stroking her rump. “Hubblebay!” he says, and they all revolve. The band accelerates into a keynote of victory.

And:

Maybe the loveliest moment is when Gunther simply has them walk: not a feat many trainers would consider exciting or could even achieve by the adversary technique. Two leave their pedestals and promenade as they might alongside a water hole. He induces another pair to join them – but counterposed – the two pairs passing in the center of the cage. Then he gets the other four to join in, crisscrossing as in Chinese checkers before lining up in formation like the spokes of a wheel. Round and round they slink, keeping abreast, looking up at him, delaying behind the band to exercise their claws (tigers never “march”).

And this beauty – my favorite of the piece:

Bidding this group good-bye, he welcomes a middle-aged, equable tiger, redder than most, and fluffing and scratching it, introduces two elephants, an African with tusks and an Indian one without. The Indian voices its aversion in squeals, the African is indifferent to the tiger, having perhaps inherited know feelings about it one way or the other. The tiger springs to the howdah that each of them carries, down to the ground and up again, then leaps between them, back and forth, finally mounting a platform near the roof of the cage, and jumps again onto the African’s back. Gunther directs all this choreography only by words, sitting at his ease on the ring curbing and watching. The elephants and tiger mount three pedestals and rotate quietly as he talks to them; he tugs on the African’s tusks and feeds it a loaf of Italian bread. The band plays traditional Spartan brass, the tiger mounts the African elephant again, and so does Gunther, his face in a Pan-like grin. He sits on the tiger, and leaning over, tugs its tufted chin, rubs his eyes and lips, and has it roar elegantly into his face. Then he and the tiger drop down to the ground, the elephants leave the cage, and he fondles the cat, tickling its black lips and its orange rump. Then he sits lightly astride its hips and rides it across the stage at a lumbering gallop, a sight not often seen.

Wow! Wow! Wow! A tour de force of evocative writing! Hoagland unfurls detail after amazing detail. The explosive roars. The fluttering stripes. Gunther’s crucifix “bouncing on his bare chest.” He even tells us what the big cats smell like: “They smell like rye bread smeared with Roquefort cheese.” Hoagland is an inspired describer. “Tiger Bright” exemplifies his art magnificently.

Homage to Hoagland: "Knights and Squires"

This is the second post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Knights and Squires: For Love of the Tugs” (included in Hoagland’s 1970 collection The Courage of Turtles).

This exuberant piece is an account of a day Hoagland spends aboard the tug Teresa Moran, “a new, 4290-horsepower, round-the-clock boat which had just changed crews, as it does every other day.” 

He introduces us to the crew: Captain Biagi (“Biagi’s back hurt because he’d been raking fertilizer into his lawn the day before; he’s peppy, talkative, competent, clever, and lives in East Brunswick, New Jersey”); co-captain Ray Carella (“Carella, who started on the Erie Canal at sixteen as a deckhand, now lives in East Meadow, Long Island, but is a gaunter, less assured, somber man”); Ture Eklund, deckhand (“a soft-spoken, civilized fellow who lives in Westchester County and builds model boats”); Walter Anglim, deckhand (“a raw-boned, rugged American sort”); Tom Rasmussen, engineer (“young, gangly, and energetic”); Joe Gallant, engineer (“a husky, hard-headed old customer”); and Candy Coelho, cook (“a Portuguese who is a veteran of forty-four years on the tugs, though his tightly smooth face doesn’t show it”). 

Hoagland’s account begins at noon with the Teresa Moran helping the ocean liner United States get underway from its slip in the North River:

The United States, though the biggest of ships, is not a particularly memorable proposition among all the tasks that come to a tug. We were helped by the Esther Moran, which tied onto the stem: we were at the bow, with Carella in the wheelhouse. Captain Biagi, on the ship’s bridge, gave his directions by walkie-talkie, each tug answering with its peep whistle to conform that the order was understood. Two longshoremen cast the hawsers off, and the ship, its engines reversed, provided its own motive power, while the Teresa and Esther kept it clear of the pier. Especially at the Manhattan piers, which are finger wharfs, built at right angles to the river, undocking a ship is a great deal simpler than docking it. The ship has been moored bow-in, so the tug which is at the bow only acts as a rudder as the ship backs away. In a kind of a dance, the Teresa nudged first one side of the stem, then the other – the stem looming overhead as sharp as a blade. There were acres of black steel plating, rivets in twisting patterns, and the two anchors like a whale’s eyes. The ship blasted its whistle to warn any traffic on the river and in no time it had backed into the current whereupon the two tugs pushed it around ninety degrees to head towards the sea. Compared to the rigamarole of warping a big ship into its slip, this was as easy as kicking your shoes off.

The Teresa’s next job is to go around Lower Manhattan and up the East River to an oil depot at 138th Street in the East Bronx to pilot the Liberian tanker St. Grigorousa:

A silent back stretch, 138th Street is beyond Hellgate Bridge, off Sunken Meadows and by North Brothers Island, where the planes sweep low every thirty seconds to land at LaGuardia Airport. The St Grigorousa, scruffy, patch-painted, offered no problems, except that our tug in maneuvering got careless and snapped a few pilings on an adjoining dock. The Greeks on the ship watched this little miscalculation with the attention which seamen of different nationalities bestow on each other’s blunders. Anglim had had trouble throwing a line up on deck, and that interested them, too. 

While accompanying the St. Grigorousa downstream, they see the Marie Moran, the Patricia Moran, and the Esther Moran pushing the broad side of a lumber boat, the Seamar from Coos Bay, Oregon, which had managed to draw parallel with its pier but was unable to approach closer. The dispatcher tells them to go to its assistance quickly. Hoagland writes,

Without waiting for Biagi to come off the ship, we swung away, and putting our bow amidships on the Seamar, shoved full ahead for what amounted to nearly an hour. Our extra horsepower did stop the drifting, but then no more progress was made, though the four tugs shifted position and pushed as hard as they could. First the outflowing tide had been the villain, but soon it was just a case of the ship being so heavily loaded that her keel was touching the bottom; we were trying to push her into a list sufficient to bring her deck close to the dock where the cranes would be able to unload her. It was tedious business; the tug captains talked back and forth on the radio and talked to the pilot, who was from the Patricia.

Eventually the Teresa leaves the other three tugs shouldering the Seamar and heads for Governor’s Island to pick up Biagi, who’s been deposited on a small barge boat called the Lester. On this mission, there’s nearly an accident:

A German freighter, the Hilde Mittman, was travelling beside us as we entered the curve that the East River makes near Delancey Street. At the same time, however, a tug called the Carol Moran was coming upriver, as well as a Penn Central Railroad tug which was roped between two unwieldly carfloats. The Hilde was outside of us and signaled them both to go outside her – or, in other words, closer to Brooklyn – but the Carol swerved inside instead, between the Hilde Mittman and us. The Hilde had to veer toward the railroad tug suddenly, and the railroad tug was almost forced into a pier on the Brooklyn side of the river – trying to avoid a collision, she reversed engines and swung dangerously sideways, and the bow lines on one of the carfloats broke. The Carol went on, the Hilde went on, but we lingered a moment or two to see whether she needed help.

The Teresa’s next job is to help a McAllister tug sail the freighter Fraternity from Pier 1 in the Erie Basin. Hoagland describes the trip:

We passed a good many ships in berths on the way: the Alamahdi, the Concordia Lago, the Lexa Maersk, the Lichtenfels. A paint-company launch puttered by, towing rafts and scaffolding; also a union launch collecting dues from the barge and lighter men whom it encountered. The sun had come out, the weather was warming up genially. Tugboats ride very low in the water, with the stubby bow pushing waves that are higher than the decks. It was a lovely, foamy, noisy trip. Standing on the fantail, I had the sense I was aquaplaning, a feeling of victory. “How are you doing – meditating?” asked Eklund.

They guide the Fraternity out of its slip and out of Erie Basin without difficulty. I love this passage:

It’s always a sharply focused instant when a ship separates from the tugs. Water slashed in as the gap opened; the wind seemed to blow harder, no longer blocked by the ship, and it was an ocean wind. For the first time, the ship’s screw kicked up a deep, worldly froth, a green wake, and the Fraternity pointed away, heaving us where we were. 

The next job is across the Upper Bay at Pier F in Jersey City. Hoagland writes,

The Baltic Sea (Goteberg) was our new eight o’clock ship. Eklund heaved up the throwing line, which has a ball on the end so that it will hang over the ship’s rail until it’s retrieved. Since the ship was white, he put a white cloth over our bow, where we would rub paint. Up on deck the silent Swedes with their beards and curly blonde hair and muted manner looked down at us, though their captain was pacing restlessly. We waited three quarters of an hour while they finished swinging cargo aboard and setting the hatches to rights. Tugboatmen kill these odd bits of time with cards, and tying up all over the harbor, they know little waterfront stores everywhere which can be reached by froghopping over a series of pilings and climbing a fence or two. Then Carella, as pilot, performed a simple and classic soft-shoe undocking from Pier F “into the stream,” as they say, scrambling down to the Teresa again while the Swedes watched. The ship had its running lights on, green on the starboard and red on the port, and the uncountable lights of Manhattan were emerging in all their bravado as the dusk darkened. The water churned between ship and tug; the sea breeze struck us as we slid clear of the ship – the mystically warm-and-cold wind of May.

The last job Teresa performs before Hoagland debarks is to help the Joan Moran sail the Ixia, an English timber boat. Hoagland describes the trip to Greenpoint where the Ixia is docked:

The spray plumed like cream at our bow, and the water was like crinkled tinfoil. The lights of the city were like jubilant news. They were flung out so far that what can one say? They’re not man-made; they’re the work of some several million men. The lights in the office buildings are a blunt blind yellow, blaring into the muffling night, but the lights of Stuyvesant Town and the other big centers of home life are like stippled banks of amber, glowing. I sat on the capstan in the stern, and it was like a whole screwy radar screen. It’s so dazzling that one’s eyes go dead every minute or so, looking. You can’t take it in; you look until your eyes go blank, turn them away to the darker water, and then look again at the sweep of it and the shining water, until again your vision wilts and goes dead.

The Teresa and the Joan push the Ixia out into the stream, and she gets underway. Hoagland’s ride is over. The Teresa drops him off on South Street on her way to another job. He writes, “I stood on the bow fender and climbed over the rail at Pier 9, East River, waving good-by and shaking hands, worn out, exuberant, and caught a bus home.”

“Knights and Squires” exemplifies Hoagland’s tremendous descriptive power. It contains several inspired sentences. This one, for example:

Eklund, a relaxed man, worked with brief motions, snuggling the thick Dacron lines around the horns of the bitt as easily as if he were tightening his belt.

And this beauty:

In the spotlight a leaping reindeer on the smokestack came alive, and the smoke, bowel-gray, bulged out of the stack, vaulting and rolling.

In detail after splendid detail, “Knights and Squires” evokes the action of a working tug in one of the world’s busiest harbors. I first read it fifty years ago. I've never forgotten it.

Postscript: Two more excellent “tugboat” pieces by Hoagland: “The Tugman’s Passage,” in his 1982 collection of the same name; and “Tugboats on the Tanana,” chapter 13 of his Alaskan Travels (2013). 

Homage to Hoagland: "Fred King on the Allagash"

This is the first post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Fred King on the Allagash,” included in Hoagland’s excellent 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River. 

This great piece is an account of a six-day, ninety-two-mile canoe trip that Hoagland made through Maine’s Allagash Wilderness Waterway. The exact date of the trip is difficult to ascertain. We know it was July 17, because Hoagland says so in the piece. But the year is unspecified. The piece originally appeared in the January-February 1973 issue of Audience magazine. I’m guessing Hoagland made the trip the previous year, 1972. His purpose was pretty basic: “I wanted to see what it was like.” He says he hired a guide “so that I could use my paddle as a writing table part of the time and, being a novice, not bother with questions of navigation.” 

The guide’s name is Fred King. Hoagland describes him:

He’s fifty-eight, looks forty-five, has short hair which is bluish gray, round glasses, a boyish doggy grin, a face deeply cut by grinning and a mouth big enough to grin with. It’s a pleasing face; his body is straight and quick like a chipmunk’s and he has an immediate laugh, provocatively loud, and likes to stop still when on the move and sound off on the matter at hand, then impulsively move forward again, seeming never to walk if he can run. At home in Augusta he keeps a jug of Allagash water to mix with his drinks, and doesn’t much like December because of the short days: “I’d sell December awfully cheap.” 

Fred is as much the subject of Hoagland’s piece as the Allagash river. You can tell Hoagland admires him. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but it’s implicit in the many vivid lines of description that he devotes to him. This, for example:

He still likes to be by himself. His ideas sound as if they had been worked out in isolation in the woods and perhaps spoken first in a loud voice all alone. He has a tight shipshape cabin on Chemquassabamticook Lake where he goes in midwinter and works on improvements, hauling now with a snowmobile. He’s got to break trail for the snowmobile on snowshoes – it’s not like the ads – but he loves the rigor of the winter woods, cooks for himself and sleeps fitfully, listening to the radio and waiting for his mouse trap to snap. The mice he feeds to the gorbies – Canada jays – outside.

And this:

When we walked, Fred was quick, and with his small intelligent face looked like a professor afield, though his right arm is beginning to go bad on him – too much holding a chainsaw. In the black-fly season he sometimes sews his socks to his pants to protect his ankles, and leaves them on for four or five days, he said. 

The trip begins on Chamberlain Lake. There are two others in their party – a Long Island couple, Jim and Audrey, being towed in a second canoe. The foursome go up the lake toward Lock Dam, pass through the lock, and then head down the river to Eagle Lake, where they run into a storm:

We ran into waves tipped with whitecaps, the wind shifting into a headwind, and a navy-blue curtain lowered in front of us. The murky curtain turned purple, the water turned black and the wind hard and strong – the waves coming in gusts, the canoe shipping water – as we met the storm. It was a smothering front, and passing beyond it, we were soaked in a pellety rain, but found some protection in the lee of Farm Island, then in a narrows, where we tied up at Priest’s Camp. In the drumbeating rain as, laughing, we threw up our tents, Fred pretended we’d almost drowned to make it more dramatic for us. He said that when he first began guiding he’d been scared he might do something wrong and had gone to an old-timer for advice: “Just take lots of eggs and jam, Fred.” 

Next day, they explore the lake:

We circled the lake, slipping into each estuary and up Soper Brook, then up Snare Brook. Dozens of ducks: fish nests down through the water, scooped in the gravel. A great blue heron flew up. A dragonfly chased by a kingfisher got away by dodging close to our bow. The brooks were silty but the wetland grasses were a tender light-green. After a half-mile or so the alder growth would close in and beaver cuttings would block the brook, and where we had to stop we’d see moose tracks.

They stay at Priest’s Camp a second night. Next day, they head for Churchill Lake, where they encounter a moose:

On Churchill, with the sun a silvery band on the water, we caught up with a swimming cow moose midway across. Her body was invisible; her head was like a blunt boat, the ears the housing, and her hairy neck hump nearly underwater. It was a groping blind-looking head, sightless as a whale’s, a feeling and suffering-looking head, the nose so huge and vulnerable that other undiscovered senses might have been contained inside. Two terns were diving on her with creaky cries. Her ears lay back as her big pumping legs hurled her ashore, and she swerved to look at us, first over one shoulder, then over the other.

Hoagland and his group move on through Heron Lake and into the Chase Rips – “the one risky spot” on the route:

The river before us fell off, abrupt as the end of a table; all of a sudden it didn’t appear to be there. Then, curling up like a hairdo, it fluffed around us, high at the prow, as we slid down into the rapids themselves. The noisy water was popping in points, peaks and tufts, blotting out all other sights and sounds. We could have been surrounded by other canoes and not noticed them. This was the first pitch, full of rocks, several hundred yards long. The second was shorter but “downhilly,” the many rips sticking up as if to chum with us, as the water curled and crabbed around. Riffles, bumps, a wild backdrop of trees.

They stop at a place called Big Eddy to dry out and have lunch. Then they push on, “the Allagash partying along, popping with rocks but forty yards wide, leaving plenty of current, till it tipped down steeply again and we slid at the edge of a whole thievish mob of rocks that nattered away, feeling their tug, zipping by Harrow Brook.”

They enjoy peaceful minutes of drifting, too. Then “for three hundred yards the river would turn feisty, roaring, tergiversating, as busy as rush hour, each rock having its say.” Hoagland writes,

We twisted through new rips and rapids, eluding sweepers, seeing the trout jump, and dragonflies in a mating clinch; jays called in the trees. The clouds were lovely, if we took time to glance upward. There were still-water sloughs, and gulls on the mud-banks, and parakeet cries from the bear-jungle. Then a swift chute, dark choppy water, on into a wide, luxurious pool. Buzzing birds in the woods, occasional pines, more shaggy cedar, big pairs of spruce, a heron flying high with folded neck, a gangly flying loon, some green grassy islands. A winter wren sang. Then again the water crawled with ripples, with stream birds flying up, the water slanting alive with bubbles over a gravel bar.

They go through a bog and then out onto Umsaskis Lake. They camp for the night in the Thoroughfare leading from Umsaskis into Long Lake. Fred keeps a jeep at Umsaskis. Next day, he drives the group forty miles across International Paper Company roads to Chemquassabamticook Lake, where they boat to his cabin. Hoagland describes the place:

His curtain rods are old setting poles, his clothesline is tied between saplings skinned by beavers. He had a potato garden to tend, and we went out to see the stump of a virgin pine with the marks of a broad-ax that cut it still visible and a forty-year-old birch tree growing on top. We saw two barred owls calling each other, and a woodpecker drinking down ants on a stump, and moose and deer prints on the sandy beach, among the debris of mussel shells the gulls had dropped. 

In the morning, “the sun was golden through the thick trees. A soupy mist covered the lake, which smoked like a hot spring. Two connubial loons floated side by side, then dived together. The water was as dark as blueberry jelly.” They head back to the Allagash and get underway toward Long Lake again:

We passed bits of islands covered with driftpiles, saw a doe and a fawn, a sheldrake with seven ducklings, a squirrel swimming the river, its tail like a rudder. A heron flew up and stood for a minute atop a fir tree. The river curved gently in a stretch as sweet as honey, softening its water sounds so that we could hear the white-throated sparrows. After tilting again with a few rocks we entered a dead water which lasted for an hour’s paddling, birds warbling all around, the water smooth, black and waxed. Tying the canoes together, we drifted as a raft, eating Fig Newtons, and hearing chain saws. Sweeney Brook, Whittaker Brook and Jalbert Brook joined the current.

That “Tying the canoes together, we drifted as a raft, eating Fig Newtons, and hearing chain saws” makes me smile. It’s quintessential Hoagland – “raft,” “Fig Newtons” and “chain saws” bumping against each other surreally. No one but him could’ve written it.  

They camp at Round Pond for the night. Next morning, they’re on the river early: “We got started at 6 A.M., a sailing hawk peering down at us. A mist almost the color of snow lay between the lines of trees, so that although the weather was warm it was a wintry scene.” They go through the Round Pond Rips. Next, the Musquacook Rips. Fred’s loud voice in the quietness irritates Hoagland "exceedingly" because it’s scaring away moose and other animals. He writes, “I had to remember that this was real history he was reliving, that he was a link with the boisterous rivermen whose intent was to knock down the forests and let the light in.” 

And now comes one of my favorite passages of the piece – Hoagland’s vibrant description of the river from the Musquacook Rips to Allagash Falls. It’s worth quoting in full:

A buckskin-colored deer exploded with springy bounds. We saw a merganser family, a ridge scalped by a tornado. In a dead water we looked down and saw grasses growing on the bottom, while a whole populace of insects bounced in the air. The sun streamed through the morning vapors in warm yellow combinations on the west bank, but on the east the view was still snowy-looking. The black-growth forest humped into low hills. We floated past grassy islands, then sibilant stretches, the water combing through the rocks, turning the big ones yellow with reflected light and leaving a platter of calm downstream of each. There’s a disastrous-sounding crunch when a canoe hits a rock and the floor lifts under one’s feet, but the sound is worse than the results. We passed an old shack with a sod roof, now burgeoning with raspberries, and saw Savage Brook debouch through its delta, and Five Finger Brook. The water itself looked like running gravel, and we passed several old cabins that used to belong to characters like Sporty Jack (so called because of a birthmark he sported), and the Cunliffe Depot, the abandoned headquarters of a logging boss who rivaled Michaud. Michaud’s hay farm was two miles below, now devoid of buildings but spacious after so many miles of woods. Then beaches and finally a slough called Finlay Bogan, where we saw kingfishers, fish jumping, islands foliaged with willows and silver maples, ice-scarred. It became a still, rainy day with some occasional neighborly thunder. We ran by a few gentle rapids and shoals, seeing huge waterlogged stumps that were shaped like moose. The river here was a dream – rustling, windy, wild-looking and lush – chipper with birds, overhung with sweepers, dense with slow channels forking between the islands. It was beautiful and remote. 

“Platter of calm,” “neighborly thunder,” “stumps shaped like moose,” “chipper with birds” – who writes like that? No one. Only Hoagland. He’s incredibly specific. He's the king of specificity. He loves using place names: Savage Brook, Finger Brook, Cunliffe Depot, Finlay Bogan. His words call up pictures: “A buckskin-colored deer exploded with springy bounds”; the water combing through the rocks, turning the big ones yellow with reflected light”; “an old shack with a sod roof, now burgeoning with raspberries”; “The water itself looked like running gravel.” 

The trip is almost over. Hoagland swims below the falls, “in deep potholes where the water was warm.” Then they carry on down the river to its mouth where it empties into the St. John River, at which point the trip ends and the parties disperse. Hoagland writes: “Fred King departed like a boy let out of school: no more entertaining or catering to us, no more wincing at the bumps delivered to his canoe. He would drive south until he got tired and sleep by the side of the road.”

Accounts of canoe trips on wild rivers are catnip to me. I devour them. This is one of the best. Hoagland puts us right there on the Allagash. His writing is active, concrete, vivid. Great subject, delectable prose – the piece is double bliss. 

On the Horizon: Homage to Hoagland

Edward Hoagland died February 17, 2026, age 93. He’s one of my heroes. As an act of homage, I want to consider some of his best essays. Over the next seven months, I’ll pick seven of them – one per month – and try to express why I like them. A new series then – “Homage to Hoagland” – starting May 10.