The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

I see The New York Times is picking the 100 best books of the 21st century. Readers are invited to submit their own top ten choices. Here’s what I submitted:

Trawler (2005)

Redmond O’Hanlon

Travels in Siberia (2010)

Ian Frazier

Cross Country (2006)

Robert Sullivan

I Curse the River of Time (2010)

Per Petterson

Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011)

Janet Malcolm

The Sight of Death (2006)

T. J. Clark

Uncommon Carriers (2006)

John McPhee

A Terrible Country (2018)

Keith Gessen

The Old Ways (2012)

Robert Macfarlane

The Ongoing Moment (2005)

Geoff Dyer

It pains me to leave out James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, and Helen Vendler – three of my favorite writers. But when you draw up these lists, sometimes you have to be ruthless. 

On Jonathan Franzen's "The Problem of Nature Writing"

Sand Dunes, Prince Edward Island (Photo by John MacDougall)

Jonathan Franzen, in his absorbing “The Problem of Nature Writing” (newyorker.com, August 12, 2023), argues (1) nature writing should be evangelical; (2) in order for nature writing to succeed as evangelism, it must tell a strong story: and (3) without story, description of nature is tedious. I disagree with all three points. 

I love nature writing. I read a lot of it. I’ve never considered it a form of evangelism. To me, it’s quintessentially a descriptive art. If it helps to get people to care about preserving the natural world, so much the better. But, for me, that’s not its primary aim. Its primary aim is to describe nature’s beauty. For example, Robert Macfarlane’s description of the vast shingle peninsulas that jut from east England’s coastline:

There is exquisite patterning to the structure of these spits. They organize themselves in designs so large that they are best witnessed from the vantage of a falcon or an airman. At Dungeness, the shingle is arranged into giant floriate blooms. Orford forms itself in long parallel ridges, each of which marks a time when a storm cast up thousands of tonnes of gravel along the shore, and fattened the spit. These ridges are the stone equivalents of growth rings in a tree trunk. Aerial images of Blakeney show it to possess the complex beauty of a neuron: the long stem of the spit, and to its leeward a marshland that floods and emerges with every tide – a continually self-revising labyrinth of channel and scarp. [The Wild Places, 2007]

Or Edward Hoagland’s description of a wolf:

Her fur was in silver-fox shades and her head was larger than life. I stared at it the next day while she was being skinned. She had grim, snapping eyes set at a spellbinding slant, and a mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors. At the zoo you can watch wolves mouthing their meat like a cobbler turning a shoe in his hands or a tailor handling a bundle of clothes. Oversized as it is, the mouth can be used as a pair of hands. Wolves’ legs are long because they churn for a hundred-and-fifty miles in a line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles in another line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles, all their lives. Their shoulders are large because they fight with their shoulders. And their heads are large to contain their mouths, which are both hands and mouths. Their eyes are fixed in a Mongol slant to avoid being bitten. Nobody nowadays will see a wild wolf. They are an epitome; one keeps count because they are so exceptional a glimpse. [Notes from the Century Before, 1969]

Or Redmond O’Hanlon’s description of an anglerfish:

Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complementary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials … And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something – it wanted to eat. And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste, haute cuisine, no, that was not its thing. Not at all … [Trawler, 20003].

I relish such descriptions. My enjoyment has nothing to do with story. My enjoyment is sourced in the writer’s art – in that “mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” There’s no plot in landscape, only the contingencies of rock, river, and wild animal. Narrative in nature books is usually simple – a chronological telling of a hike or a canoe trip or a mountain climb. 

Franzen’s most annoying statement is that nature description is tedious. I could quote a thousand passages to show that it is not. Here’s one more, from John McPhee’s great Coming into the Country (1977):

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

3 for the Sea: Conclusion

This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts on my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), and Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003). Today, I’ll try to sum up my reading experience.

One of my main purposes in launching this series was that I wanted to get to know these books better. I wanted to see how they’re put together, how they work. I feel I’ve accomplished that. But in focusing on their formal aspects – structure, perspective, description, etc. – I see that I’ve neglected their meaning. All three are about vivid personal experience – that’s obvious. But each has a specific meaning, too. Looking for a Ship is about the decline of the U.S. Merchant Marine. It ends, symbolically, with Stella “dead in the water.” Passage to Juneau is about turbulence: “If you want a mirror for your own existence, you need look no further than tumbling rapids or the strings of dying whirlpools downtide of a piling.” Trawler is about fish – the fascinating variety of strange species that live in the wild North Atlantic ((“By the tail, which was not a fish-tail as you might imagine it, but several inches of raw-hide whip, I hoisted the 2-foot-long, huge-headed, slender-bodied, grey-silver, big-scaled, armour-plated, snub-snouted, underslung-mouthed pre-human fish to eye-level – and eye-to-eye it was truly disturbing, because its eyeball was three times the size of mine”).

But to reduce these great books to a single message does them serious injustice. For me, their true meaning resides in their splendid art of description. This, for example:

Albatrosses flew beside us, motionless to the point of impudence, their eyes on our necks, their great wings fixed, their iron momentum matching the ship’s. At bridge level, sixty-five feet above the water, an albatross flew beside us with his right leg up scratching his ear. [Looking for a Ship]

And this:

The only motion was that of the incoming tide, stealing smoothly through the forest at one knot. Where fallen branches obstructed the current near the shore, they sprouted whiskers of turbulence that were steadily maturing into braided beards. The water was moving just fast enough to feel the abrasion of the air against it, and its surface was altering from glassy to stippled with the strengthening flood. Soon the false wind, brushing against the tide, created a trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light. [Passage to Juneau]

And this:

At the centre of my field of vision, at the bottom of the steep, inward-angled, stainless-steel panels of the tall container, to the right of four Greenland halibut which lay where they’d slid (just below the lower lip of the open drop-gate to the conveyor), there spread across the slopes of the floor, there swirled around Luke’s yellow sea-boots, a semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through, a something from another world, a dead creature which, as I stared, resolved itself into far too many long viscid arms studded with white boils, eruptions, suckers to hold you fast … [Trawler]

On and on – these books are endlessly quotable. I love them. I don’t want to let go of them. What is the key to their art? What draws me to them? I think it’s their glorious specificity. Not just an albatross, but an albatross flying by “with his right leg up scratching his ear”; not just waves, but a “trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light”; not just an octopus, but a “semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through.” Every word and line is definite, specific, evocative. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three wonderful books. I picture it like this: ropes, nets, red and yellow oilskins; the Norlantean (searchlights blazing in the black winter night); a Greenland halibut; a red Jacobs biscuit-box; a wooden-handled gutting knife; a map of the North Atlantic; a Rabbit fish; a green nylon sleeping bag; a kittiwake; W. D. Hamilton; a Nikon FM2 camera; a thick dry biscuit; a blue rubber glove; a Merchant Marine license; the Stella Lykes (piled high with containers); an albatross; a bunch of bananas; Charles Darwin; the pentimento on Stella’s bows; a pirogue full of pirates; a monocular on a nylon cord; a map of South America’s Pacific coast; Franz Kafka; a red plastic jug; two black balls flying from a mast; a map of the Inside Passage; the Penelope (mainsail up, headsail out to starboard); Franz Boas, a red-and-black-painted Haida canoe; Captain George Vancouver; a whirlpool, a Dall’s porpoise; a lava lamp; a cormorant; HMS Discovery under full sail; a hand compass; an elderly wooden purse-seiner; a tugboat pulling a raft of logs; an orange helicopter lifting a sling containing a log; a painting of a raven’s eye inside an ovoid frame; a Venetian glass trade-bead (the color of a kumquat); a floathouse; a razor-slashed barstool; a cannery built out on stilts over the water; a chum salmon. Overlap these images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and randomly across its surface paint three zigzag blue lines representing the waves of the Pacific, North Atlantic, and Inside Passage. I call my collage “O’Pheeban.” 

3 for the Sea: Details

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their extraordinary quality of observation.

Art is in the details. Consider this passage, one of my favourites in O’Hanlon’s Trawler: 

Smacked left, hard, against the steel plates of the inward bulging port-bow and right, hard, against the steel partition of the rusty shower, I pitched to my knees in front of the seatless bowl and held on to the rim with both hands, hard. On the floor to either side were two big circular iron valves, each stamped SCUPPER DISCHARGE O/BOARD. I lowered my face into the bowl. The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart. And then I said goodbye to all that Guiness, to the pig’s supper at the Royal Hotel (£28 for two) and even, perhaps to a day-old bolus of breakfast at Bev’s Kitchen, Nairn.

I remember reading this for the first time, and thinking, oh god, he’s not actually going to do this. Then comes “I lowered my face into the bowl,” and I realize ugh, here we go! And then comes that transfixing, unforgettable bit of grossness: “The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart.” 

Let’s consider another example. I mentioned earlier the artful way Raban, in Passage to Juneau, blends his account of his journey through the Inside Passage with that of Captain George Vancouver two hundred years previous. At one point, Raban describes a flogging that took place on Vancouver’s Discovery:

At six bells in the forenoon watch (eleven o’clock), all officers and midshipmen were ordered to present themselves in uniform and wearing swords, in the main cabin. The fifteen marines aboard were mustered on the quarterdeck under their lieutenant, standing at attention with muskets shouldered. The bosun’s mate carried the cat-o’-nine tails in his ceremonial red-plush bag. (Hence “to let the cat out of the bag.”)

Archibald Menzies, as ship’s naturalist, claimed the privilege of a civilian and kept to his private cabin, where he still could hear the intolerably long-drawn-out administration of the punishment. The drumlike construction of the ship’s hull made the sounds of John Noot’s footsteps, and each crack of the lash, reverberate between decks.

After the first dozen lashes was an interval. Blood trickled from the welts on Pitt’s narrow back; his body looked like a carcass hanging in a butcher’s shop. Mudge detached himself from the line of officers and went up to the boy, saying that if Pitt would vow to behave better in the future, he would plead with the captain to remit the final dozen lashes. 

With what was left of his words, the midshipman said something about “honour,” and then that he “would not begd off by Mr. Mudge.”

Noot laid on twelve more strokes of the cat.

That, for me, is one of the most memorable scenes in the book. What makes it memorable is the detail – the red-plush bag in which the cat-o’-nine tails is carried, the reverberation of the crack of the lash between decks, Pitt’s body like “a carcass hanging in a butcher shop.” The terse unflinching final line (“Noot laid on twelve more strokes of the cat”) is inspired.

McPhee’s selection of details in Looking for a Ship is masterful. Here’s his description of Stella’s mooring line – itself a detail not many people would notice:

Ships are tied up with what the rest of the world would call ropes. They look anachronistic – like rope you would see in a seaport museum, but larger. A good mooring line costs eight thousand dollars. Made of Dacron for strength and polypropylene for flexibility, it is six hundred feet long. We carry eighteen. As a mooring line payed out over the side and reached like a suspension cable in the direction of the pier, the ship was so askew that six hundred feet might not do. You marry one line to another if the need arises. In Genoa once, on the Almeria Lykes, Washburn married three lines and winched the ship more than a thousand feet. The one line spanned the distance here and was soon secured to bollards. A dugout canoe passed below it, moving smartly under a sail made of flour sacks. Very slowly against the wind – completing what Washburn would later call “one of the poorest dockings in marine history” – Stella reeled herself in. 

I relish that extra detail – “A dugout canoe passed below it, moving smartly under a sail made of flour sacks.” It shows McPhee’s avid eye for particulars. 

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

3 for the Sea: Figuration

This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favourite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), and Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of figuration.

“Four A.M. in the cashmere blackness” – how fine that is! I wish I’d written it. It’s from McPhee’s Looking for a Ship. It’s only six words, but it’s one of my favorite lines in the book. “Cashmere blackness” – is there a more evocative way to convey the texture of a night off the coast of Colombia? I can’t think of it. Here’s another from the same book: 

To look far down over the side at light from our ship on the racing dark water was to feel the power of the weighted glide, its controlled uncontrollability. We were a bowling ball, avoiding duckpins.

The duckpins are fishing boats and merchant ships in Stella’s vicinity. 

How about this beauty, also from Looking for a Ship: “In the heavy roll, Stella’s bridge wings alternately reach for the water, like the hands of a swimmer.”

“ ‘Hey Redmond!’ said Luke, getting to his feet with excessive energy, throwing the bug-proboscis stub of his cigarette into the sink. ‘You can’t just sit there dreaming! We must go. A trawler skipper – he can’t afford to wait. Not for anyone.’ ” When was the last time you saw a cigarette stub compared to an insect’s elongated sucking mouthpart? Never, I’ll bet. It’s totally original, delightful, and memorable. It’s from Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler. A few pages later, O’Hanlon writes another cigarette metaphor equally as good: “Luke took a hard suck on his catheter tube of a cigarette.” That one makes me smile every time I read it. Trawler brims with vivid metaphors and similes. Here’s a passage containing seven of them: 

Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva, I worked my way out of my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag and, lying back again on the bunk, I pulled on my pants, my trousers. I found my black socks (three to each foot, against the cold) and, bundling forward like a curled foetus, I lodged into my wooly carapace of a sweater. The effort of it: there was no rest anywhere, nothing would stay still … The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming into land, and a that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. Other smaller, straining engines came into life directly beneath me, and the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue, gently, very slowly, prone, through the hanging curtains of Luke’s bunk, over his flat blue sleeping-bag, out the other side – and it tipped me off and down on to his linear collection of red, blue and yellow plastic biscuit-boxes. My buttocks, I’m sorry to say, must have landed on his favourite box, his red Jacobs biscuit-box, because under me its top and sides blew-up, releasing a tight stash of small, empty, plastic screw-lid Marine Lab specimen-bottles all over the floor.

That “The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming into land, and a that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high BEEP-BEEP-BEEP” is inspired! Notice also, “Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva”; “my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag”; “bundling forward like a curled foetus”; “my wooly carapace of a sweater”; and “the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue” – all wonderful metaphors that help us see, hear, and feel exactly what O’Hanlon experienced.

How about this for vivid metaphoric description:

I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal wave whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension.

That “brushfire crackle of the breaking wave” is very fine. So is the comparison with the “trustful beetle on the surface tension” of the water. The quotation is from Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau. Raban is a superb metaphorist. Here, from Passage to Juneau, are nine more examples of his art:

The terminal fell silent, except for the complaining gulls and the bronchial rattle of the generators aboard the emptied boats.

Past the lighthouse on Point Wilson, to the west of the ferry’s course, the water seethed like a pan of boiling milk.

Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water, where I let go the anchor, switched off the engine….

The sea, scored with current-lines, was like an ice-rink imprinted by the tracks of figure-skaters.

In the morning calm, this productive turbulence was revealed in the snaking S-shaped lines of kelp and driftwood that collected on the margins between eddies; in finger-sized whirlpools; in windrows of slick water that ran in twisting paths across the surface; in threads and seams of current, like whorled fingerprints.

The boat sauntered, at eight knots going on nine, through Gillard Passage and Dent Rapids – a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks.

Outside the shelter of the island, the water was like a bolt of gray silk, lightly undulating in the first intimations of the ocean swell ahead. Soon the swell was regular and well-defined; rhythmical pulses of energy, like rippling muscles, moving at speed through the windless calm.

After twenty minutes of roller-coasting sailing, there was no more than a brisk one-foot chop on a flat sea. Running before the wind, under the clearing sky, I sat back and listened to the twiggy sibilance of the bow-wave as it broke from the hull – air and water getting mashed up together like egg whites in a blender. 

Reluctant to break the windless silence, listening for animals in the brush along the shore, I let the sky revolve overhead and watched an eagle soaring on a thermal like a scrap of charred paper against the blue.

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

3 for the Sea: Nature

This is the ninth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their wonderful nature descriptions.

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

Albatrosses

Albatrosses flew beside us, motionless to the point of impudence, their eyes on our necks, their great wings fixed, their iron momentum matching the ship’s. At bridge level, sixty-five feet above the water, an albatross flew beside us with his right leg up scratching his ear. [Looking for a Ship]

Plankton

A teaspoonful of Puget Sound water yielded a whole world of Hollywood monsters: copepods; rotifiers; flagellates, their whips flailing on the glass. Each time I dipped the slide in the bucket, the cast changed: new wrigglies waved spiky antennae, inflated their balloon-like luminescent torsos, flexed their cilia, flapped rubbery watery wings, or gazed up at me with vacant soccer-ball eyes. [Passage to Juneau]

Porpoises

A new sound entered the orchestra: the explosive chuff! of a Dall’s porpoise surfacing along side the boat. Chuff! Chuff! Chuff! Six black-and-white torpedoes, in close formation, went scissoring under the bow, came up to exhale, then shot astern, where they wheeled around in unison before launching another mock attack. Bantam weight, pure muscle, they whizzed past on the beam, just a few inches below the surface, in a show-off wriggle of exultant flesh. [Passage to Juneau]

Kittiwakes and Gannets

The kittiwakes and the gannets rose into the wind, banking round towards the cod-end. The Kittiwakes alighted alongside the line of net (and they seemed so light, so delicate, so out of place in all this unremitting violence); they rode the small waves on the big swell with ease; they flicked up their wings as they pecked at the mesh. The gannets, 60 or 70 feet above the surface-hills of the sea, would flip over to one side, half close their 6-foot expanse of wing, and, elbows out, streak down towards the cod-end in one long low oblique-angled dive, folding their wings tight against their bodies, a second before impact, to become a white underwater trace of bird and bubbles. [Trawler]

Waves

Dawn came. The air, Fahrenheit, was sixty-two. There was a head wind at Force 7. The sea was heaping up, and there were whitecaps everywhere, and high spray, and the foam of breaking waves made streaks in the direction of the wind. [Looking for a Ship]

Boils and Eddies

Deception Pass was like a lava lamp on a heroic scale. As the tide entered the funnel, it felt the tightening constraint of the land; the bottom shallowed, and house-sized boulders tripped the water up and made it tumble. With far too much sea trying to escape through far too small an aperture, liquid panic broke out in the pass. The obstructed tide welled up vertically in mushroom-topped boils a dozen yards across or spun impotently around in great saucer-shaped eddies. The surface of the water was pitted with small, traveling whirlpools. Everything was on the move on its own eccentric curvilinear track. [Passage to Juneau]

Rabbit Fish

The monstrous chimera, the mythical freak, two or three feet long, was on its back, its creamy underside shiny with slime, its pectoral fins like wings, and where its neck should have been was a small oval of a mouth set with teeth like a rabbit’s. [Trawler]

Anglerfish

Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complementary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials … And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something – it wanted to eat. And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste, haute cuisine, no, that was not its thing. Not at all … [Trawler]

Octopus

At the centre of my field of vision, at the bottom of the steep, inward-angled, stainless-steel panels of the tall container, to the right of four Greenland halibut which lay where they’d slid (just below the lower lip of the open drop-gate to the conveyor), there spread across the slopes of the floor, there swirled around Luke’s yellow sea-boots, a semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through, a something from another world, a dead creature which, as I stared, resolved itself into far too many long viscid arms studded with white boils, eruptions, suckers to hold you fast … [Trawler]

Snotfish

In his right palm he held a 6-inch-long fat little brown glob of a fish: its small black eyes sat on top of its head, and such a big head, an upward tilted mouth, a huge double chin; yes, a fat-old-man of a head, a glutton of an old man, dribbling a fork-load of spaghetti which had slipped from his lower lip and stuck to his protruding neck. [Trawler]

Glaucous Gulls

The light was thin and white and pure and, somehow, directed upwards – and there, right above us, in this light I had never seen before, hung three gulls from the Arctic ice-cliffs, but their heavy barrel-bodies, their broad wings, their butch heads (they were looking down, straight at me, mildly interested, suspended in this extreme northern world of theirs, a hundred feet above us), seemed to be pink, a dull pink. [Trawler]

Herring Gulls

Out in the middle, a slovenly army of herring gulls was snacking on tidbits thrown up by the flux. They yelled and jostled, fighting over whatever loose body parts had been left behind by such submarine scavengers as the dogfish and squid: an old anemone tubercle, half a flatworm, a bit of decayed starfish arm, a fibrous morsel of rancid crabmeat. [Passage to Juneau]

Rapids

Off Big Bay, great curds of yeasty scum marked the sites of rips and whirlpools that were now nearly extinct. A few logs and uprooted kelp stems continued to revolve in patches of broken water. But the surviving eddies were flaccid, and there was no real heart in their attempts to wrench the steering from my hands. The boat sauntered at eight knots going on nine, through Gillard Passage and Dent Rapids – a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks. [Passage to Juneau]

Tide

The only motion was that of the incoming tide, stealing smoothly through the forest at one knot. Where fallen branches obstructed the current near the shore, they sprouted whiskers of turbulence that were steadily maturing into braided beards. The water was moving just fast enough to feel the abrasion of the air against it, and its surface was altering from glassy to stippled with the strengthening flood. Soon the false wind, brushing against the tide, created a trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light. [Passage to Juneau]

More Waves

The waves came hissing at the transom. Only a few minutes old, born as wrinkles 800 yards away across the channel, already they were mature and grizzle-bearded. Blocklike, lumpy, they packed a big wallop for their size. Pale ribbons of dissolving foam streaked the inky water, and the boat was being jostled with sufficient force to make me double-up the mooring ropes. [Passage to Juneau]

Wind

I’d just stowed my bucket when a sudden rush of wind came down the funnel of the strait, like an unprovoked punch delivered out of nowhere. The boat corkscrewed. The genoa-sheet, bar-tight, groaned on the drum of the winch. I feared for the stitching of the sail as the fabric swelled under the impact of the wind, which had begun to yodel nastily in the rigging. In no time at all, the ruffled water changed to a short, steep, breaking sea. [Passage to Juneau]

Roundnose Grenadier

And at last, for us, the haul was over … When Luke – so thin, young, wiry, so manic and committed – bent down, quick as a cat-strike, and came up with a yard-long fish of sorts (where had he stored that? Aye, as he might have said, of course, under his stand-on fish-box …): a fish that, in its bulk, was all head, with a short and rounded snout tipped with horny plates, a large underslung mouth – and a thin following body which tapered down to a real look-alike rat-tail, which was all the more convincing because its muscly last few inches were young-rat pink. [Trawler]

Hagfish

Light brown, a foot long, three-quarters of an inch thick, muscular, cylindrical, it appeared to have no fins – unless that narrow keel of wrinkled flesh snaking down the centre of its underside and vertically folded into hundreds of little flags – unless that was a fin? And what were those white pimples – two lines of them, one to either side of the fin, the central fringe of flesh? There were two regular rows of tiny white raised roundels – as if the animal had been-doubled slashed with a razor all the way along the underneath of its bendy shaft of a body, and the twin slits stitched, and it now bore the scars: the entry and exit holes of a fine needle … [Trawler]

Note the many brilliant figures of speech: the lower jaw of an anglerfish “set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting”; a snotfish with “a fat-old-man of a head, a glutton of an old man, dribbling a fork-load of spaghetti which had slipped from his lower lip and stuck to his protruding neck”; rapids – “a scene of spent turmoil, like the tumbled sheets of an empty bed, with an appropriately salty, postcoital smell of bladder wrack drying on the rocks”; on and on. McPhee, Raban, and O’Hanlon create inspired figuration. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

3 for the Sea: First Person

This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of the first person.

All three of these books are written in the first-person major. That, for me, is a compelling aspect of their style. They aren’t second-hand reports (except when they're recounting other people's stories or telling about historical events). McPhee, Raban, and O’Hanlon were actually there – on the Stella Lykes, in Guayaquil, as pirates climb up the anchor chain (McPhee); on the Penelope, as it spins through the “multibillion-gallon turmoil” of Deception Pass (Raban); on the Norlantean, as it wallows deep down in the waves of a North Atlantic hurricane (O’Hanlon). They’re writing from personal experience, which, for me, is the most concrete form of reality. 

But each of them has a distinctive way of “being there.” Their “I”s differ from each other. Raban and O’Hanlon are much more self-revealing than McPhee. Raban writes about his father’s death. He shows his marriage fall apart. He discloses his fears:

I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension. Rationalism deserts me at sea. I’ve seen the scowl of enmity and contempt on the face of a wave that broke from the pack and swerved to strike my boat. I have twice promised God that I would never again put out to sea, if only He would, just this once, let me reach harbour. I’m not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea.

O’Hanlon writes a transfixing form of interior monologue, often in parentheses, constantly revealing his inner thoughts. For example:

(So why hadn’t I noticed that? Why hadn’t I even registered that steel slide – big enough to stand in – leading to the steel gate of the scupper, where the light from the sea outside shone so white, where, I supposed, the gannets and the kittiwakes waited, and whence, as the Norlantean took those violent rolls to starboard, the cold fresh manic sea powered and swept across the deck? It’s OK, I said to myself, stop this nonsense, you’re in another world – you don’t need these self-imposed anxieties; you can’t expect to understand everything at once – relax; because there’s so much time ahead of you, so much genuine, external, comforting real fear – and it’s all coming your way …)

McPhee, in Looking for a Ship, doesn’t share many intimate thoughts. But his fascinating descriptions of life aboard the Stella Lykes sometimes include his personal response. For example:

I remember the first time I appeared in the officers’ dining room for dinner. The captain was there, and Andy Chase, and Bernie Tibbotts. All three had been served and were eating. No one else was present. Tibbotts sat alone at a table, facing the opposite wall. The captain, at his table, sat with his back to a third wall, looking into the room, and into the space between the turned backs of Chase and Tibbotts. Franz Kafka was up in the ceiling, crawling on a fluorescent tube. No one spoke. No one so much as nodded when I came in. I sat down where I was supposed to: at a fourth table, across the room from the captain, I looked at him through the slot between the other men’s backs. I did not have – I’m here to tell you – the temerity to speak.

All three of these books feature the kind of active first-person sentence I devour. Examples:

Sometimes I go on lookout with Peewee, Mac, or Calvin – go forward with a flashlight on the main deck at four, up the ladder to the fo’c’sle deck, around the windlasses and the anchor chains, and past the hawsepipes to the absolute point of the bow, where the lookout station conforms to the requirements of admiralty court, being “as far forward and as low down as conditions allow.” [Looking for a Ship]

At the fairway buoy, I killed the engine and unrolled the headsail, letting the boat drift north on the wind at a speed that could have been comfortably outstripped by a very old lady on a bicycle. [Passage to Juneau]

By the tail, which was not a fish-tail as you might imagine it, but several inches of raw-hide whip, I hoisted the 2-foot-long-huge-headed, slender-bodied, grey-silver, big-scaled, armour-plated, snub-snouted, underslung-mouthed pre-human fish to eye-level – and eye-to-eye it was truly disturbing, because its eyeball was three times the size of mine. [Trawler]

Below the bridge deck is the boat deck, and on the boat deck is Captain Washburn’s office. Nine A.M. I often sit here in the morning drinking coffee, reading manifests, and listening to him. [Looking for a Ship]

Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water, where I let go the anchor, switched off the engine and found my hands were incapable of striking a match to light a cigarette. [Passage to Juneau]

I made my way round to him – hanging on to the edge of the conveyor to the hold, to the curve of the gutting table; I clambered over the hopper-conveyor; and I stood, beginning to slide, like the big slimy fish, port to starboard, starboard to port. [Trawler]

An active verb, a line of specific description, and the indispensable “I” – these are the ingredients of my favourite kind of sentence. These three books abound with them.

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

3 for the Sea: People

This is the seventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of people. 

There are dozens of people in McPhee’s Looking for a Ship – dispatchers, crew members, pilots, pirates, and stowaways. McPhee sketches many of them. But one man stands out: Stella’s captain, Paul McHenry Washburn. McPhee calls him “the most interesting person on the ship.” Here’s our first glimpse of him:

We hear a door open and close. Another opens. Captain Washburn comes into the wheelhouse. “Good morning, good morning,” he says. The first salutation may be for us, the second for the ship. The captain routinely talks to the ship. 

A few pages later, McPhee describes Washburn in more detail:

Now about to dock in a foreign city, he is wearing his more-or-less dress blues. His shoes and trousers are dark and naval. His white short-sleeved shirt, open at the collar, has epaulets striped with gold. There is gold braid on his visor. His glasses are rimmed with gold. As he moves back and forth on the bridge, he takes things in with the comprehensive gaze of a boxer. He leans forward like a boxer, his mouth and jaw set firm. His body is chunky, his paunch under control, like a trimmed spinnaker. Wisps of gray edge his cap. His face – beardless, full-featured – appears to have been the site of an epic battle, wherein the vitriol he speaks of has at last been subdued by humor.

McPhee tells Washburn’s family history (“Captain Washburn’s family name derives from Great Washburne, near Evesham, in the English Midlands”); he tells about the old skippers that Washburn sailed with when he was young (“The captain learned from Leadline Dunn, from Terrible Terry Harmon, from Dirty Shirt George Price”); he tells about his life (“Aged thirteen, fourteen, and upward, he rode freights as a hobo”); he visits him in his office on the boat deck, and listens to him talk (“Straightening up with a sheet of paper in his hand, Captain Washburn looks out a window past a lifeboat in its davits and over the blue sea. After a moment, he says, ‘I love going to sea. I do not love that sea out there, That is not my friend. That is my absolute twenty-four-hour-a-day sworn enemy’ ”); he visits him at his home in Jacksonville (“In the captain’s home, across town, the numerous religious calendars are outnumbered by the golfing trophies he has won in the pro-am tournaments of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes”); he plays golf with him (“Washburn tees up at Baymeadows, a quiet place under pines and palms”).

As ever with McPhee, action is character. Here he shows Washburn docking Stella: 

Now, in Buenaventura, the admiral decides to dock the ship himself, to ignore the hurt feelings of the pilot, to keep at a safe distance the incompetent tugs and reduce their crews to spectators, to rely on his own eye and his commands through the engine-order telegraph to solve this problem in very tight large-scale parallel parking. As an automobile driver, he may not know where he is. To watch him as a golfer, though, is to notice that the closer he gets to the pin the abler and more precise he becomes. Which of these characteristics will predominate here remains to be seen. His commands fall like rain, and in the same steady rhythm, with no revisions. With a few adjusting motions fore and aft, he goes into his berth as if were closing a drawer.

Those last two lines are inspired!

O’Hanlon’s Trawler is a boatload of distinctive “characters” – nine of them in total, including O’Hanlon. One way these men reveal their personalities is by their talk. O’Hanlon has a wonderful ear for dialogue. Here’s skipper Jason Schofield explaining to O’Hanlon what will happen if the Norlantean’s engines fail during the hurricane:

“Then what? Then what! Then, Redmond – we drown. It’s so simple. There’s no argument. I like that. I like that a lot. There’s no uncertainty about it. No bullshit. There’s no maybe this and maybe that, and on the other hand, and if you look at it from a different point of view, or perhaps percentage this and percentage that, and you could say it’s his rotten childhood or his bent social fucking worker or his great-fucking-granny, or come on, that Hitler, he only had one ball, so of course he had to invade Poland. No! Here there’s no bullshit! That’s not what it’s like here! You make a mistake? Simple. You drown.”

And here’s Robbie Stanger, “boss of the Greenland-halibut gutting unit,” talking to O’Hanlon on what it’s like working for Jason: 

“You’ll not know. You’ll think Jason’s the norm. Because you canna know any different unless I tell you. Well – he’s not. It’s true, maybe he doesna shout at us as much as usual because you’re on board. But he’s a focking miracle, really. That’s what he is. The real exception. I know you Redmond, your type, first-timers, people who want to be trawlermen, you know, straight out of college in Stromness, aye, and if not even their fathers were at the fishing, they’re starry-eyed, they talk about love-of-the-sea. Jeesus. So I’m telling you, being on a trawler, Redmond, you probably think the only problem is the weather. The weather! Who cares? You either die or you don’t – and you die all together. No, no – it’s the skipper. Because most of them are madder than the weather. More violent, you could say, more unpredictable. Now dinna get me wrong. I’m sure I’d be the same. Millions of pounds in debt. Like Jason. And then Jason has a wife and child at home to look after, and another on the way. I shouldn’t wonder. And there again, his father-in-law, the greatest Orkney trawlerman of the ;ast generation – skipper of the Viking, the Viking for Chrissake! And we all know what he says to himself every waking minute of every focking day – ‘my daughter, the loveliest daughter in the world’ (along with her sisters, of course, if she has any sisters) ‘– that Jason she married, is he a real man or just a no-good-slack-arsed-focking southerner?’ Aye. The strain of it. Being a skipper – that’s not for me. I’d go mad too, I know I would. But here’s the thing, Redmond. Jason, he’s quick as a focking ghost, one problem and he’s out the brown door of that wheelhouse quick as a focking ghost – and I’m telling you now, he’s sane.” 

Some of the book’s most absorbing (and humorous) dialogue is between O’Hanlon and his friend Luke Bullough. Bullough is a biologist at the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen, and a member of the Aberdeen lifeboat crew. O’Hanlon says he’s “probably the toughest (and certainly the most modest) young man I’d ever met,” “a man with a vast experience of the real sea: as a research diver in Antarctica; as a Fisheries Patrol officer in the Falklands; on trawlers and research ships in the North Atlantic.”

O’Hanlon and Bullough are both talkers; they talk to each other about all kinds of things – fish, sex, marriage, evolution – but especially fish. Bullough loves fish. Here he’s talking to O’Hanlon about a lumpsucker:

“Aye! And guess what? The female makes her way up and ashore in April and lays up to 300,000 pink eggs between the mid-tide and low-water level, spread over a rock. And then? She fins it back out to sea, gone, buggered off, excuse me, she deserts and saves herself! And guess who stays and aerates the eggs? Who takes no food from April to November, his stomach distended with nothing but water? The male! Poor sod. So who’s in guard position when the tide is out and here come the gulls and crows and rats? Who’s not left his post (if he hasn’t been pecked or gnawed to death) when the tide comes in and he does his main job, aerating the eggs with his fins, bringing home that critical extra oxygen? Eh? The male! He stays there when the tide sweeps in with those hungry big, big fish! That’s the kind of father I’d like to be!”

Dialogue in Raban’s Passage to Juneau is sparse. Raban is sailing solo. The only chance he gets to speak to anyone in person is when he’s ashore. Most of those conversations are brief. Nevertheless, he does meet a variety of people: the Seattle electrician (John Munroe) who re-wires his boat; the lock-keeper at Ballard Locks; the captain of the ferry Vancouver Island Princess; two Sidney customs officers; the clerk in the Sidney bookstore; the yachtsman in Sidney marina; the mill-worker in Crofton; two Crofton beachcombers; the retired couple (“the Schmales”) at the Jolly Roger resort; the two brothers on the dock at Vananda; the bank clerk in Vananda; the woman in Vananda who asks for help to bury her goat (Raban refuses); the Vananda wharfinger; the resort owner on Blind Channel; the Indian fisherman on Minstrel Island; the manager of the Minstrel Island hotel; two members of a Minstrel Island logging crew; John and Wendy Walders, owners of the floathouse on Potts Lagoon; the pilot of the floatplane that flies Raban from Potts Lagoon to Port McNeill; the Raban family in Market Harborough – Raban’s mother, father, and three brothers; Raban’s wife (Jean) and daughter (Julia); Owen, the young man in Bella Bella who invites Raban to a party; the biologist in Klemtu; two Port Simpson men repairing a gill net; the man in Port Simpson who challenges Raban to a fight; the owner of a Port Simpson troller; the gill-netter in Revillagigedo Channel; the duty officer in Ketchikan; the couple (Simon and Monique) in the Ketchikan hotel dining room; the young woman on the Ketchikan boardwalk (“Yawannadate?”); Gloria, the Ketchikan cabdriver; the Compass Rose couple (Derek and Linda); the captain of the research vessel John A. Cobb; Bruce Finney, a scientist on the John A. Cobb; the kid named Rebecca on the Juneau dock; the fisherman named Joe on the boat docked next to Raban’s in Juneau.    

Compiling this list of people in Passage to Juneau expands my appreciation of the book’s circumstantial richness. So many scenes, incidents and images! 

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

3 for the Sea: Place

This is the sixth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their description of place.

Charleston, Cartagena, Valparaiso, Balboa, Lima, Guayaquil, Jacksonville, Savannah – just some of the places that figure in McPhee’s Looking for a Ship. McPhee beautifully sketches some of them. For example: 

Glimpses of Guayaquil: Heavy construction, bamboo scaffolding … Rubber trees in the medians of streets … Shrimp cocktails in double goblets – the cooked shrimp in a glass sphere, surrounded by live, swimming fish … A checkerboard on a bicycle seat – a game being played with bottle caps, half of them upside down … In the heart of the city, the perched iguanas high in the branches of trees … The four clocks of the cathedral towers, each agreeing with the others, all correct twice a day. In the broad savannas across the Guayas, dark beans drying in the sun, green bananas beside the road. Papayas. Pineapples. Mangoes. Cane. The shrubs of coffee. The evergreen cacao. Billboards warning of “DROGADDICCIÓN.” A clear-plastic bag of what appears to be gazpacho hanging from the handlebars of a policeman’s motocycle. Since the ship sails in two hours, it is time to return to the ship.

I devour such descriptions. I wish there were more of them. But Guayaquil and the other destinations on Stella’s itinerary aren’t McPhee’s focal point. That “time to return to the ship” tells the story. The place at the heart of this narrative is the ship itself.

Here are some of the things that McPhee tells us about Stella:

“This ship is very strongly built,” Washburn says. “She’s sturdy and reliable. There’s lots of horsepower down there. She will answer the rudder. She will respond. She’s a capable and trustworthy ship. You know what she’ll do and you know her limitations. They aren’t crucial, but you can’t expect her to do things where you know she’s a little short. You can’t suddenly demand that of her and expect to get it. It isn’t there. She’s American-built. There’s good steel in the hull. Those frames are close together. She’ll roll on a following sea, but she’s got a high-raised fo’c’sle head and a sharp bow. She’s built for rough weather. She’s built for rough handling. She’s built to take seas and fight back. You cannot overpower seas. But she can deal with what’s out there. She was built to go to Scandinavia in the middle of winter. 

There is a lot of pentimento on the bows of the Stella Lykes. Former names are visible, even in fading light. The ship was built in 1964 and stretched in 1982. When she belonged to Moore-McCormack, she was called the Mormacargo. After Moore-McCormack died and United States Lines bought her, she became the American Argo. After United States Lines died, Lykes Brothers chartered her from financial receivers.

Understand: this ship is about the length of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Rockefeller Center, Pennsylvania Station, Union Square. To berth her you need almost three city blocks. With her piled-high containers divided by canyons under the jumbo boom, she is, if nothing else, labyrinthine.

McPhee roams Stella’s decks and compartments, talking to crew members, describing what he sees. Here he’s in the lookout station:

Sometimes I go on lookout with Peewee, Mac, or Calvin – go forward with a flashlight on the main deck at four, up the ladder to the fo’c’sle deck, around the windlasses and the anchor chains, and past the hawsepipes to the absolute point of the bow, where the lookout station conforms to the requirements of admiralty court, being “as far forward and as lowdown as conditions allow.” The lookout stands in a roofless cupboard. A sheet of clear plastic deflects the wind. He is not quite like a fly on a bowsprit, but somewhere near it – projected far over the water, over the nose bulb, and riding up and down the Pacific swells. He stands there, and stays there, in rain and lightning.

And here he’s in the officers’ dining room:

I remember the first time I appeared in the officers’ dining room for dinner. The captain was there, and Andy Chase, and Bernie Tibbotts. All three had been served and were eating. No one else was present. Tibbotts sat alone at a table, facing the opposite wall. The captain, at his table, sat with his back to a third wall, looking into the room, and into the space between the turned backs of Chase and Tibbotts. Franz Kafka was up in the ceiling, crawling on a fluorescent tube. No one spoke. No one so much as nodded when I came in. I sat down where I was supposed to: at a fourth table, across the room from the captain, I looked at him through the slot between the other men’s backs. I did not have – I’m here to tell you – the temerity to speak.

That “Franz Kafka was up in the ceiling, crawling on a fluorescent tube” makes me smile every time I read it. 

The first two chapters of O’Hanlon’s Trawler take place mostly on land; the rest of it happens on the ship. Our first view of the Norlantean is at the quay in Scrabster harbour:

“Another layer,” said Luke, opening the hatchback. “And oilskins.” So we pulled on our second sweaters (naval blue), took off our shoes in the slush, clambered into our oilskin trousers (his: yellow; mine: bright orange; and Luke showed me that it was possible to not to strangle yourself in the curl of rubberized braces), put on our yellow sea-boots. To our left, the sixteen wheeler articulated trucks, the giant refrigerated transports, waited in their loading bays. To our right, on the edge of the quay, a line of Herring gulls stood, at strict gull-personal-space intervals, between the big mooring-bollards, disconsolate, not in talking mode, staring out to sea, their feathers puffed up against the cold. Along to our left one of those derelict trawlers was berthed: her upper hull had once been painted orange, her wheelhouse and decking white; but she was now so streaked and stained and patterned with rust, her steel plates so bobbled with layers of paint and rust, that she seemed alive, to be herself and no one else, to have grown old and used and wrinkled, and was now, where she lay, close to death. To my surprise, I saw that the diesel-tanker truck parked on the quay beside her actually had its fuel hose extended over her stern; that men in the back of a container lorry were lobbing empty white plastic fish-boxes on to her deck.

“The Norlantean!” said Luke, quickening his pace. “Isn’t she beautiful? What a conversion! Look at that! Wow! Redmond! You’d never guess she was the old Dorothy Gray!”

We go aboard with O’Hanlon and Luke; immediately the world shrinks to the dimensions of the Norlantean’s steel decks and compartments: bridge, cabins, fish-room, galley, hold. This is where the rest of the book takes place (except for an evening ashore in Stromness before the ship heads out). Here, for example, is O’Hanlon and Luke’s cabin: 

Four bunks, in two tiers, filled the dark airless cabin. Luke said, as one practised in such matters, “Lights? Lockers? Toilets? Showers?” He threw a heavy metal switch by the door and a lamp (in industrial protective casing) came on: by its small glow we could see that the mattresses on the two lower bunks were piled high with discarded clothes, sleeping-bags, rammed-in cardboard boxes and the ship’s supply of lavatory rolls.

“A shower!” said Luke, stepping between the beds towards a cubby-hole in the bows. The door of the makeshift shower-room, crumpled in the middle as if it had taken a heavy blow to the stomach, had come off its bottom hinge and was tied back with string. In the left-hand corner of the room was a lavatory; Luke pushed down the flush-lever. “It works!” he said, delighted. And then, looking around, “Christ!” he said. And we stared at huge, inward bulge on the outward-slanting plates of the bow. “Big style!” said Luke. “Sean told me that Charlie Simpson, the second skipper, had had a ding, He hit something. But no one seems bothered … And anyway, Redmond, we’ll be fine. She’s double-hulled.”

And here, in one of the book’s most beautiful passages, is the fish-room:

“Come on, we’ll set up here.” He stepped across to the flat steel shelf beside a conveyor belt which divided the cavernous fish-room into two: a steel-sided, steel-grilled trackway that led from a tall, round, stainless-steel table (down to our left) to a closed hatch at my feet. A slosh of seawater, shin-high, washed across the dark brown swollen slippery wooden floorboards with each roll and, as the ship bent shuddering over to port, a part of the wave of slush and foam ladled itself out via the half-open drop-gate of the port scupper. As she rolled further over and down, fresh white seawater powered in, to toss and curl, as the ship righted herself, straight across to starboard, to repeat the process. “Grand!” said Luke, switching on his scales (a red light appeared to the left of the long calibrated dial). “Magic! It works – even in seas like this!” The steel ceiling of the fish-room was a confusion of pipes and cables (some encased in steel tubes, some simply slung and looped); strip lights; fuse boxes. The stainless-steel sides of the hopper occupied about one-fifth of the space, down in the left-hand corner, and from it another shorter conveyor belt led up to the circular rimmed table. To our right, to the right of the bulkhead door to the galley, lay a wide-diameter ribbed tube, an augur of sorts, a length of giant gut. Directly aft, at the end of the rectangular cavern, another open bulkhead door let dimly through to the net-deck, where the big winches for the bridle stood back-lit by the early morning light streaming in from the stern-ramp, from the bright surface of the heaped-up, following sea.

O’Hanlon’s capture of the light in that last line is ravishing!

Raban’s Passage to Juneau differs from Looking for a Ship and Trawler; it has a broader canvas. The world it describes is nothing less than the entire one-thousand-mile Inside Passage – its myriad channels, bays, and seaports. I relish Raban’s flâneurial approach: after a day on the water, he docks his boat and goes ashore for a drink or a meal or just to nose around. 

In Sidney, he has supper at a Chinese restaurant called the Phoenix, and then walks the town’s main street. At the grocery store, he buys “three grizzly-bear postcards,” and mails them to his daughter Julia at the post office.

At the Dockside Motel-Pub-Café, in Crofton, he ploughs happily through the $8.95 turkey dinner while reading a volume of Captain George Vancouver’s journal: “Vancouver was propped open between the ketchup bottle, verso, and the mustard- squirt, recto.”

In Shearwater, he attends a Saturday-night party at the recently rebuilt fishing resort: “I had to fight my way through the dancers to get to the bar, where I stood in the crush trying to signal two whiskeys. While waiting, I saw the band’s name on the face of the bass drum: the Charred Remains.” 

Vananda, Minstrel Island, Potts Lagoon, Port McNeill, Klemtu, Prince Rupert, Port Simpson, Ketchikan, Meyers Chuck, Wrangell, Petersburg, Juneau – all places that Raban visits. He has a particular fondness for the jumble of sheds, wharves and canneries lining the eastern shore of Wrangell Narrows. He writes,

The straggle of sheds and houses along the bank at last thickened into the low, pale, floating city of Petersburg, whose canneries and bunkhouses, built out on stilts over the water, were doubled by their reflections in the oily calm. Boats greatly outnumbered buildings. In the half-mile narrows, Petersburg needed no sheltering harbour wall, so the boats were scattered piecemeal along a mile of pilings, moorings, piers, and floating docks, making the town more like a fleet at anchor than a permanent settlement. The whole place rippled and shimmered. I felt faintly dizzy as I tied up among the reflections, then went to report to the harbormaster’s office. 

All three of these books are exceptional, not just in terms of their site-specificity, but in terms of their description of people. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

3 for the Sea: Action

This is the fifth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their action.

By “action” I mean the events represented in the narrative. What interests me is the way these events are conveyed, how they’re written. Here, for example, is McPhee’s description of a pirate attack:

Fast-crackling rifle shots. Bullets slamming the mangroves. A pirogue full of pirates fleeing for the swamps, pursued by more bullets. 

Very powerful boats appear. One of them circles the ship. Two lingering pirates cling to the bills of the anchor not in use. They stand on the flukes. They plunge into the river. Swiftly receding in the brown current, their heads bob. Their heads become dots in the water as they are swept away.

The pirates’ forty-horse pirogue, with stores seized from the upper forepeak, reaches a sandspit at the edge of the manglar. There are six aboard. They take off running.

That’s just a taste. To get the full kinetic effect, read the six-page description in full. Note the active verbs (“circles,” “clings,” “stand,” “plunge,” “bob”), the present tense, and the brilliant sentence fragments (“Fast-crackling rifle shots. Bullets slamming the mangroves. A pirogue full of pirates fleeing for the swamps, pursued by more bullets”) – three techniques that McPhee uses to convey immediacy. 

Not all the events in Looking for a Ship are that dramatic. Some are just routine shipboard activities. For example:

Chipping rust is a job for people made of neurological nylon. They use hand-held jackhammers – needle guns, chisel guns, Bumble Bees, triple-scalers. They dislodge rust and they create sound. Wherever they are, wherever you are, you can hear them. You can climb the flying bridge, wrap a pillow around your ears, stuff yourself in a hawsepipe, hide under a table – you cannot escape the sound. As a result, there are union rules limiting the sound to six hours a day. Depending on where you are, the chippers can seem to be hovering aircraft, they can seem to be splashing water, they can suggest a dentist drilling a cavity hour after hour. There is a rust buster so large, so heavy, so lurchingly difficult to control that Vernon McLaughlin is often the only sailor willing to accept the task. This is the Arnessen Horizontal Deck Scaler, colloquially known as the lawnmower. It looks something like a lawnmower, but if it were ever used on a lawn it would bury itself in seven seconds. After standing watch from four to eight, Mac will run the lawnmower from nine to twelve and again from one to four, while Peewee follows him, sweeping chips.

That final phrase “while Peewee follows him, sweeping chips” is wonderfully placed. McPhee’s eye for dynamic detail enlivens everything he writes, even description of such seemingly mundane tasks as chipping rust.   

Raban’s Passage to Juneau brims with action, much of it generated by wind and water:

The sea in Saratoga Passage frosted over, as the forecast wind began to fill in from the south. The wrinkled skin of the water became ridged with breaking wavelets; in less than half an hour, the waves were steep, regular, well-formed, hard-driven by the building wind. With the headsail out to starboard, the boat skidded through the sea – the winched sheet bar-taut, the sail molded into a white parabola as rigid as one of Frank Gehry’s curved concrete walls. The wind keened in the steel rigging. At my back, I could hear the forward rush of each new wave, then its sudden, violent collapse in a crackling bonfire of foam. Hauling on the wheel, driving the boat downwind as it tried to slew broadside-on, I was on a jittery high. I hadn’t had such sailing in many months. The three-step waltzing motion of the boat, the throbbing, strings-and-percussion sound of wind and water on the move, came back to me as an old, deep pleasure. But a pleasure tinged, as always, with an edge of incipient panic.

To steer a straight course was impossible. Overpressed, and unbalanced by its single sail, the boat corkscrewed downwind at 7.6 knots, held to that speed by the braking force of its own bow wave, which peeled away from the hull in a long, curling mustache of surf. The mizzenmast behind me shuddered with the strain taken by the rigging, and I was frightened that something up there was about to break. If one thing broke, so would a whole lot of things, in extremely rapid and disconcerting succession. It was a relief to gain the shelter of Strawberry Head on the Whidbey Island side, where the wind was reduced to muffled gusts and skirls, and I took in a half-dozen rolls of sail and let the boat saunter, gently, through a seascape so changed that it belonged to another nation.

A log the length of the boat was twirling slowly around on the starboard bow. I hauled the wheel to port and passed backward under the bridge – a pity, since there were half a dozen pale faces up there, and I was sorry to find myself suddenly turned into a happy spectacle of nautical incompetence. I got the boat facing the right way, yawed on a boil, slewed on an eddy, and slammed into a line of low, breaking overfalls. Somewhere, as I came out of the pass like a cork expelled from the neck of a champagne bottle, I found room in my head for the thought that I would not at all like to be doing this in a motorless cedar canoe. 

How I love that “as I came out of the pass like a cork expelled from the neck of a champagne bottle.” And that “At my back, I could hear the forward rush of each new wave, then its sudden, violent collapse in a crackling bonfire of foam” is inspired!

What is the central action of O’Hanlon’s Trawler? Six words sum it up: pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge, and yaw. So violent is the Norlantean’s motion that O’Hanlon struggles to keep his balance. Here’s what happens in his cabin:

Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva, I worked my way out of my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag and, lying back again on the bunk, I pulled on my pants, my trousers. I found my black socks (three to each foot, against the cold) and, bundling forward like a curled foetus, I lodged into my wooly carapace of a sweater. The effort of it: there was no rest anywhere, nothing would stay still … The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming into land, and a that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. Other smaller, straining engines came into life directly beneath me, and the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue, gently, very slowly, prone, through the hanging curtains of Luke’s bunk, over his flat blue sleeping-bag, out the other side – and it tipped me off and down on to his linear collection of red, blue and yellow plastic biscuit-boxes. My buttocks, I’m sorry to say, must have landed on his favourite box, his red Jacobs biscuit-box, because under me its top and sides blew-up, releasing a tight stash of small, empty, plastic screw-lid Marine Lab specimen-bottles all over the floor.

And here’s what happens in the fish-room:

Intending to clamber over the 3-foot sides of the conveyor, I began to try to hitch up the civilian trousers beneath my oil-skin trousers (there seemed to be so many belts and braces and rubber straps; and the whole outfit was so uncomfortable; and it was so difficult to keep everything up around a moving flop of stomach when the world would not stay still; and besides, my boxer shorts long ago half-shredded by jungle mould, had now decided to give up altogether and to drop, dying, around my knees). And then, for the second time – and once again, so gently, without warning, so slowly – I was weightless, I was airborne. The conveyor belt passed beneath me; someone shot me in the left shin; the travelling wave of froth and foam came curling up to wash over me and to leave me, splayed out full length, against the rusty plates of the port side of the inner hull.

When the world would not stay still – that is the Norlantean’s world. O’Hanlon evokes it brilliantly. 

Vivid action is one factor that makes these three books great. Another is their terrific sense of place. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

3 for the Sea: Structure

This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their structure. 

McPhee’s Looking for a Ship has a curious structure. Unlike most travelogues, it doesn’t follow the journey as it was made through time and space. The book consists of seventeen untitled chapters. The first two, written in the past tense, are set in Charleston, South Carolina, where McPhee and his friend Andy Chase, second mate, look for a ship. They eventually find one, the Stella Lykes, that takes them on a forty-two-day run through the Panama Canal and down the coast of South America, with stops to unload and pick up freight at such ports as Cartagena, Valparaiso, Balboa, Buenaventura, Lima, and Guayaquil. Chapter 3, written in the present tense, plunges us directly into life aboard Stella. The date is August 10, “the twentieth day of the voyage.” Stella is six days out of Guayaquil, Ecuador, heading for Valparaiso, Chile. What happened to the previous nineteen days? What about the ports before Guayaquil – Cartagena, Balboa, Buenaventura? What about the Panama Canal? No mention of any of them. We jump from Charleston to Valparaiso. But be patient; keep reading. McPhee has his own artful way of proceeding. All these ports of call eventually enter the narrative: Valparaiso in Chapter 3; Cartagena in Chapter 4; Guayaquil in Chapters 5, 12, and 13; Balboa and Panama Canal in Chapter 11; Lima in Chapter 12; Buenaventura in Chapter 15.

Looking for a Ship’s structure isn’t determined by chronology. It’s theme-driven. One of its main themes is the strong character and superb seamanship of Stella’s captain – Paul McHenry Washburn. McPhee calls him “the most interesting person on the ship.” Washburn appears in almost every chapter. McPhee describes him on the bridge, interviews him in his office, shows him docking Stella in some tight spots, tells about his personal history, visits him at his home in Jacksonville, shows him outwitting a Caribbean storm, describes him dealing with pirates, stowaways, and Stella’s burners going out. 

Captain Washburn is one of McPhee’s themes. Another is the decline of the American Merchant Marine. It’s this theme that generates the ending of the book, with Stella dead in the water. When I first read Looking for a Ship many years ago, I found this ending abrupt and unsatisfying. The journey seemed prematurely terminated (even though there’s at least one clue – the reference in Chapter 17 to the inspection of Stella’s hull in Port Newark – indicating the ship did make it back to where it started). But, on second reading recently, the ending strikes me as perfect. Stella, floating dead in the water, is a marvellous symbol of the United States Merchant Marine’s predicament. McPhee’s final sentence is consummate:

With our lemons and lollipops and terrycloth towels, our three thousand cases of wine, with out ninety drums of passion-fruit juice, our onions, umbrellas, bone glue, and balsa wood, our kiln-dried radiata pine, with our glass Nativity scenes and our peach chips, we are dead in the water.

Unlike Looking for a Ship, Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau unfolds in a straight chronological line. Events are described in the order they happened. There are no flashbacks. But there is a neat structural wrinkle. Raban braids two narratives: (1) his journey through the Inside Passage; (2) Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 exploratory voyage through the same body of water. The two strands are beautifully interlaced. At times, it’s almost as if Captain Van is sailing right there with him (“I’d planned that day to sail up Admiralty Inlet and cross the strait, meeting Vancouver’s expedition as his small boats made their way south into the sound”). 

The primary narrative – Raban’s account of his trip – moves in the most natural way, day by day, noting details, logging impressions. I relish this journal-like form of writing. The book consists of eight chapters. The first begins in Seattle, in March. The last ends back in Seattle, in August. Chapter 5 contains a surprise, a break in the narrative line. Raban suspends his trip, docks his boat in Potts Lagoon, approximately midway on his voyage, and returns to his Seattle home, where he learns that his father is seriously ill. Raban flies to England to be with him. We go from the labyrinthine channels, mercurial tides, and boiling whirlpools of the Inside Passage to the lawns and gardens of Market Harborough and the modest brick bungalow where his mother and father live. We’re plunged directly into Raban’s personal life, his sometimes prickly relations with his parents and siblings. Raban describes his father’s death, funeral, and cremation. The chapter, called “Rite of Passage,” is forty-six pages long. Its content contrasts sharply with the rest of the book. At the chapter’s end, Raban flies back to Potts Lagoon and resumes his voyage. But his mood has changed (“There was no avoiding my father now”). 

Earlier, I described Chapter 5 as a break in the narrative. But, on reflection, I don’t think it is. It’s part of the chronology of events that happened during the voyage. By including it, Raban shows his fidelity to real life. 

Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler is interestingly structured. The first three chapters are chronological; the remaining eleven are thematic. The book begins at O’Hanlon’s home in Oxfordshire. He receives an excited call from his friend Luke Bullough:

Redmond, you’ve got to get up here, fast. There’s a storm coming in, big style! I have the satellite maps. Force 11, maybe more. Straight for Orkney. And Jason, the Norlantean skipper – he’s called on Cellnet. He’s north-west of Shetland. He says the weather’s horrendous. And getting worse. Perfect! Just what you wanted! He says we sign on at Scrabster, Saturday, two days’ time, 7 a.m., no later. OK? Good. So pick me up at home – 19 Pilot Square, Fittie. Be there! And remember – nothing green.

The first three chapters tell about O’Hanlon’s trip to Fittie to pick up Luke, and then about the two of them continuing on to Scrabster, where they board the Norlantean. The ship then makes a short trip to Stromness, where it takes on supplies and ice, and where O’Hanlon, Luke, and some of the crewmen visit a couple of bars. Then back aboard the Norlantean, and away she goes, away, away to the wild North Atlantic fishing-grounds. In one of my favourite sentences, O’Hanlon describes her departure this way:

The next day, in full, black, northern winter night of four o’clock in the afternoon, in a constant, unvarying wind of such violence that I found it almost impossible to stand on deck, the Norlantean, spotlights blazing, left Stromness.

The rest of the book takes place on the Norlantean. We say goodbye to chronological narration. The trip becomes a series of pungent, vivid, humorous set pieces. For example, Chapter 4 takes place in the fish-room, where O’Hanlon learns to gut Greenland halibut (“my gloves only just got a grip on its smooth slimy skin”). Chapter 5 shows him in the galley, eating clapshot (“I decided that I actually liked minced sheep’s-oesophagus-and-stomach, both lengths of colon, the rectum, the entire alimentary canal, as long as it had that reassuringly acrid background taste of gunpowder”). Chapter 6 describes being in the wheelhouse during a Force 12, Category One hurricane (“I was silent, mesmerized by the lines of foam streaking towards the bow window, lit by the bow searchlight, flying seawater whipped into white by winds gone berserk, like snow in a blizzard, except that the snowflakes had got together, coagulated, as if they were whole long lines of detached wave-crests, coming at me in a solid weighted mass”). 

Each of Trawler's chapters describes a particular aspect of shipboard life. Time seems measured not in days or hours, but in hauls. 

To sum up, Passage to Juneau is chronological; Looking for a Ship is thematic; Trawler is partly chronological and partly thematic. All three structures contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.