March 28, 2022 Issue

In this week’s issue, Nick Paumgarten visits a retirement village in Florida and writes about it. Sound exciting? Actually, it’s terrific! One reason is that the community in question – Latitude Margaritaville, in Daytona – turns out to be a genuinely fun place to live. Another is that Paumgarten, as we know from previous pieces, can be witheringly skeptical about man-made paradises: see, for example, his evisceration of Augusta National in “Unlike Any Other” (The New Yorker, June 24, 2019). So when you start reading this piece, you don’t know how it’s going to go. Will it be a scoff or a spree? It turns out to be a bit of both. Along the way, it affords the pleasure of reading Paumgarten at his descriptive best. For example:

Men with guitars set up outside someone’s garage, and the golf carts appear out of nowhere. Commence the beer pong. Pool parties, poker nights, talent shows, toga parties, pig roasts. Cigar-club meeting, group renewal of wedding vows, a pub crawl in old St. Augustine. Oktoberfest this fall had a “Gilligan’s Island” theme; “Hoodstock” was hippies, Fireball, and multicolored jello shots. The golf carts zip and swerve. 

And:

Late in the day, I found McChesney playing cornhole in the village square with some friends. I joined in for a while, and then we loaded up the cornhole boards and got into his golf cart and, beers in hand, hummed down the cart path, in the pink subtropical twilight, pines and palms whizzing by, a whiff of fry grease lingering in the air.

And:

The night went by in a wash of gentle, well-rehearsed and well-worn folk rock, amid video imagery of reefs, coves, beaches, sailboats, cocktails, Jet Skis, cheeseburgers, and resort developments—a kind of subliminal indoctrination into the blurred line between the wild and the tame, the pristine and the industrialized. 

“Five O’Clock Everywhere” is a wonderful exploration of “retirement the Margaritaville way.” I enjoyed it immensely. 

March 21, 2022 Issue

What’s it like to live in Ukraine right now? Joshua Yaffa’s “The Siege,” in this week’s issue, tells us in detail after immersive detail. Here, for example, is his description of conditions at Kyiv’s Ohmatdyt children’s hospital:

The hospital was facing a crisis with its regular patients. Hundreds of children suffering from severe conditions required urgent treatment and operations. Supplies of expensive and rare cancer medicines were running low; flights were grounded and logistics scrambled, making it impossible to get stem cells for bone-marrow transplants. Given the ongoing risk of missile strikes and air raids, most of the children had been moved to a series of basements in the hospital complex. Inside one, dozens of mattresses were arrayed on a concrete floor. The space was dank and drafty. The ceiling leaked. Mothers rocked their crying children or lay silently with them. Pots of food were kept warm on small stoves. One infant needed a shunt implanted to remove fluid from her brain. A six-month-old girl and her mother had checked in to Ohmatdyt for an operation to regulate the baby’s lymphatic system. “We were all ready, and the war started,” the woman told me.

And here’s his depiction of Kyiv’s International Square, “near where the bulk of Russian forces had massed”: 

There had been a firefight the night before. The carcass of a torched military transport truck lay slumped on the asphalt. A shot-up Army bus with deflated tires stood across the square. Shrapnel and bullet casings crunched underfoot. A group of locals had gathered to take a look.

Everywhere Yaffa goes, he talks with people, noting down their comments. For example:

Later that day, I stopped by Dubler, a stylish café co-owned by a local architect named Slava Balbek. It had been closed for days, but I found a dozen young people seated around a long wooden table finishing a late breakfast. Balbek was conducting a planning meeting with volunteers. He had turned the café into a nonprofit kitchen and delivery hub, sending meals to Territorial Defense units, hospitals, and anyone else left behind. “I went straightaway to my local military-recruitment depot, but they told me they were already full”—in the first ten days of the war, a hundred thousand people reportedly enlisted in the volunteer forces—“so I thought, O.K., how else can I be helpful,” Balbek, who is thirty-eight, and an amateur triathlete, told me. “I’m a good trouble-shooter, and if you leave out the particular horrors of war, this is basically organizational work. You need strong nerves and cold reason.”

My take-away from Yaffa’s absorbing piece is that Ukrainians are an amazing people – united and determined to survive Putin’s brutal invasion. The final paragraph says it all:

War has split Shchastia yet again. Dunets, the civil-military-administration head, was recalled back to the Ukrainian Army, and is fighting with the 128th Brigade. Tyurin, his deputy, stayed on in the city administration, albeit under a new flag. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. “I told them to fuck off,” he said.

Photo by Jérôme Sessini, from Joshua Yaffa's "The Siege"

March 14, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s “Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter,” an account of his overnight visit with journalist Kristina Berdynskykk in an underground space of a Kyiv metro station. Every night, Yaffa says, Kyiv metro stations “fill with as many as fifteen thousand civilians, from young families with inflatable mattresses to babushkas who remember wartime stories from their parents many decades ago.” He says of Berdynskykk,

Along with her sixty-seven-year-old mother, Galina, and seventeen-year-old niece, Nastya, she had secured a place inside a train car, which tends to be a few degrees warmer than the concrete platform. On every surface, several dozen people lay in various angles of awkward recline, surrounded by rolling suitcases and plastic shopping bags.

Yaffa puts us squarely there, in the makeshift bomb shelter, when the lights go down for the night:

After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow.

That passage is inspired!

Photo by Emanuele Satolli, from Joshua Yaffa's "Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter"

March 7, 2022 Issue

A special shout-out to The New Yorker for its “Days of War,” a portfolio of Mark Neville’s photos, in this week’s issue. Neville’s portraits catch the remarkable strength of Ukrainian character in the face of Russia's vicious invasion. Joshua Yaffa, in his accompanying text, quotes Neville as follows:

“What I find most remarkable is the resilience of the people there,” Neville says. “As a photographer, I’ve been in many places where people are going through incredible trauma. They would reach out to me for help, for money, to get them out, and I would say, ‘The only way I can help is to take your picture and tell your story.’ But with Ukrainians, and with some of the many hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced, no one—not one—has asked me for anything. The only thing they want is to sit me down and tell me what’s happened to them. They have lost people, seen people wounded terribly, seen their streets obliterated. All I want is for people who are looking at these pictures to recognize a version of themselves. Schoolkids taking gymnastics lessons, people just going about their lives despite the shelling and more. For eight years! Can you imagine?”

Mark Neville, "Days of War" (2022)

Postscript: Jonathan D. Spence 1936 - 2021

Jonathan D. Spence (Photo by Misha Erwitt)

I want to pay tribute to Jonathan D. Spence, who died a few months ago, age eighty-five. Spence was an eminent scholar of Chinese history. And he was a great writer. His style was spare and elegant. I’m not a student of Chinese history. But I enjoyed reading his writing, especially his New York Review of Books pieces: see, for example, “A Master in the Shadows” (April 5, 2012); “The Ball and the World” (December 8, 2011); “The Enigma of Chiang Kai-shek” (May 28, 2009); “Portrait of a Monster” (November 3, 2005).

There’s a sentence in the “Acknowledgments” of his wonderful The Question of Hu (1988) that I cherish:

And just in case all that love and caring from so many people might not prove enough, my aged dog Daisy climbed the narrow wooden steps to my summer study countless times a day, and lay across from me during every word, sighing gently in her sleep over my endless attempts to draw some meaning out of the constantly vanishing past.

February 28, 2022 Issue

Rivka Galchen, one of my favorite New Yorker writers, has a medical piece in this week’s issue. Called “Change of Heart,” it’s about the world’s first transplantation of a pig’s heart into a human. Galchen talks with the surgeon, Bartley Griffith, who performed the operation. She talks with the surgeon, Muhammad M. Mohiuddin, who led the surgery that extracted the heart from a year-old genetically modified pig. She describes the transplantation:

The cold pig heart was delivered to the operating room. “Some people like to blast music in an O.R., but I like to hear pins drop,” Griffith said. “I like to hear the sound of the heart-and-lung machine.” Griffith estimates that he has performed more than a thousand heart transplants, but this one called for a different start: before he made the first incision, he suggested that everyone pause for thirty seconds to “think about what this man is entering into.” He described the transplantation as an opportunity to learn. Griffith told me, “We don’t usually take a moment like that. But I think it relaxed everyone. And then we went to work.” The process of transplanting a heart is both brutal and precise. An eight-inch incision is made in the chest. The breastbone is cut in half with a bone saw. The ribs are opened outward to expose the heart. One large vein and one large artery are connected by tubes to a cardiopulmonary-bypass machine; a third tube washes the organ with a heart-stopping fluid. That’s the beginning.

And, most memorably, she describes what happens when the transplanted pig’s heart starts to beat:

When he first pulled the pig heart out of its container, it looked small and pale. “It had an opaqueness that was off-putting,” he said. “I wondered, Did we do something wacky?” He connected the pig heart to the patient’s vessels. He released the clamp, allowing human blood to flow into the organ. “It was as if we’d turned on a light. And it was a red light. The heart just brightened up. And it went from trembling to pumping.” He demonstrated the movement with his hands. “Hearts don’t just squeeze when they beat, they kind of twist, and this heart—it was doing the hoochy-coochy. It was one of the best hearts I’ve ever seen after transplantation.”

Galchen is a superb describer of complex scientific projects: see, for example, her “Green Dream” (on nuclear fusion), and her “The Eighth Continent” (on the race to develop the moon). She writes clearly and vividly. I enjoy her work immensely. 

3 for the Sea: Redmond O'Hanlon's "Trawler"

This is the third 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 review Trawler.

Strap yourself into your chair. Use belts, rope, bungee cords, whatever you can find, because you’re about to enter the wild, chaotic, alien, manic, exotic world of the Nortlantean, an Orkney commercial trawler (“a 38.5 metre-long deep draught mass of iron”), fishing the freezing North Atlantic, in a storm gusting Force 11 to Category One Hurricane:

It was a black night, but the Norlantean’s main stern searchlight was on, and the black night was a white-out of spray, a chaos of whirling streaks of foam – in patches so thick that at first the lines and spirals seemed almost stationary in the inverted cone of the fierce rays of light. And then, as I withdrew my mesmerized gaze from the furthest penetration of the beam (which was not far – just enough to give me a glimpse of the Norlantean’s starboard gunwhale, now rolling down, down, digging in to the waves I couldn’t see, and would she come up? How could she come up? And why did she have to move her whole stern like that, a fast side-to-side rear-end waggle like a cat about to pounce, and then wallow deep down in, and slew obscenely left-to-right in a movement I’d certainly not felt before … ), as I focused on the very brightest patch of spray and bunched foam a yard or two out from the searchlight, I realized that all this torn-up water was moving so very shockingly fast, and I felt sick, but it was not seasickness – no, it was far worse, it was entirely personal, hidden, the steely stomach-squeeze of genuine all-out fear, that sharp warning you get before you panic and disgrace yourself to yourself forever … 

The “I” in the above passage is O’Hanlon. Trawler is the riveting account of his two-week trip aboard the Norlantean, January, 1999. He’s there with his young friend Luke Bullough, a marine biologist (“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”). Luke is O’Hanlon’s guide (“Hey, Redmond! Big style! We’re going to have a grand time, you and I”; “I want you to see everything, every chance we get”). And that’s what happens; he does get to see everything – the bridge, the machinery, the galley, the hold, the fish-room, the hauling of the net, and, most memorably, the amazing fish that are caught in that net  – except, for O’Hanlon, it’s not always a “grand time.” For one thing, he gets seasick:

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.

For another, he has a hard time keeping his balance due to the Norlantean’s constant pitching, rolling, swaying, heaving, surging, and yawing:

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.

Many of the book’s best scenes are set in the fish-room, where the haul is sorted and gutted. O’Hanlon describes it magnificently:

“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. 

The fish-room is where we see the fish, not only Greenland halibut, redfish, Blue ling, and Grenadiers, which are what the Norlantean is hunting, but also strange, extraordinary creatures such as a 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. It slid down, flop, on the tray. Its foot-long-rat-tail whiplashed after it.

And a deep-sea 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 …

In one of my favorite scenes, Luke mischievously lures O’Hanlon into a startling encounter with an anglerfish:

Expecting some minor curiosity, I stepped into the stainless-steel hopper, right leg first, over the sill – and stopped. My left leg (despite its outer oilskin protection, its inner high yellow rubber sea-boot complete with steel toe-cap) refused to follow. From my brain it received the down-both-legs forked message before I did. It already knew that my right leg, at the level of the lower shin, was one engulfing snap away from a permanent goodbye to a length of oilskin, one half of a right yellow welly complete with its toe-cap of steel, one still flexible ankle and a perfectly usable right foot.

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 complimentary 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 … 

As you can see, I love quoting O’Hanlon. He’s a brilliant writer – where brilliance means specific, attentive, original, vivid, perceptive, vital, humorous. Trawler is one of his masterpieces. 

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss various aspects of these three great books – their action, structure, point of view, sense of place, sense of people, descriptive art, meaning, humour – in more detail. My next post in this series will be on structure.

February 14 & 21, 2022 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. This may be just me, but Miriam Toews’ personal history piece, “The Way She Closed the Door,” in this week’s issue, seems unreal. The device of recounting her life as if she were talking to that youth in the Paris café seems just that – a device. And that river walk is too much, too patterned, too dreamlike to be believable. The same goes for the river cracking up and the cracked window and the piece of glass lodging in her forehead. I’m not saying these events didn’t happen, but the whole thing just seems too shaped, too artful to be a chronicle of real experience. 

2. Michaelangelo Matos’s “Goings On About Town” note on the Black Dog’s new EP “Brutal Minimalism” contains these delightful lines:

The grainy, gray-toned percussion, redolent of cracked concrete walls, and the low-mixed chimes, like faraway train signals, add to the verisimilitude. Even when the beats come forward, they amplify the background details.

3. Perhaps the most beautiful sentence in this week’s issue appears in Anthony Lane’s “Living for the City,” a review of Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World”: “Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle.” 

February 7, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three.” It’s another one of the Master’s “reminiscent montages.” This one consists of six segments. They flash back and forth in time. The first is set in 1972; McPhee takes nature writer Edward Abbey on a walking tour of Princeton. The second section travels back to 1948; McPhee is a night watchman at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In the third segment, it’s June 21, 2006; McPhee is on the McKenzie River with one of America’s great fly fishermen, Dr. Lenox Dick. In the fourth, it’s 1960; McPhee has dinner with Henry Luce. The fifth is a double; one part describing a weekend in 2004 that McPhee spent driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries; the other telling about a 1982 trip he and his wife, Yolanda, took to the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, to visit a Bing cherry orchard. In the final segment, McPhee goes way back to when he was ten, and tells about the time he broke into Joe Brown’s sculpture studio in Princeton to steal some clay. 

The piece is quite a mash-up of images – the literary equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine or a Cornell box. I devoured it. The pleasure of it, for me, flows from its wonderful sentences. This one for example: 

Sitting back in the armchair with his legs at full stretch, one boot across the other, he seemed to be aiming through a kind of gun sight formed by his toes. 

And this:

With its haystacks and standing waves and boulder-field eddies below pools of fast flat water, its rhythmic curves, it has the shape of a downhill ski run. 

And this:

In Speyside, on Isla, on Skye, I later interviewed the distillers, including Captain Smith Grant, whose artesian spring, called Josie’s Well, was out in the middle of a field of oats near Ballindalloch, Banffshire, and was providing thirty-five hundred gallons an hour to the stills of The Glenlivet.

“Tabula Rasa 3” is an excellent addition to McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa” series. I enjoyed it immensely. 

January 31, 2022 Issue

Once again John Seabrook’s beloved Ford F-150 pickup appears in his writing. You’ll recall that’s what he was driving when he hit black ice, in his superb “Six Skittles” (April 9, 2018). Now, in “Green Giants,” in this week’s issue, he considers replacing it with an electric version, a Ford F-150 Lightning. And once again, it’s his personal experience of the product that makes his piece so engaging. He attends a car show in Austin, Texas, where the Lightning is on display. He notes, among other things, that the new truck has a “frunk” (“Instead of a hunk of throbbing, greasy metal up front, there’s a lockable storage space large enough to fit two sets of golf clubs, and equipped with a drain so that the frunk can be filled with ice and drinks”). 

He tours the Rouge Electric Vehicle Centre, in Dearborn, Michigan, where the Lightning is assembled:

We came to the largest of the robots, a Fanuc M-2000iA, which can lift a vehicle frame at least thirteen feet into the air. The robot deftly picked up the truck’s eighteen-hundred-pound Korean-made lithium-ion battery, which looked like a rooftop cargo-carrying case. The reinforced high-strength plastic shell contained hundreds of AA-battery-size cells filled with chemicals. The Fanuc placed the battery on the truck’s chassis, and the skillet floated farther down the line.

Most interestingly, he takes one of Ford’s new electric vehicles – a Mustang Mach-E – for a two-hundred-and-sixty-mile test-drive. His description of this trip is, for me, the highlight of the piece. And, as was the case in his wonderful “Scooter City” (April 26 & May 3, 2021), in which he a tries out an e-scooter, the experience is mixed. It starts well. He and his son, Harry, set out from Brooklyn. He notes that the car “can deliver microbursts of acceleration, without cycling through gears, in the way that an electric egg beater can go directly to the high-speed setting, skipping low and medium.” Seabrook enjoys these “microbursts of acceleration.” He says, 

My driver’s brain was far more engaged by these torquey sprints than by a steady rate of high speed. I’m pretty sure Cousin Charlie would have dug it. But the torque wasn’t truly satisfying until I turned on the “propulsion sound” in the “unbridled” mode (it’s a Mustang, remember), so that I heard the speed. Harry shook his head. O.K., Vroomer.

One thing they have to be mindful of is that the car needs to be recharged. At first, their search for a charging station goes smoothly. He writes,

The navigation system correctly calculated that if we drove to the Electrify America direct-current chargers in the Chicopee Marketplace mall, in western Massachusetts, we would have twenty-four per cent of battery life remaining. We arrived after nine, so the vast parking lot was mostly empty. The Mach-E’s G.P.S. led us to the chargers—four plugs in green-glowing, gas-pump-like stations next to a Home Depot. Could this be right? No one else was using them.

They plug in and walk to a restaurant. While they eat, Seabrook monitors the battery’s charging progress on his phone. That's a very cool detail. 

But as they drive north the temperature drops, and, as it does, the projected range of the vehicle keeps diminishing. Range anxiety sets in. Seabrook says, 

The navigation system apparently hadn’t figured this change in weather in its original calculation, which, at least to me, seemed neither seamless nor delightful. It began to rain. We were both showing signs of range anxiety by the time we arrived, at 11:30 p.m., nearing empty. We plugged into a regular outlet in the barn, in the dark.

The next day doesn’t go well. Seabrook writes,

The Mustang didn’t charge much overnight on my 120-volt outlet. The car’s navigation system—or the spotty rural cell coverage—failed to route me to the closest Electrify America chargers, across the state border in New Hampshire, and, for safety reasons, I couldn’t use the FordPass app on my phone to navigate while the car was moving. Ford’s charging infrastructure will inevitably improve as more E.V.s hit the road. Today wasn’t my day. I finally found the charging stations in the West Lebanon Walmart parking lot, but they weren’t working properly, and angry drivers were on the phone with customer service. It was still raining; puddles had formed in the depressions around the chargers, and my feet got wet while I was trying to get a hundred and fifty kilowatts flowing into my car, which isn’t as unsafe as it sounds.

Will Seabrook replace his old gas-fed F-150 with a new electric Lightning? He might not. Towards the end of the piece, he road-tests another electric pickup – Rivian’s futuristically designed R1T. He says, “Still, from my first glimpse of the truck’s front end I was smitten.” Smitten! Oh, oh, that doesn’t bode well for the Lightning. 

“Green Giants” provides an illuminating glimpse of the impending rise of the electric vehicle. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Acts of Attention

Alec Soth, "Tim and Vanessa's, Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania"

Vince Aletti, in his absorbing “Alec Soth’s Obsessive Ode to Image-Making” (newyorker.com, February 1, 2022), quotes Soth on his creative process: “Soth said in the course of a recent walk-through at Sean Kelly, he felt that he could ‘liberate’ himself simply by ‘paying attention to what I see.’ ” I love this comment. “Paying attention to what I see” is, for me, the essence of photography – the essence of art, for that matter. Robert Hass, in his What Light Can Do (2012), writes, 

One of the things I love about the essay as a form – both as a reader and as a writer – is that it is an act of attention. An essay, like a photograph, is an inquiry, a search. It implies attention to and sustained concentration on some subject.

One more corroborative quote – my favourite in all of art writing – Peter Schjeldahl on Vermeer: “Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look” (Let’s See, 2008).

3 for the Sea: Jonathan Raban's "Passage to Juneau"

This is the second 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 review Passage to Juneau. 

Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau chronicles his 1996 trip through the Inside Passage, from Seattle to Juneau and back, traveling solo aboard his thirty-five-foot sailboat Penelope.

It’s an unforgettable journey through a thousand-mile obstacle course, and what makes it unforgettable is Raban’s tremendous descriptive power. He puts us squarely there, in the cockpit with him, as he steers his boat through the Inside Passage’s maze-like world of channels, islands, inlets, rapids, whirlpools, deadheads, fogbanks, and fishing fleets. For example, here’s his description of sailing down Saratoga Passage’s “long reach of growling 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.

And here’s his depiction of Deception Pass’s chaotic sea:

In the dwindling afternoon light, the water looked as black and thick as tar, its surface lumpy with boils and cratered with eddies. At ten past five, with 55 minutes to go before slack water, I fed the boat gingerly into the stream, running the engine full blast to give it maximum steerageway through the turbulence. It was like driving a car on ice. Each time the boat’s head met a swirl, it went into a sideways skid, and I had to spin the wheel violently to maintain any semblance of control.

And here’s his description of inching through the dense fog of Haro Strait:

A moving blip resolved into the shadow of a fishing boat, faintly imprinted on the fog, but at a reassuring distance of about a hundred yards. Watching the depth-sounder, checking the radar, I felt my way cautiously inside the sheltering arm of Sidney Spit – a mile-long drying sandbar that ran out from the northern end of Sidney Island. 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 that my hands were incapable of striking a match to light a cigarette. They blundered about in the air, a pair of shaky fists, obstinately declining to take orders from the brain.

That “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” is inspired!

One of my favourite passages is this beauty, a description of the water in Cordero Channel:

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.

How I relish that “just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.” 

Passage to Juneau is structured chronologically, beginning in Seattle on April 1, 1996, ending back in Seattle on or about August 14, 1996. But the narrative is anything but linear. Woven into its intricate fabric is the history of Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 exploration of the Inside Passage. Raban follows Vancouver’s tracks (e.g., “Following Discovery, I ran up Clarence Strait, close to the mountainous and rock-strewn shore of the Cleveland Peninsula”). He evokes Captain Van’s ships Discovery and Chatham so realistically, it’s almost like they’re right there on the water with him; in a sense, they are.  

Midway in Raban’s voyage, at Potts Lagoon, he takes a break and flies back to Seattle to spend a couple of weeks with his wife and daughter. Here the book takes a fascinating turn. In Seattle, Raban learns that his father is dying of cancer. He flies to England to be with him. Suddenly, we’re plunged into the intimate details of Raban’s personal life – his relationship with his father, mother, and brothers, his father’s death (“No more indignities now. I was glad for him”), the funeral and cremation (“Now began the surreal administrative business of death, ‘the arrangements’ ”). This is the messy stuff of real life. I think most travel writers would likely omit it; Raban includes it, and his narrative is the richer for it. After the cremation, Raban flies back to Potts Lagoon and resumes his trip. But his father’s ghost is with him now, haunting the rest of the voyage (“There was no avoiding my father now”).

From Potts Lagoon, he sails through Baronet Passage, stops in Port McNeill, on Vancouver Island, to buy groceries, continues on through Queen Charlotte Strait, shelters in Miles Inlet, heads for Egg Island, then Whirlwind Bay, passes the entrance to Burke Channel, and then joins a convoy of small boats that sail past Bella Bella Island, Spirit Island, and Whiskey Cove, making landfall at Shearwater, a fishing resort on Kliktsoatli Harbour, where there’s a party going on. Next day, out Seaforth Channel into Milbanke Sound:

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 together like egg whites in a blender. By noon, in fitful sunshine, I was in the riverine steep-sided corridor between Cone and Swindler islands, looking out for the Indian village of Klemtu on its hook-shaped bay.

Then a visit to Klemtu, and, next day, up the Finlayson Channel, past the ruins of Swanson Bay and Butedale, at the southern end of Fraser Reach, then through Grenville Channel, anchoring in Nettle Basin for the night (“The Inside Passage had more wild and empty stretches than anywhere I’d ever been, but Nettle Basin was a sharp reminder that I was a tourist among tourists”). Next day, on to Prince Rupert (“I liked Prince Rupert. The city laundromat, full of fishermen and yacht-tourists, was like a big rowdy bar on Saturday night; the liquor store sold Laphroaig whiskey, though at a fearful price”). Next day, past the rocks of Venn Passage, into the lagoon of Metlalkatla, sheltering in Port Simpson for the night. Next day: Dixon Entrance (“In Dixon Entrance at first light, I had white fingers and a hangover”) and Revillagigedo Channel, packed with fishing boats:

The nets were laid across the grain of the new flood tide, and each boat was making constant small maneuvers to keep itself aligned with its own pearl-string of floats. These American nets were longer than Canadian ones – 300 fathoms, more than a third of a mile – and they bulged and kinked in the turbulence of the current. I was playing a game with shifting goalposts: one promising gap abruptly closed while another line of corks swung open like a door. Biting hard on my lower lip, I veered this way and that, sliding past the colored marker-buoys at walking pace.

Revillagigedo Channel leads to the tight bottleneck of Tongass Narrows, “where the long, thin, jerry-built city of Ketchikan stretched out on a ledge dynamited out of the north shore.” Raban spends a couple of days in Ketchikan (“Across the boardwalk was the Potlatch Bar, a raucous cave into which I unwisely stepped for a beer”). From there, he sails through Clarence Strait, then Zimovia Strait, then past the mouth of the Stikine River (“The water here was a milky soapstone green”), to Wrangell. Then through Wrangell Narrows to Petersburg:

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 need no sheltering harbor wall, so the boats were scattered piecemeal along a mile of pilings, moorings, piers, and floating decks, making the town look more like a fleet at anchor than a permanent settlement. The whole place rippled and shimmered.

Then up Frederick Sound, through Stephens Passage to Hobart Bay. Then Gastineau Channel to Juneau (“Even in cruise-ship hours – from ten to five – I liked to walk the fringes of old Juneau”). Raban’s wife and daughter fly there to meet him. The reunion doesn’t go well. Raban’s wife tells him she wants a separation (“My stomach went south”). His joyless voyage back to Seattle is covered in just eleven pages. It includes this bleak observation: “If you want a mirror for your own existence, you need look no further than the tumbling rapids or the strings of dying whirlpools downtide of a piling.”

Passage to Juneau describes Raban’s personal experience of the vast, complex world of the Inside Passage in all its smell-taste-touch-sound-sight-thought-emotion-scoop-of-light magnificence. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Passage to Juneau, including its action, structure, imagery, detail, point of view, and humour. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Redmond O’Hanlon’s superb Trawler.