Taking a Break

Humber Bay Arch Bridge, Toronto (Photo by Tanya Mok, from blogto.com)

Today, Lorna and I travel to Toronto to do some cycling. I’m taking the April 15 New Yorker with me. I’ll post my review when I return. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about April 28. 

On James Wood: Fact v. Fiction

James Wood (Photo by Hans Glave)

Warning: this is a rant. But I'll try to keep it brief.

Can a novel be relied on as biography? To me, the obvious answer is no. A novel is by definition fiction. Therefore, it’s inherently unreliable. James Wood, in his “A Life More Ordinary” (The New Yorker, April 8, 2024) seems to have a different view. He refers to V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. He says that in writing it, Naipaul was “essentially writing the life of his own father, Seepersad Naipaul.” The key word is “essentially.” I take it to mean that, in Wood’s view, Biswas embodies the core of Seepersad’s character, but not every detail. He’s a reasonable facsimile, but not a clone. Is this true? I don’t think so. Wood, in his 1999 essay “The Real Mr. Biswas” (included in his great 2005 collection The Irresponsible Self), points out that Seepersad’s letters to his son Vidia “show that Naipaul’s father was less naïve, much less unlettered, and more worldly than Mr. Biswas.” To me, these are fundamental differences. Seepersad Naipaul is not Mr. Biswas. A House for Mr. Biswas should not be read as his biography. Novelists alter, heighten, and omit facts. In “A Life More Ordinary,” Wood praises Amitava Kumar’s new novel My Beloved Life for its “autobiographical power.” Okay, but novels aren’t autobiography. Or put it this way: they aren’t reliable autobiography. Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because it bugs me to see a great critic like Wood (one of my heroes, actually) seemingly oblivious of the slippery ground he’s on when he blurs the line between fact and fiction. 

Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (Part I)

This is the first in my series “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists,” a celebration of Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023), in which I’ll select four of my favorite pieces from each collection (one per month) and try to say why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Thurman’s wonderful “First Impressions” (June 23, 2008). 

In this piece, Thurman explores the fascinating world of cave paintings. She visits, in the Ardèche region of south-central France, the base camp of a group of researchers dedicated to the study of the Chauvet Cave. She describes the layout and contents of the Chauvet Cave. She discusses the meaning of cave art. And, in my favorite part, she goes with a guide inside the Niaux Cave and describes her experience:

The floor near the mouth was fairly flat, but as we went deeper it listed and swelled unpredictably. Water was dripping, and sometimes it sounded like a sinister whispered conversation. The caves are full of eerie noises that gurgle up from the bowels of the earth, yet I had a feeling of traversing a space that wasn’t terrestrial. We were, in fact, walking on the bed of a primordial river. Where the passage narrowed, we squeezed between two rocks, like a turnstile, marked with four lines. They were swipes of a finger dipped in red pigment that resembled a bar code, or symbolic flames. Further along, there was a large panel of dots, lines, and arrows, some red, some black. I felt their power without understanding it until I recalled what Norbert Aujoulat had told me about the signs at Cussac. He was the second modern human to explore the cave, in 2000, the year it was unearthed, some twenty-two thousand years after the painters had departed. (The first was Cussac’s discoverer, Marc Delluc.) “As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper, noting where they’d broken off stalagmites to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say, ‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”

They make their way to “one of the grandest bestiaries in Paleolithic art” – the Black Salon, a rotunda a hundred and thirty feet in diameter:

Scores of animals were painted in sheltered spots on the floor, or etched in charcoal on the soaring walls: bison, stags, ibex, aurochs, and, what is rarer, fish (salmon), and Niaux’s famous “bearded horses”—a shaggy, short-legged species that, Clottes writes in his new book, has been reintroduced from their native habitat, in Central Asia, to French wildlife parks. All these creatures are drawn in profile with a fine point, and some of their silhouettes have been filled in with a brush or a stumping cloth. I looked for a little ibex, twenty-one inches long, that Clottes had described to me as the work of a perfectionist, and one of the most beautiful animals in a cave. When I found him, he looked so perky that I couldn’t help laughing. Alard was patient, and, since time loses its contours underground, I didn’t know how long we had spent there. “I imagine that you want to see more,” he said after a while, so we moved along.

“First Impressions” is an absorbing tour of some of the world’s most spectacular prehistoric art. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man" Revisited

O. J. Simpson (Photo by Vince Bucci)

“If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit,” Johnnie Cochran told the jury, in O. J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial. And that’s what they did – they acquitted. It’s one of the most breathtaking verdicts in the history of criminal law, flying in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming evidence of guilt. Simpson’s death this week brought back memories of that riveting trial. It also reminded me of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s New Yorker essay on the case – “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” (October 23, 1995). Last night, I reread it. What an extraordinary piece of writing! It begins brilliantly:

“Every day, in every way, we are getting meta and meta,” the philosopher John Wisdom used to say, venturing a cultural counterpart to Émile Coué’s famous mantra of self-improvement. So it makes sense that in the aftermath of the Simpson trial the focus of attention has been swiftly displaced from the verdict to the reaction to the verdict, and then to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict, and, finally, to the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict—which is to say, black indignation at white anger at black jubilation at Simpson’s acquittal. It’s a spiral made possible by the relay circuit of race. Only in America.

Gates looks at the case from many angles. He sees it as counternarrative: “To believe that Simpson is innocent is to believe that a terrible injustice has been averted, and this is precisely what many black Americans, including many prominent ones, do believe.” He sees it as blacks’ distrust of the justice system: “Wynton Marsalis says, ‘My worst fear is to have to go before the criminal justice system.’ Absurdly enough, it’s mine, too.” He sees it as soap opera: “So there you have it: the Simpson trial – black entertainment television at its finest.” He sees it as black prowess in the courtroom: “By the same token, the display of black prowess in the courtroom was heartening for many black viewers.” I found it heartening, too. And inspiring. Johnnie Cochran became one of my heroes. 

Most compellingly, Gates sees it as “racial reduction” and argues strongly against it. He says,

Yet to accept the racial reduction (“WHITES V. BLACKS,” as last week’s Newsweek headline had it) is to miss the fact that the black community itself is riven, and in ways invisible to most whites.

He goes on to say that he himself was convinced of Simpson’s guilt and was “stunned” by the verdict. 

I think it’s fair to say that many people reacted the same way. I remember being at the Merchantman Pub, in Charlottetown, when the verdict came down. The place was packed. All eyes were on the TV screen above the bar. There were four other lawyers at my table. We took bets on whether the verdict would be guilty or not guilty. I was the only one who bet not guilty. Why? It had nothing to do with race. I’d been following the trial and I was impressed with the way Simpson’s defence team had shredded the prosecution’s case – no search warrant, improperly stored DNA, and so on, not to mention that bloody glove found at the murder scene that didn’t fit Simpson’s hand. I felt there was a good chance the jury would throw the case out. 

One aspect of the trial that Gates doesn’t discuss is Simpson’s wealth, which enabled him to hire some of the best defence attorneys in America. That’s an advantage most of us don’t have. I’m not downplaying the so-called “race divide.” It was surely a major factor in Simpson’s case. But his trial also illustrates a wealth divide. People who can afford to hire top notch lawyers to defend them are more likely to avoid being found guilty than people who can’t.

Gates concludes his piece by likening OJ’s trial to an “empty vessel” into which each of us pours our own meanings. I agree. The verdict is endlessly interpretable.

April 8, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Robert Sullivan’s delightful “Talk” story “Find a Grave." It’s about three members of Dervish, a band from Ireland’s County Sligo, and their search for the grave of Michael Coleman, a Sligo fiddler. Coleman is buried in St. Raymond’s Cemetery, in the Bronx. The trio rent a vehicle and use GPS to find St. Raymond’s. The process isn’t straightforward. Sullivan writes, “Kelly was busy with his phone. The cemetery offices, he discovered, were closed, and the precise location of Coleman’s grave was inscrutable.” But they persist and eventually find Coleman’s grave. They gather around it and play a tune in Coleman’s honor:

Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called “Sligo Maid.” Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. “That’s Coleman!” Kelly said. Tunes started up again as a plane departed LaGuardia.

Kelly smiled. “This is a big moment for us.”

“It’s practically spiritual,” Mitchell said.

After a while, they packed up their instruments. Clouds had covered the sun. Mitchell put his hands in his pockets and shivered. “It’s cold, lads,” he said.

The piece is practically a prose poem. I love it. Sullivan is a master “Talk” story writer. This is one of his best.

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #7 "George V. Higgins's Profane Style"

George V. Higgins (Photo by Benno Friedman)

This is the fourth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “George V. Higgins’s Profane Style” (August 29, 2014):

My favorite part of James Wood’s superb "Away Thinking About Things" (The New Yorker, August 25, 2014), a review of James Kelman’s new story collection If It Is Your Life, is his consideration of the way Kelman “repeats and refines ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ ”:

A single sentence will deploy the same word differently. “If it was me I’d just tell them to fuck off; away and fuck I’d tell them, that’s what I’d say if it was me,” the narrator thinks in “The One with the Dog.” There is also “fucking” as a kind of midsentence punctuation (functioning like “but”): “She would just fucking, she would laugh at him.” And also as impacted repetition: “Fuck sake, of course she would; what was the fucking point of fucking, trying to fucking keep it away, of course she’d be fucking worrying about him,” Ronnie thinks in the story “Greyhound for Breakfast.”

Reading that, I immediately thought of my favorite novelist, George V. Higgins, and the resonant way he deployed “fuckin’ ”:

The Digger leaned on the bar. “Lemme tell you something, Harrington,” he said, “you take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life. I went out to Vegas there and I said, ‘Fuck me, fuck me.’ And they fucked me. Then I get that gaff job. I got unfucked.” [The Digger’s Game, 1973]

"You take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life" is a very powerful line. Its use of “fuckin’” to modify “smooth” is what powers it.

Higgins also used the contraction “fuck’re” to great effect. “Where the fuck’re you taking me?” Jackie Brown says in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1971). In The Rat on Fire (1981), Don says to Mickey, “The fuck’re you doin’ there?”

One of Higgins’s most memorable uses of “fuckin’ ” occurs near the end of his brilliant Cogan’s Trade (1975):

“There’s all kinds of reasons for things,” Cogan said. “Guys get whacked for doing things, guys get whacked for not doing things, it doesn’t matter. The only thing matters is if you’re the guy that’s gonna get whacked. That’s the only fuckin’ thing.”

That’s the only fuckin’ thing. Higgins/Cogan is talking about impending violent death. “Fuckin’ ” is used here to underscore the brute reality of being “the guy that’s gonna get whacked.” “Fuckin’ ” gives the line its existential hardness. The passage is a memento mori delivered Boston underworld style.

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

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy's Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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