May 6, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is D. T. Max’s “Design for Living.” It’s about an intriguing form of real estate development currently trending in New York City’s financial district – the conversion of obsolete office towers into apartments. Max talks with Nathan Berman, a specialist in the business. He says of Berman, “He happily spends hours poring over blueprints, dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens.”

Max reports that Berman, through his firm, Metro Loft Management, has turned eight Manhattan office towers into rental-apartment complexes. He’s currently converting a thirty-story office tower at 55 Broad Street. Max visits the site with Berman:

A visit to the sixth floor offered a bleak sight—it was an empty, dark space half the size of a football field, interrupted only by steel support beams and rusted copper waste pipes. The floor was unsealed concrete, and transverse beams along the ceiling were coated with intumescent paint, a fire-resistant covering that looks like bubbling-hot marshmallow. When I stood at the center of the building, the windows were so far away that they looked almost like portholes.

Berman gave me a detailed tour of the thirteenth floor. In his business, a crucial metric for turning a profit is the time lag between borrowing construction money and renting out units. So he works fast. Just four months had passed since Berman, Silverstein, and Rudin had closed their deal, but the thirteenth floor already felt like part of a new apartment complex. Workers were measuring, drilling, staple-gunning. Metal track had been laid down where new walls would go, and a few drywall panels had already been installed—they were covered in a playful-looking purple glaze, to make them resistant to mold. “It’s a little bit more expensive,” Berman said. “But we don’t want any issues down the road.” On one piece of drywall, “Apt. 10” was scratched in pen. There was even a handsome tub in a bathroom without walls, like a guest who’d arrived too early for a party.

It's writing like this that keeps me reading The New Yorker. Max puts me squarely there inside 55 Broad Street and immerses me in Berman’s project. 

An aspect of Berman’s conversions that strongly appeals to me is that they’re a form of recycling. Max writes, 

According to a recent paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, converting an out-of-date office building into an apartment complex can increase its energy efficiency by as much as eighty per cent. (In a residential building, not everyone blasts the air-conditioning 24/7.) According to a report by the Arup Group, an engineering firm, converting a Manhattan office tower releases, on average, less than half the carbon that building one from scratch does.

“Design for Living” is a fascinating tour of the conversion business. I enjoyed it immensely. 

T. J. Clark's "Strange" Aesthetic

Paul Cézanne, House and Tree, L'Hermitage (1874-75)

“Strange” and “strangeness” are two of T. J. Clark’s favorite words. He uses them repeatedly: “the sheer strangeness” of Cézanne’s House and Tree, L’Hermitage; “the strange mixture of sadism and togetherness” of Bruegel’s Magpie on the Gallows; “the strange achievement” of Picasso’s Guernica; the “strange motif and viewpoint” of Cézanne’s House with Cracked Walls; the “strangeness and intricacy of the spatial set-up” in Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. He says that Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm is “full of a sense of the strangeness, the precariousness, of the emerging mode.” Bellini’s The Dead Christ Supported by Four Angels is “a strange mixture of the heart-rending and the lavish.” On Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage, he says, “Veiled body and bare stone cylinder make a strange unity.” On Pollock’s drip paintings: “The process is as strange and extreme as any painting process ever was.” On Richter's "squeegee" paintings: "It is a strange world." On Cézanne’s House near Gardanne: “Landscape painting is given back its strangeness.” On Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women: “He was improvising strange (and wonderful) solutions to problems he had never set himself before.”  

In Clark's superb Picasso and Truth (2013), he writes,

Much of the history of twentieth-century art can be written in terms of artists looking at the loaves in Bread and Fruit Dish – looking at how they obey and resist the force field of the picture rectangle, and assert their own materiality against the paint they are made from – and thinking that somehow, in this, the true strangeness of representation had been invented again. 

Note that “true strangeness.” Later, in the same book, he says it again:

Cézanne’s still lifes, to move closer to Picasso, mostly posit a space that is absolute in its proximity to us, but at the same time – this is the true strangeness – fundamentally unbounded and untouchable. 

This is the true strangeness – Clark knows and appreciates strangeness when he sees it. It’s his ultimate value, the core of his aesthetic. A painting can be breathtakingly beautiful and still not totally grab him. In order for that to happen, it has to be strange. But what does he mean by that? What’s his idea of “strange”? 

The answer (or at least the beginning of one) is Cézanne. Clark makes this clear in his brilliant “Pissarro and Cézanne” (included in his 2022 collection If These Apples Should Fall), in which he analyzes the mentor-mentee relationship between the two artists and compares their styles. He says, “The difficulty with Pissarro – the difficulty of Pissarro – is his simplicity. ‘Strangeness’ is the last word that comes up in connection with him.” 

Clark looks at several Pissarros and notes their many felicities. Of Landscape near Pontoise (1872), he says,

The pale grey of the tree trunk at left is one such, done in a single smear. The path with its rustle of uncut dry grasses, and then the path losing its way by the fence and going on into distance, across fields not yet harvested, as a tentative green smudge. The pale blotted saplings on the other side of the fence; the flattened horizon way off to the right; the small square darker cloud. These are astonishments – the mind and eye can feast on them. 

His description of Cabbage Field, Pontoise (1873) shows his delight in Pissarro’s details:

Can we agree that the light in Cabbage Field, which is breathtaking, is some kind of high-summer gloaming, maybe with moisture in the early evening air? (Of course the painting is equivocal about clock time. It isn’t a Monet sunset. It could be that the peasants are taking advantage of the coolness of morning. But the overall colour balance seems to look forward to dusk.) Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders.

Things emerge from the evening light only gradually: it is the light that is striking, not the ghosts of trees. The edge of visibility is a world of its own. Push towards the unnoticeable in vision, therefore, and if necessary the unpaintable: that seems to be Pissarro’s self-instruction. Look at the leafless tree in the picture’s left foreground, drawn dark on dark against the hill and the house on its crest. How did Pissarro do it? How did he see it as paintable in the first place? Or look at the light caught in the trees on top of the hill, and the final flourish of touches that establish the sparser tree standing on its own between the houses centre-right, its dark greens scrawled liquid on pink.

Those two exquisite paragraphs are among my favorites in all of art writing. They completely win me over to Pissarro, an artist I heretofore immensely underrated. I remember, when I first read them, thinking Can it be? Clark is showing Pissarro to be the greater artist. But then Clark pivots to Cézanne, looks at his House and Tree, L’Hermitage (1874-75), and says,

And the sheer strangeness of House and Tree does speak to something fundamental: we look at the picture’s precipitous road and front lawn to the left, or the desperate staccato of its branches against the house front, window, hilltop, red chimney, and know you’re in the presence already – impossibly – of the twentieth century. 

Clark’s verdict: 

The reader between the lines so far will have gathered that, however much I think we underestimate Pissarro, I largely accept the banal comparative judgment as to Cézanne’s and Pissarro’s strengths. I agree with Pissarro, in other words. Cézanne was the greater artist – more tragic and outlandish, more relentless and single-minded – and therefore modernity’s patron saint. 

Cézanne is strange; Pissarro isn’t. For Clark, that difference is clinching. Interestingly, a shorter version of “Pissarro and Cézanne” appeared in the October 8, 2020 London Review of Books. It’s title? “Strange Apprentice.”  

Robert Sullivan's "Double Exposure"

I see Robert Sullivan has a new book out. It’s called Double Exposure. This, for me, is a major literary event. Sullivan is one of my favorite writers. His great Cross Country (2006) was one of the books featured in my series “3 More for the Road.” I avidly look forward to reading his new one. 

April 2024 Food Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the 2024 Food Issue, a digital-only issue about the culinary world. What a feast! Adam Iscoe’s “No Reservations,” Helen Rosner’s “Padma Lakshmi’s Funny Side,” Jiayang Fan’s “Another Chinatown,” Patricia Marx’s “Spoiler Alert,” Hannah Goldfield's "Holey Grail" – all excellent! But, for me, the highlight is Gary Shteyngart’s delightful “Shaken and Stirred.” Why? Because it’s sheerly, purely, unimpeachably hedonistic. Shteyngart goes on a Martini tour of some of New York City’s grandest bars, and he does it in the company of some very witty drinkers. Here he’s at the Lobby Bar, in Hotel Chelsea, with his friend Amor Towles:

The Lobby Bar is sumptuous, with a bar top that accommodates a Parthenon’s worth of marble, and banquettes that are cozy and velvety. Amor came properly dressed in a vest for the occasion, while I had hastened off the Amtrak in my country garb. The Dukes Martini was assembled tableside—the ingredients presented on a foldout stand—by a young server skilled in the pouring arts. When it comes to the purist’s dry Martini, there are two things to remember. First, there is a mantra that Amor himself has coined: “Crisp, clear, and cold.” The Lobby Bar follows these directives by freezing the glasses, as well as the gin or vodka. The second is the “vermouth rinse.” In this maneuver, the composition I usually turn to for a dry Martini—one part vermouth to five parts gin—is almost entirely done away with. The vermouth is conscripted only to coat a rather enormous glass and is then tossed away before the gin or vodka, which has been primed with a dash of salt-water solution, is poured. (I have been told that at the original Dukes the vermouth was ignominiously tossed onto the carpet, whereas at the Chelsea it is merely splashed into a tiny glass of olives, perhaps later to be lapped up by an alcoholic dog.) Notably, no ice or shakers are used and the alcohol is neither shaken nor stirred, creating a ninety-five-per-cent undiluted Martini, which, at this volume, functions as a kind of uncontrolled insanity.

I read that and immediately found myself thirsting for a Martini.

Shteyngart and Amor begin drinking. Shteyngart writes,

The first Martini, essentially a vermouth-coated container for what I eyeballed to be two and a half to three shots of juniper-noted, grapefruit-evoking Tanqueray No. Ten gin, immediately put us in a mood. The mood was a good one. I cannot remember whether it was Amor or I who said “I’m feeling very chummy.” Perhaps we both said it. The Dukes Martini came with an array of garnishes, of which I found the lemon peel most conducive to the juniper crispness of the Tanqueray.

Then they each have a Dukes Martini with Ketel One vodka. After that they order shrimp cocktails and split a B.L.T. sandwich to fortify themselves for their third drink, an 1884 Martini. Shteyngart describes it superbly:

This beast is premade with two types of gin—Boatyard Double Gin, from Northern Ireland, and the New York Distilling Company’s Perry’s Tot Navy Strength Gin—which clocks in at a ridiculous 114 proof. This dangerous concoction is then fat-washed with Spanish Arbequina olive oil, after which it is frozen and the olive oil’s fat removed, while vermouth, lemon liqueur, a house-made vetiver tincture, and a few dashes of lemon-pepper bitters are added. A lemon peel is then showily expressed over the glass tableside and a very briny Gordal olive and a cocktail-onion skewer are plopped in. Although more sizable quantities of vermouth and other pollutants are at play than in the classic Dukes Martini, the over-proofed gin does a lot of the talking and one is soon very convincingly drunk.

The Chelsea is just the first stop on this sybaritic binge. Another night Shteyngart goes to the Gotham Restaurant with his friend J. Smith-Cameron. She likes the place because of the bartender, a guy named Billy. They each have a Vesper (“a drink that de-Balkanizes the conflict between vodka and gin by combining both, with a splash of Lillet Blanc serving as the Holy Spirit”). This is followed by two Gibsons. Then Billy mixes them a Martinez. Shteyngart writes,

The cocktails are related, but after the crisp minimalism of a Gibson, the Martinez is akin to encountering a violent early hominid in a downtown bar. Sweet vermouth and maraschino are conscripted alongside the usual gin. Billy uses Carpano sweet vermouth, which, to my palate, provides hints of bitterness instead of overwhelming sweetness. It went down as easy as a Martinez can, and J. and I were now thoroughly drunk. Gotham’s kitchen was closed, so we headed across the street to get burgers at the Strip House to buffer our stomachs. When we left, an hour later, Billy had also crossed the street to get a drink at the bar. There he was, with his sleeves still rolled up, saying goodbye to the evening.

That “It went down as easy as a Martinez can, and J. and I were now thoroughly drunk” made me laugh.

Another night, Shteyngart goes to Tigre, on Rivington Street, on the Lower East Side, with his friend Adam Platty. Shteyngart writes,

Tigre is one of the most beautiful bars of recent vintage that I have seen. Windowless, it glows like a jewel box, and the striking semicircle of the bar is not unlike that of the U.N. Security Council, though studded with booze. Platty remarked that “all these bartenders look like Jesus,” and our handsome open-shirted server so resembled the Lord that I couldn’t help but hum, “Oh, come, let us adore him,” under my breath. The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as “smoky as fuck.” “It’s old-fashioned, like if you smoked a cigarette while having a Martini,” Jesus told us, which is absolutely on point. Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far.

That last sentence is inspired, combining words (“Truman vodka,” “flaming orbit,” Empirical,” “Stephen King,” “pyrokinetic,” “Charlene McGee,” “smoked juniper,” “nicotine and tar”) I’m sure have never been combined before. Reading Shteyngart’s piece. I started to feel tipsy. I wasn’t drinking, but it felt like I was. I was getting drunk on his Martini-drenched prose. 

Shteyngart attends other bars as well: Sunken Harbor Club (Immortal Martini); Dante (Dante Martini); Temple Bar (Plymouth Martini); Bemelman’s Bar (Tanqueray Ten); Le Rock (Au Poivre, Super Sec, L’Alaska, In and Out). It’s quite a Martini marathon! I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Another source of pleasure in Shteyngart's piece are the jazzy, glamorous photos by Landon Nordeman. They enhance the text magnificently.

Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart's "Shaken and Stirred"

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

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The men assess the rapid and plan their course:

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

McPhee describes their passage:

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

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

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

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

Segment two concludes with this beautiful passage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's stage two:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 22 & 29, 2024 Issue

I love descriptions of art. There’s a beauty in this week’s issue – Jackson Arn’s description of Anni Albers' Pasture (1958):

None of the shapes or colors in “Pasture” (1958), a smallish plot of mainly red and green threads, would be out of place on a roll of Christmas wrapping paper. The trick is that each component lingers long enough to make any change feel like an event; checkerboard red-and-green switches to green-on-black, then green-on-black but with stutters of white and red. Patterns unfold horizontally, but every so often a twisted pair of vertical threads (it’s called a leno weave) slashes its way out of the grid. An invisible logic, mysterious but never precious, presides. Most visual art addresses whoever happens to be looking at it. “Pasture” stares straight through you, at some distant, tranquil future in which primordial beauty is the only kind left.

That “slashes its way out of the grid” is excellent. The whole piece is excellent. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Anni Albers, Pastture (1958)

3 for the River: Action

This is the fifth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their action.

These books are never static. Their protagonists (the authors) are always going somewhere, doing something. Sometimes you hear of stories being described as essayistic. These books aren’t essayistic. They’re thrilling action-adventures. But not in the mindless Hollywood “superhero” sense. The action-adventures here are real, involving real people in real existential situations, e.g., canoeing dangerous Nahanni rapids, avoiding collision with massive Mississippi barge tows, descending the Congo River by pirogue. 

Patterson puts us squarely there with him and his companion, Gordon Matthews, in the Cache Rapid, when their canoe upsets:

As the canoe drove out of the eddy at the head of the rapid it hit the current with a plunge, and a boiling surge of water foamed up along the gunwale. The frightened dogs all shifted to the downside and the canoe lurched and almost filled with water. I managed to swing it back to the shore we had just left, and Gordon jumped with the line. But he was pulled into the river, as Stevens had been, and down we went. The canoe slid backwards over a rock that was just awash: the tail went clean under water while the nose hung in midair with the river driving past on both sides. I could just see Gordon: he had fetched up against a rock with a smack that almost stove his chest in, and there he stayed hanging on to the line very stoutly with both hands. His arms must have been pretty nearly wrenched out of their sockets.

That’s the kind of action I’m talking about. Dangerous River brims with it. Here’s another taste. This time Patterson is alone, attempting to canoe Hell’s Gate Rapid:

I tried that rapid three times, but the current in the canyon was stronger than I had thought, and I was not able to get speed enough on the canoe to drive it up on the crest of the riffle that barred the way. Twice the canoe climbed the ridge, close under the big waves, only to be flung across the river and driven down the canyon, almost touching the cliff on the portage side. At the third and last attempt the eddies worked in my favour: the canoe was climbing the hill of racing water with speed enough (I thought) to take it on and over, when suddenly a gust of wind blew down the river, the nose swung off course and the canoe slid down into the lower whirlpool. It started to spin and then was lifted on the upsurge of a huge boil from below. It was like the heave of one’s cabin bunk at night in some great Atlantic storm. Then the water fell away from beneath the canoe, and I caught a glimpse of the white waves of the rapid, a long way above, it seemed. The canoe rose once more and spun again, and then at last the paddle bit into solid water and drove the outfit out of the whirlpool and down the canyon for the last time, taking a sideways slap, in passing, from a stray eddy and shipping it green as a parting souvenir of a memorable visit. 

There’s action aplenty in Old Glory, too, much of it on the Mississippi River, as Raban tries to navigate its tricky currents and avoid being run down by barge tows. Here’s a sample: 

When I was signaled into the chamber, the moon was up, silvering the slime on the lock wall. I was lowered into the black. The sluices rumbled in their underground tunnels. When the gates opened, they framed a puzzling abstract of mat India ink spotted with scraps of tinsel. 

My eyes weren’t accustomed. I nosed out gingerly, feeling my way through the water that I couldn’t see. The lights on my boat were supposed to make it visible to other people and were no help in making the river visible to me. I went ahead, giving the motor little, nervous dribbles of gas. A flat-topped black buoy, heeling over in the current, went by so close I could’ve leaned out and touched it. I could just make out the irregular bump of Otter Island and steered to the left of it. For a few minutes I congratulated myself on beginning, at least, to get the hang of this business of night navigation. Then I saw the pointed top of another buoy five yards ahead of my bow. A red. I hadn’t been going downstream at all: I’d just crossed the channel at right angles.

The carbide searchlight of a tow (was it across or down from I was?) raked the river. I headed for what I hoped was the shore, and the tow disappeared over my head at terrifying speed. It left no wake behind, and it was only when I saw another, racing by at the same altitude, that I realized that the tows were trucks on a highway. I edged on. Another beam swiveling idly on the water suddenly picked out my boat and held me, half-blinded. The long, growling blast of the siren was as queerly, then scarily, intimate as the cough of a stranger in one’s bedroom. Panicking, I swung the head of the boat and drove it at full tilt. Any direction would do – just not, please not, into the tow. It went past thirty, thirty yards off, a lone towboat without its barges. Its balconied side and back were lit up like a Christmas tree, but from the front it had been as black as the surrounding river. Its high wake caught me broadside; I had miscalculated the direction it would come from; and as I hung in the trough, the boat rolled and the left-hand gunwale began to gouge cleanly into the side of the wave. I was shin deep in water before I could swing the front of the boat around and ride out the swell. 

I found myself blubbering with shock. Had the towboat been pushing a barge fleet, I would be dead now, or drowning, unconscious, under its screws. I had lost all sense of the shape of the river. I didn’t know where the shore was. I didn’t know up from down. The tow’s lights had left the river even darker than it had before. I saw one faint glimmer, and what looked like the distant outline of a tree, but I was frightened that it would turn into another tow, its leading barges a black wedge waiting to suck me under. I drove away from it, then around it, then cautiously approached it. It was an electric light on a pole. Under it, a johnboat, piled with hoop nets was drawn up on the sand.

Action in Tim Butcher’s Blood River takes place on both land and water. Butcher moves through the Congo jungle on a motorbike, dodging rebel soldiers: 

The next 200-kilometre-long stretch was grim. It began well enough with a relatively fast track out of Kabambarre along a well-forested ridge. This was the main access road into the town and I spotted a group of soldiers guarding the entrance to the town. They were gathered around a cooking fire in the ruins of a building, but Benoit repeated his old trick of speeding up, and though the soldiers jumped up, grabbed their weapons and shouted after us, we had already slipped by. 

At the village of Lowa, on the Upper Congo, he shifts to travel by pirogue. This is my favorite part of the journey. It puts Butcher in direct contact with the river (“I let my fingers trail in the river water. It was as warm and soothing as a bath”). As his crew paddles him downriver, Butcher relaxes. He falls asleep. He’s woken by a clap of thunder. A storm approaches. The crew races to get to shore. Butcher’s description of the action is excellent:

“We must find shelter, or the rain will fill the pirogue an we will capsize,” shouted Malike, struggling to make himself heard above the noise of the wind and waves. I thought of the crocodile I had seen the day before. Capsizing would not be good.

As the paddlers made for shore, we raced a curtain of rain that I could hear, but not see, approaching from behind. We lost the race by only a short distance but it was still enough to see me soaked through, struggling to keep my camera bag clear of the water welling in the bottom of the boat. I had felt sorry for the paddlers when I saw how little they brought with them, but now I was the one with the problem of having to deal with wet equipment.

The paddlers had spotted a break in the riverside forest and some tied-up pirogues being clattered by the waves, so I knew we were near a village. Slithering up a muddy bank, we found ourselves at a thatched hut shuddering in the wind. There was nobody to ask permission from, so we just bundled in through the small door and collapsed on the floor. By the time I had retrieved my soggy head torch and cast a light around the room, my four companions were asleep, their limbs all folded together for warmth like the blades on a Swiss Army knife. I turned off the torch and settled myself on the ground, watching as every so often the mud-hut walls glowed to the flicker of lightning outside. 

Action is a prime feature of all three of these great books. Another is acute sense of place. That’ll be the focus of my next post in this series.