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.

Postscript: Helen Vendler 1933 - 2024

Helen Vendler (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Helen Vendler died April 23, 2024, age 90.  She’s one of my all-time favorite writers. I first encountered her work in The New Yorker. I remember the piece – “On Marianne Moore” (October 16, 1978; included in Vendler’s great 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us). I remember the line that hooked me: “Marguerite Young told, in a festschrift for Moore’s seventy-seventh birthday, how the poem ‘Nevertheless’ arose: Moore, seeing in a box of strawberries a misshapen green one, almost all seeds, said, ‘Here’s a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle,’ and found thereby a first line.” 

Here's a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle – I love that line. It belongs to Moore, not Vendler. But credit Vendler for including the circumstances of its origin in her brilliant essay. Vendler was always interested in the “how” of poetry – how it's conceived, how it’s constructed, how it achieves its effects. She was a formalist extraordinaire. Her writing taught me that style matters immensely. As she said of the poets she reviewed in her great Soul Says (1995), “Each has left a mark on language, has found a style. And it is that style – the compelling aesthetic signature of each – that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.” Her responses are among the glories of literary criticism. For example:

On Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man”: “Probe after probe enters the reclining figure’s unknown substance: Is he stone? Is he tough bird-tissue? Is he a gnarled root? The probes are successively visual and tactile, and are sometimes two-dimensional (“the grain of his wrists”), sometimes three-dimensional (“the ball of his heel”). The corpse, at this point, is still unressurected: it is stony, wooden, cold, alien, made of disarticulated parts. But as the similes turn to metaphors, the corpse begins to stir.” [The Breaking of Style, 1995]

On Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose”: “The exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness, the evening harmony of settling and clinging and closing and creeping, the delicate touch of each clause, the valedictory air of the whole, the momentary identification with hens, sweet peas, and bumblebees all speak of the attentive and yielding soul through which the landscape is being articulated.” [Part of Nature, Part of Us, 1980]

On James Schuyler’s “Used Hankerchiefs 5¢”: “Hopkins would have liked this writing, with its exquisite texture of letters and sounds, its slippage from description to theory of style, its noticing of visual effects, both accidental (crush marks) and intended (cross-stitching). In this affectionate piece, Schuyler allies himself with an American pastoral aesthetic of the found, the cared-for, and the homemade – with Stevens’ Tennessee gray jar and home-sewed, hand-embroidered sheet, with Elizabeth Bishop’s doilies and hand-carved flute. 'Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?' says Bishop’s Crusoe.” [Soul Says, 1995]

Note that “exquisite texture of letters and sounds.” Vendler relished verbal texture. In her superb “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1989; collected in Soul Says), a review of Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue, she wrote, “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page.” It's the art of Vendler's criticism, too. She was a master of it.

April 15, 2024 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s New Yorker: Eric Lach’s “Trash, Trash Revolution” and Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault.”

In “Trash, Trash Revolution,” Lach tours the complex world of New York City’s Sanitation Department. He talks with the City’s Sanitation Commissioner, Jessica Tisch. He describes Tisch’s new program: “Bags off the sidewalks. Clean highways. Citywide organic-waste pickup. Beefed-up enforcement of sanitary laws.” He accompanies two sanitation workers on a midnight collection route in the West Village. He visits the Sanitation Department’s garage in South Brooklyn to discuss illegal dumping with the Sanitation Police. In my favorite part, he rides with Tisch on a trash barge to Port Elizabeth. He writes,

One day, I rode with Tisch on a trash barge to Port Elizabeth. Only after we set off did Tisch ask an aide how long the trip to New Jersey would take. A hundred and forty minutes, the aide said. “A hundred and forty minutes?” Tisch yelled, in disbelief. Ed Whitmore, the owner of the tugboat pushing the barge, went to consult the captain, then returned. “Good news,” he said. With the tide moving the way it was, we could make the trip in about an hour. Soon, white spray was shooting off both sides of the barge as the tug chugged through the water, pushing a thousand tons of rotting cargo across the harbor.

“A thousand tons of rotting cargo” – that’s a lot of garbage! And, as Lach points out, it’s only a fraction of what New York City deals with. He reports that each day the City disposes of twenty-four million pounds of waste – “enough to fill more than two dozen Statues of Liberty.” That’s a disgusting amount. There must be ways to reduce it. Lach doesn’t say. I’d welcome another piece by him addressing this issue. 

Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault” tells about his recent experience embedding with Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion in Tabaivka, a settlement in north-eastern Ukraine, less than ten miles from the front line. The purpose of the 1st Battalion, as Mogelson explains, is “to rapidly deploy to areas along the front that are in danger of collapse.” It is one of Ukraine’s most skilled fighting units, led by a cunning and audacious commander named Perun (his call sign). 

The heart of this riveting piece is an assault by a team of 1st Battalion members on an underground root cellar in the backyard of a farmhouse where a number of Russian soldiers are staying. Here’s an excerpt:

They needed to hit the cellar entrance. Kyivstar’s companion had left him behind and was walking there alone. His call sign was Wolf. He was a welder from a rural village in western Ukraine who, when the war started, had been working in the Czech Republic, sending money home to his wife and their young son and daughter. He’d been with 1st Battalion for about a month, and this was his first mission. Sever hadn’t intended to bring him to Tabaivka, but Wolf was filling in for the soldier who’d broken his leg when their truck crashed into the crater. At the house, Wolf had struck me as the team’s most timid member, sheepishly observing Sanjek and Noah’s shenanigans. When the stormers were leaving for the operation, Banker had scolded Wolf for guzzling a tall can of energy drink, which would make him have to urinate. In the cargo van, right before Banker shut the door, Wolf had said, “Fuck, I forgot my ballistic glasses. Oh, well, whatever.”

He was now doing something inexplicable. Instead of sneaking up to the cellar entrance, he was approaching it openly—revealing himself to anyone who might be watching from inside. “He was confused,” Kyivstar later told me. “I was yelling at him, trying to get him to come back.” He added, with frustration, “There was no need for him to go ahead by himself like that. It was like he was going there to die.”

In the operations center, Perun yelled into the radio, “No! Don’t cross in front of the entrance!” But Wolf couldn’t hear him. He kept walking until he reached the open door. For several long seconds, everyone in the operations center watched as he stood there, motionless. Then he crumpled.

“They got him,” Perun said, not loudly, and not over the radio.

The root cellar withstands the attack. But in the ensuing siege, many Russian soldiers are killed. Mogelson writes,

For the rest of the day, a steady stream of small groups of Russian infantrymen—between two and six soldiers each—walked to Tabaivka from the east. Few made it across the three-hundred-yard gap. The snow had relented, and Boyko easily stalked the groups with the surveillance drone. Perun bounded between the panel and the radio, shouting himself hoarse, calculating azimuths, and correcting the aim of his stormers, snipers, and machine gunners. It was madness: Russians kept marching down the same paths, to the same spots where their comrades had just died. One 1st Battalion machine gunner later told me he had fired his weapon so much that it had kept him warm in his frigid dugout. He couldn’t see the men he was killing. But since they kept reappearing in certain places, he memorized different branches below which he could point his barrel to hit specific coördinates up to a mile away.

Unlike the machine gunner, those of us in the operations center had a bird’s-eye view of the Russians on the receiving end of the barrages: men running and stumbling as they fled the bullets and the shells, crawling after being shot or hit by shrapnel, hiding behind tree trunks and under bushes. At one point, the monitor displayed six Russians hurrying up a road toward the safety of a dense forest. Two of them were helping along a limping soldier who had his arms draped over their shoulders; two others were dragging an injured or dead soldier across the snow on an improvised toboggan. Perun called in cluster munitions on them: a smoking warhead that scudded down, followed by a dozen impacts all around the group. Another 1st Battalion drone pilot was attacking Russians with F.P.V.s. Footage from one of them captured two infantrymen diving away, too late, in the split second before the F.P.V. detonated and its video feed cut out.

“The Assault” is a tremendous piece of war reportage – another in Mogelson’s extraordinary series of dispatches from the front: see, for example, “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023) and “Underworld” (May 29, 2023). 

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 major 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.