Fresh Air Fiend (60 page)

 

The loan of Nansen's ship, the unsinkable, uncrackable
Fram,
was an immense benefit to Amundsen. Scott's creaky
Terra Nova
was no match for it, and indeed the
Fram
ultimately had the distinction of sailing both farthest north and farthest south. The
Fram
was crucial, for Amundsen needed a seaworthy and powerful expedition-tested ship—his mission was secret, he left home much later than Scott, and he had almost no patronage. Yet in almost every instance, Amundsen made the astute judgment and Scott the wrong, ill-informed one, which is why Huntford's book seems so valuable, for it is about myth making and heroism and self-deception, the ingredients of nationalism.

The Last Place on Earth
was a sensation when it first appeared. Rereading it twenty years later, I still find it an engrossing and instructive narrative, with vivid characterization and a mass of useful detail. When you finish it, you know much more about human nature, for it is more than a book about the South Pole. It is a study in leadership, contrasting two leaders, two cultures, and the nature of exploration itself, which is a counterpart of the creative impulse, requiring mental toughness, imagination, courage, and a leap of faith.

A
NY NATION'S
literary history is rich in phantom pregnancies. Many writers produce a first book, worthy in every respect, and while there is often a muttered mention or a breathless hush regarding a second book, the thing never appears—phantom pregnancy. Isn't there a celebrated scholar in New Haven, sounding as desperate as a woman in a paternity suit, who is always threatening to publish his masterpiece? But it's a common condition. And I think most people, reflecting on the silence since
Blue Highways
appeared in 1982, believed—and who could blame them?—that William Least Heat-Moon's excellent book would not have a successor.

Yet that had also struck me as peculiar, because there must have been any number of publishers cooing into telephones, urging the man to repeat the formula. "Why not try the blue highways of Russia or Brazil? Or what about the back roads of Italy, Bill?" you can almost hear them saying. "Listen, they got plenty of blue highways in Australia." In the simple act of writing a travel book about your peregrinating along back roads you sort of lay claim to every back road on earth, or so people think. In that same spirit, it is sometimes felt that the world's railroads, and all their splendors and miseries, belong to me and that anyone else who writes about them ought to be shot for poaching.

With the appearance of
PrairyErth
it is immediately obvious what Heat-Moon has been doing for the past almost ten years, and that is researching and writing this densely printed 624-page book. It is not on the face of it a travel book, any more than is Gilbert White's
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne,
a work it much resembles in form and intention. The subtitle, "a deep map," is not much help, being at once idiosyncratic and gnomic (I suppose he means the invasive procedures of writing about an alien landscape). But
Blue Highways
proved beyond any doubt that Heat-Moon is nothing if not gnomic.
PrairyErth
is travel in eccentric circles, but the word "eccentric," in the sense of off center, is also somewhat inappropriate, since the landscape of the book, Chase County, Kansas, is at the geographical center of our country. "I have traveled a good deal in Concord," Thoreau said, and in this book Heat-Moon has covered just about every inch in the 744 square miles of Chase County, met most its people, noted most of its Burma Shave signs, and disproved the scribbled graffito "Living in Kansas is a contradiction."

It is a wonderful and welcome book and has the distinct virtue of being completely unexpected. It is as different from
Blue Highways
as any book is likely to be, but obviously written by the same man, who is thoroughly friendly and patient, rather self-conscious, slightly pedantic (he knows the words "forb" and "chert" and you don't), something of a loner, a trifle old-fashioned, a bit mystical, and just as much at home in the tallgrass prairie as on the far side of a cracker barrel. He is also something of a naturalist, though he is lacking in the misanthropy that characterizes that calling—nature lovers are so often people haters. Chase County has a total population of three thousand, and on Heat-Moon's reckoning there is not a bad egg among them. To his great credit, he is lavish in reporting the Kansas idiom:
He's been around the sun bettern fifty times,
and
All I ever caught was a limb in the face,
and the man
who wasn't worth a bushel of damn hedgeballs,
and in a more sinister vein:
The other guy shot the colored boy in the back of the head and got off on self-defense—convinced the jury the guy used to wear his hat backwards.

"In a purely metaphysical sense I am a turnip," a Kansas clergyman once wrote—and you don't quite grasp his meaning until you learn his name, William Quayle, quite obviously a distant antecedent of our own political vegetable. Of the living heroes and just plain folks Heat-Moon finds, there is the cowboy "Slim" Pinkson, "a character shaped by the bovine nature of the animals he spends his days with"; Larry Wagner, crippled by polio, who is eloquent in his attempt to save the all-grass prairie; Linda Thurston, whose café went bust: "We never did get the farmers to eat alfalfa sprouts. They know silage when they see it. Maybe we should have tried it with gravy"; Fidel Ybarra, who remembers every spike he had driven and every railroad tie he had set; Lloyd Soyez, who perhaps saved de Gaulle from being assassinated by snipers in Paris; and a nameless but memorable diner in the Strong City Café who described his Kansas encounter with a history prof in Hush Puppies from back east: "Couldn't tell a sycamore from a cottonwood, hadn't the least idea of what kind of tree to cut a wagon axle out of. He wasn't exactly sure what an ox is. He didn't know how to make hominy, hadn't ever skinned a squirrel or milked a cow—and he got paid fifty thousand a year to tell college kids about the West."

This is rural Kansas, but a far cry from the grim lunacy of
In Cold Blood,
the fantasy of
The Wizard of Oz,
or from Ian Frazier's vivid but shapeless
The Great Plains.
It is all prairie, and mostly pleasure—nothing here that smacks of the prairie fear felt by such natives of it as Willa Cather, who had an absolute horror of grassland. If
PrairyErth
has a fault, it is that it is almost entirely a celebration, even when it does not mean to be. It is a good-hearted book about the heart of the country. Heat-Moon does not make much of the xenophobia he encounters, nor does he explore the racism—the anti-black and anti-Hispanic sentiments—he hears. He takes people as he finds them, and they put up with his note-taking. Nagged for drinking a beer with his lunch in a cemetery ("This isn't a tavern"), he just smiles. "You'll be tolerated even if they do think you're about a half bubble off plumb," a women tells the author, making him feel he has been complimented. I kept wondering why he apparently spent all his time in motels. If these people are the salt of the earth, why didn't they offer him a bed? And while I am quibbling, why was it that few showed much concern about the greater world beyond Kansas? I have recently been in the Solomon Islands, and I heard more intelligent political talk and global concern from one naked Melanesian than Heat-Moon heard from a whole county of Kansas farmers.

It is risky for any book to attempt to be exhaustive, and this is as true for
Moby-Dick
as it is for
PrairyErth.
The risk is that lengthy extracts can break the spell of reading, and such a book—as shuffling and potbellied with undigested stuff as the Kansans it describes—may quickly become nothing more than a database, something to sort and study. The catalogue, the long digression, the essay-within-the-text, the scrapbook, the potted history, the portrait gallery—all of this served up as narration—can blunt the sharp edge of prose.

Kansas is the way we were, and it is the way many people in this country still are. By concentrating his scrutiny on this small area of rural America, where families have been settled for generations, where folks are folks, and there is a strong sense of attachment to the land; by accumulating a vast mass of detail and querying whether the West was won in quite the way we felt it was, Heat-Moon has succeeded in recapturing a sense of the American grain that will give the book a permanent place in the literature of our country. I mean to say that in its doggedness, its thoroughness, and its ingenious design the book—in its intentional crankiness—has value both as a historical document and as personal testimony.

W
HEN IN
Looking for a Ship
John McPhee explains in his characteristically lucid way the difference between ullage and innage, the subtleties of the Plimsoll mark, the length of a Trident-class submarine, and the manner of a Fathometer tracing the contour of the sea bottom, it is hard not to think of him as "Doc," the plainspoken polymath, the voice of experience. Doc is methodical and thorough, even to the point of being a teeny bit ponderous. While the rest of us are generalizing like mad and cracking feeble jokes, Doc is simply nodding and taking notes. He has the sort of patience that makes people nervous, and an almost exasperating sanity.

In this voyage with a purpose, an account of the current decline of the U.S. merchant marine, Doc doesn't get rattled when pirates board at Guayaquil. He understands the anxiety of a seaman eager to be employed: "If his neurons seemed hyperactive, they had some reason to be"—and isn't it just like Doc to put it like that? When a storm blows the ship sideways, Doc doesn't say exactly how he felt but rather enumerates the things that fell onto the deck—the alarm clock and all the rest of his clobber. In Chile Doc reads Charles Darwin. En route he reads Bowditch and takes pulses. He knows the age of everyone on board. He is patient—no record here of his losing his temper; and he is restrained—only eight obscenities, all told, in this account of the merchant marine. (I find Doc's habit of enumerating to be infectious.) When the ship is moored in the steamy Colombian port of Buenaventura, another man might have gone boozing and roistering in the waterfront dives with the crew—I certainly would have seized the chance to watch this bunch of level-headed sailors lose their marbles—but Doc heads for the hills: "We wanted to see the jungle rising to the Cordillera Occidental." Typical!

Fair-minded, frugal, truthful, fluent, decent, and humane, John McPhee is Doc to his fingertips. In the past I have trusted him on tennis champs, on geology, physics, Alaska, camping, the construction of the birch-bark canoe, and a score of other subjects. In an interview in a recent issue of
Sierra
magazine, McPhee was reported as saying, "My next book could be about a ketchup manufacturer ... my next book could be about anything." As it happens, this, his next book, is about the sorry state of our merchant marine. Why shouldn't I trust him on that subject too? If John McPhee says the Peru—Chile trench is steep and the continental shelf is extremely narrow, I believe it. If he reports an exasperated man as saying, "Another day in the life of Walter Mitty. Heavens to Murgatroyd, we're stuck in the lock," I believe that McPhee reported it correctly. When a man says, unchallenged, "Five more years, there won't be no Merchant Marine. It's going down the guts," you have to take it more or less as written—this is the last gasp of the merchant marine. McPhee only allows himself to be fanciful now and then.
Now
is his reference to the fact that his Spanish is purely functional and his grammar "tartare";
then
is a passage beside which I have marked "joke" in the margin of my copy—I found no others. The sentences read as follows: "The author Alex Haley is noted for riding on merchant ships as a way of isolating himself from distractions and forcing himself to write. He could write a book called 'Routes.'"

Surrendering to his subject while remaining somewhat obscure himself, a technique he has just about perfected, McPhee follows the progress of a seaman named Andy Chase, who is looking for a ship. After quite a lot of hullabaloo, Andy lands himself a berth on the
Stella Lykes,
bound for the west coast of South America. McPhee also boards, but as a paying passenger, and he ranges over the ship reporting on the moods and experiences of the rest of the crew. It emerges that Andy is the great-great-great-grandson of Nathaniel Bowditch (of Salem), father of modern navigation and author of the basic texts. But even this cannot make Andy Chase colorful enough to occupy the center of the book, and Andy is nudged aside in favor of Captain Washburn, the
Stella Lykes's
skipper, who is both a superb captain and a self-made eccentric on a heroic scale. Formerly a poor student, a runaway, a circus performer (he walked on glass and did fakir tricks), and an amateur boxer, Captain Washburn earned his master's certificate the hard way, under the tutelage of such skippers as Dirty Shirt Price and Terrible Terry Harmon. Here is Terrible Terry in a storm: "Do you know how to pray?...Then try that. That's the only thing that's going to save us now." Washburn has a delightful gift for the non sequitur. He understands Columbus and is sympathetic: "[Columbus] did not produce, and that was the bottom line. He was a maverick, an adventurer; he was not a follower of the party line. Come to think of it—not to compare myself with Columbus—some of those adjectives kind of fit me." McPhee obviously agrees, and a few pages later quotes a nice Washburnism (the captain speaking from the bridge): "I would rather be here for the worst that could be here than over there [on land] for the worst that could be there."

I would be happy to read a whole book about Captain Washburn and cannot think of a better man than McPhee to write it. Unfortunately the captain is somewhat incidental to McPhee's purpose, which—to state his intention crudely—is to use this voyage on the
Stella Lykes
in order to give an idea of the state of the merchant marine. He writes about the ill-assorted cargo, about stowaways, piracy, and flags of convenience. It is all wonderfully set out, but McPhee makes it clear that the boat and its crew will soon be museum pieces.