The Sea Runners

Another ocean novel where the water itself plays a leading role.

It's not giving anything away about Ivan Doig's 1982 novel The Sea Runners to say that one of the four Swedish young men trying to escape cruel indenture to the Russians in 1853 Alaska dies before they complete their 1000-mile canoe journey south to Oregon. 

On the book’s first page it reads: “A high-nosed cedar canoe, simple as a sea bird, atop a tumbling white ridge of ocean.  Carried nearer and nearer by the water’s determined sweep, the craft sleds across the curling crest of wave and begins to glide the surf toward the dark frame of this scene, a shore of black spruce forest…. Landing, they turn to the abrupt timber.  As the trees sieve them from sight, another white wave replaces the rolling hill of water by which the four were borne to this shore where they are selecting their night’s shelter, and where one of them is to die.”

Another hint; the cover illustration shows only three men in the 15-foot Indian canoe they stole from the Alaska natives. 

But the story is much, much more complicated and surprising than just that one death.  And it is based on a true account that Doig found in an 1853 issue of the Oregon Weekly Times, a report of some Swedish men who had been found on a beach just north of the mouth of the Columbia River, “the perfect pictures of misery and despair,” who told a remarkable story of their journey by canoe down the Northwest coast from indentureship in Sitka (then called New Archangel.) 

It’s almost a Mission Impossible setup, with one leader, Sven Melander getting the escape idea, and assembling an unlikely team, Wennberg, Karlsson and Braaf, who all have certain skills they bring to the crazy adventure.  Braaf, for example is a small sleazy guy no one likes, but Melander tells Karlsson, “We need a thief.”  That’s Braaf’s skill, and before they leave on New Year’s Night, sneaking past the drunken Russians, he steals Russian food, firearms, and most important, their maps.

A map!!  In each of the ocean novels I have read this summer, I have wanted a map.  How could I follow Anna as she dives in the East River around the Brooklyn Navy yard, Cora as she wanders the Essex fens, Diego as he sails northwest from Havana in pursuit of the marlin, Humphry, Maud and Wolf as they battle the sea from San Francisco to Japan to the Aleutians, Leonie and Jojo and the ghosts as the wander the bayous of southern Mississippi -  without a map?  But no maps in any of these books!  In what waters are these protagonists sailing, diving, swimming, drowning?  Where is the shore, the island, the swells, the docks?  Oceans are places, have boundaries and depth charts and islands. Boats have routes, ports.   I want to see them.

Finally a map, in The Sea Runners.  Well it’s a map for us, the readers.  We live in an era of aerial maps, satellite maps, Google maps, GPS.  Not these poor Swedes.  Braaf steals all the Russians’ maps he can find, but it turns out the hapless Russians, who barely ever leave Sitka and make their Swedish slaves and the native folks do all the work in the walled fort and all the seal and otter hunting, have never sailed that far south of Sitka, made no maps.  Our freedom seekers get to the southern edge of their last map, the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and don’t know which way to go around the island, west or east coast.  Or how far it is to Astoria, John Jacob Astor’s settlement on the Columbia River mouth that Melander had heard of.  (Seattle was still 10 years away from being incorporated as a city.)  The last third of their journey is done “blind,” and when some of them do finally reach Oregon Territory, they are barely alive, lost of hope and strength. 

Doig began as a journalist, and later wrote extensively of his native Montana and the inland West.  But he lived in Seattle where his wife taught at the University of Washington, and in this his first of many novels, he uses his journalist eye for the history, adding in the most beautiful writing of the sea I have encountered in my small summer selection of sea novels. 

I was reminded of another Inland Passage tale, Jonathan Raban’s non-fiction account of his solo sailing in the 1990’s north from Seattle to Juneau, Passage to Juneau, a journey of self discovery, but also filled with lush and detailed descriptions of flora and fauna, the accounts of George Vancouver and other European explorers, and the culture and skill of the Kwakiutl and Tlingit and other natives. 

Subtitled A Sea and Its Meaning, Raban’s book contrasts the Indians' understanding of their ocean with the meanings given it by European explorers. The NY Times review of Passage to Juneau summarizes the difference; “Royal Navy Captain George Vancouver's young officers thrilled in 1792 to the region's ''thundering waterfalls'' and ''beetle-browed cliffs,'' which they saw as sublime in their ''lonely and romantic vastness.'' But they thought of the sea itself only ''as a medium of access to the all-important land.''

“For the Indians it was precisely the other way around, and they viewed the hazards of the forest, with its ''wolves, cougars and grizzly bears,'' as ''more unpredictable and less easily avoided than the maelstroms and krakens of the deep.'' …Raban's comparison between the Indians' conception of the ocean as a ''place,'' a ''mobile surface full of portents, clues and meanings,'' and the white sailors' sense of it as mere ''empty space'' deserves to become standard.”

According to that distinction, ocean as place and the shore full of unavoidable hazards, or ocean as empty space, merely access to the all-important land, the Swedes actually seem more like the Indians.  Of course, both water and shore present relentless danger, but on the sea they are at least on the move.   Melander reads and navigates the waves well, and he is good at managing the less skilled men, both their rowing and their mood.  The shore, by contrast, is full of danger to them from animals and violent Indians; our Swedes are relieved each morning to have made it through the night to get back in the canoe.

The ocean’s character here reminds me of a character in the other Pacific Ocean male adventure story I read this summer, Wolf Larsen in Jack London’s Sea Wolf.  Both (ocean and Wolf) are scary and unpredictable, sometimes calm, mostly darkly destructive.  But also determined and directive, a moving force able to get you thousands of miles where you want to go, faster than land. Sadly but perhaps inevitably, their successful journeys include loss of life, but some of the crew do limp into Astoria. 

And like Sea Wolf, at the end of the book there’s no hint at what happens next to these escapees, far from home.  The ocean can do that to you, violently take you far from home.  But it can also sail you to freedom.  You chose.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter

“All the Life-Giving Waters of the World”

My summer reading of ocean novels continues, going South this week to the fertile and mysterious Gulf Coast.

If your father's name is River and your mother is referred to as "Salt Water Woman," it comes as no surprise that water flows through your body and soul.  In Jessamyn Ward's new novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, the bayous and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi are not just landscape backdrop.   Water is a lead character, not just in daughter Leonie's life, but in her whole family's life of both despair and hope.

My own daughter left this book here after her last visit, and I was intrigued by the cover of this new novel by Ward, who has won the National Book Award and teaches Creative Writing at Tulane University.  But I was half way through the story before I realized this could be my ocean novel of the week. 

Frankly, that was about the same time I was considering abandoning the book, it was such a sad and depressing tale of racism, poverty, drug addiction, casual murder, child abuse, slow cancer death, horrible prisons, all of which was only reinforcing my generally stereotyped dismissal of any hope for the South.  I certainly didn't expect it to be my weekly ocean novel.

African American Leonie lives in southern Mississippi with her two young children at the home of her impoverished parents River and Mam, the Salt Water Woman, while her white husband is in prison.  Mam Salt Water is slowly dying of cancer, River is a proud but sad and silent man, who cares for the children and household and garden and animals. Leonie works at a bar and does drugs and barely notices her kids.  Her brother was killed by his white high school classmates some years earlier for not staying in his "place."  No one was ever charged.  The first person narratives alternate between Leonie and her 12 year old son Jojo, on the cusp of manhood and deeply loved by his grandfather River. 

Critics link the book directly with Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I have not read.  But I have always liked the Faulkner quote that every novel has one of two plot lines, "A stranger comes to town, or, a person sets out on a journey."  Just as I was about to abandon this book, Leonie and the kids set out on a journey, to meet their husband/father as he is being released from prison.  A journey is always more interesting than staying at home, and the action picks up.  On the trip there is danger and more drugs and traffic stops.  Horrible heat and hunger and thirst for the kids.  Parchwood Prison.  We meet the father and some new characters along the way. 

And suddenly it is not just the depressing racist South, but fantastic voodoo spiritual South, as the novel dives into magical realism. Two deceased characters come along for the ride, the brother and a convict from the prison, also killed long before his time.  These two dead young men seek connection, peace, reconciliation, burial, release.  So does the dying salt water Grandmother.  Her voodoo spirit is strong but can't stop her death.  The two dead young men hover around the family, especially Jojo.   Leonie and her husband try to be a family, but succumb to drugs again.  It feels like drowning.  Jojo tries to be an adult. The ghosts and the voodoo spirits permeate the house and family, awaiting release. 

The writing picks up in this second half, and suddenly I couldn’t put the book down. The magical realism drew me onward, and in a curious way the dead ghosts were more compelling characters than the living ones, or their desperate search for release seemed more profound and possible than the addicts.  I could also detect a small glimmer of hope in the midst of that very un-magical highly real realism called modern southern poverty.  Jojo and his younger sister, who turns out also to have magical salt water flowing through her veins, might make it, if their grandfather River can stay alive long enough, and the spirits stay with them.  But Mother and Grandmother are gone, to drugs and death, drowned.

The title seems to be a reference to the opening lines of the Iliad, Homer asking the muse to sing of the unburied dead on the battlefield.  Their journey also has an Odyssey feel to it and reminded me of the Odyssey themes of the Southern film “O Brother Where Art Thou?”  (That's a good ocean novel, the Odyssey, lots of wet characters.  Might that be my next ocean novel?)

So where is the ocean in this novel?  What's her role?  In the other ocean novels I’ve read this summer the ocean character symbolizes the unknown, fear or violence, a dark home to scary creatures, a challenge to be conquered.  But the waters of the Gulf Coast in this novel are a welcome moist breeze, lush green magnolias, rooms that smell of salty ocean and blood, docks over the gentle waters where anyone rich or poor, black or white, can go fishing or necking, wet possibility.   Northern Mississippi by contrast, on the road trip, is dry pines and prisons, parched, death.  The prison is actually named Parchwood, and on the whole trip Jojo and his sister are parched, thirsty and ignored by their mother.

So unlike my first two novels, of women finding themselves by the sea, and the two novels by and about men conquering the world on the sea, in this novel of poverty and racism, the ocean here seems to represent hope, life after death, and healing.  Life is bad enough, we don’t need an ocean to conquer.  We need healing and hope. 

Hope:

River tells a friend about the ocean, “We got so much water where I’m from.  It come down from the north in rivers.  Pool in the bayous.  Rush out to the ocean, and that stretch to the ends of the earth that you can see.  It changes colors, like a little lizard.  Sometimes stormy blue.  Sometimes cool gray.  In the early morning, silver.  You could look at that and know there’s a God.”

Life after death:

One of the ghosts tells Jojo he wants to “cross the waters and be home.  To become the song, the sound.  Beyond the waters.”

Healing:

When high schooler Leonie first tells her mother she is pregnant, Salt Water Woman takes her into her lap, “shushing me like a stream, like she’d taken all the water pouring on the outside world into her, and she was sending it out in a trickle to soothe me.  ‘Je suis la fille de l’ocean, la filles des ondes, la fille de l’ecume,’ Mamma muttered and I knew.  I knew she was calling on Our Lad of Regla.  On the Star of the Sea.  That she was invoking Yemaya, the goddess of the ocean and salt water, with shushing and her words, and that she was holding me like the goddess, her arms all the life-giving waters of the world.”

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter

Sea Wolf by Jack London

Fourth report in my summer reading of “ocean fiction,” novels in which the ocean is more than just backdrop, but an actual character.  Suggestions welcome for further reading.

It’s hard to know which character in Jack London’s Sea Wolf we should hate and fear more -  ship captain Wolf Larsen, or the ocean itself.  Both personify danger and destruction, both seem without feeling or compassion.  They roil and rage, kill and maim the crew, are unpredictable, yet full of surprises from their depth.  One of them has to win, and in the end, guess which it is?  Time and tide wait for no man. 

But it’s quite a fight.  I was exhausted after finishing it.  Hell, I was exhausted after every page. 

In each of my summer reading ocean novels the ocean character has personified danger and mystery (Manhattan Beach – diving deep, Essex Serpent – murky fen shores, Old Man and the Sea - I fought the sea and the sea won.)  But I was still hungry for a sort of old-fashioned high seas adventure story, so I picked Sea Wolf.  I surely got that.   But I was surprised at all the philosophy and religion on the stormy seas as well.  

When I told my husband that I had just started to read Sea Wolf, he said, Oh yes, they made a movie about it with Edward G Robinson as the hated sea captain, and with Ida Lupino.  Ida Lupino?  There’s a woman in the story?  Don’t tell me anymore, I said, but I couldn’t help wonder when the female character was going to show up on the high seas.  Turns out it’s not until almost 2/3 of the way through the book, and for many critics the book flounders from then on.  Just keep the macho men debating the meaning of life and trying to stay alive. 

But I am getting ahead of myself.  The narrator is a gentleman scholar named Humphry Van Weyden, who is rescued from a deadly San Francisco Bay foggy ferry accident by a seal hunting schooner bound for Japan.  The vile and vital captain, Wolf Larsen, refuses to return our hero to shore.  For weeks at sea he dominates and derides him, forcing this overeducated and unskilled gentleman to be first a cabin boy and then a ship mate.

Author Jack London was, like Wolf Larsen, a self educated adventurer from poverty and a dysfunctional family.  London was already a success when this book was published in 1904, especially from his Klondike adventure tale, Call of the Wild.   He went on to great fame and fortune, adventure travel and political writing, drinking, death at age 40.   He had worked on trawlers himself, and as a pirate, so his descriptions of sailing pre-GPS and automated rigging are vivid and as far as I can tell, accurate.  As are the accounts of the bludgeoning of seals, and the cynical assessment, even by the hunters, that the slaughter is an unnecessary waste simply for rich vain women in Europe.

Wolf Larsen delights in making cruel fun of our weak narrator, but when he finds out he is a scholar, Wolf demands they debate immortality and immorality, quoting Milton, Spenser, and Darwin between throwing crew members overboard.  Wolf seems to have no morals, cares nothing about his crew, kills a few of them, sails them into danger, sadistically taunts and maims them.  Van Heyden tries to maintain his faith in humanity and meaning, but in his fight for simple survival he becomes a bit hardened and cynical like Wolf.

Maud Brewster shows up in the story as another shipwreck rescue, near Japan’s shore, but likewise held hostage by Wolf.   She is almost too perfect a salvation for our hero Humphry Van Heyden, they turn out to know each other’s work as scholars and critics and poets, and she can hold her own against both male thinkers.  But boys will be boys, wolves will be wolves, and both men fall for her.  Humphry the gentleman represses his true feelings painfully and unrealistically until the very last page, but Wolf of course tries to rape her, and that motivates the two literary types to manage their own escape from the ship (aptly named The Ghost) and manage to land on a deserted island in the Aleutians.

It becomes a Robinson Crusoe type tale as they struggle to rebuild their damaged boat and get out of there by winter.  Ambrose Bierce said of the novel, "The great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen... the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime... The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful.”  London is quoted as saying he added in that part of the story because he knew people would like it, he said there is nothing wrong with giving readers what they want.  One could argue that the only way London could get past the inevitable cruelty of the ocean, and of “man,” is to introduce a love interest, and at least she is intelligent and capable.  (In the movie versions Maud, Ida Lupino, is transformed into a dopey con woman – Hollywood doesn’t do intelligent capable women.)

Romantic that I am, I liked having Maud come on the scene, and I was pretty sure they would make it, which they do.  But Wolf shows up at the very end and almost thwarts their escape. His whole crew has abandon him and he is dying but still manages almost to destroy their ship by fire.  Even facing death he doesn’t change, he never says I was wrong, I’m sorry.  Like the ocean, he is relentless, immoral, amoral, bent to take down everything with him.

Also like the ocean, there is no real ending to the tale, besides Wolf’s death.  We do not know if Maud and Humphry can become hopeful poets again or if the sea has scoured them of morality.  Surely they are wiser.  And much better sailors.  But I must admit, it is Wolf Larsen’s character that lingers in my memory.  He makes me cringe and despair, but I can’t let him go.  I almost hated to see him die.  Almost.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter

The Old Man and The Sea

I am reading ocean fiction this summer.  My first two columns were about contemporary ocean novels with female lead characters, Manhattan Beach and The Essex Serpent.  Today, a very different novel, an old guy author and an old guy protagonist, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea.

Does he catch the fish?  Yes.  A huge marlin, longer than his boat, 19 feet. Every day he set sail, but for two months the old man, a heroic fisherman, had not caught a single fish.  But this day Santiago hooks a big fish and for the next three days he and the marlin become one, chaser and chased, as it pulls him ever eastward away from Havana, into the Gulf Stream.  The marlin leaps, circles, slows, and finally Santiago kills it with his harpoon, lashes it to the boat side, and sets his course home to Havana. He imagines the money he will make from this catch, and the people who will find dinner from this massive fish.   But quickly sharks attack the lashed catch, and although an exhausted Santiago kills four sharks, by the time he returns home there’s only the head and skeleton, what might have been.

I read this book in high school, and remembered only the chase, not sure if the old man finally got the fish, or made it home.  Surely someone dies.  Well yes, the fish died, but not the man.  After three long painful days and nights alone at sea, he does finally land, hauls his boat up, and carries his mast back to his shack, as fisherman do, to make sure no one takes their precious cargo, and it is a Christ like scene, the tired man carrying the wooden beam on his back, just as he had imagined himself, his sore hands nailed and crippled.

Hemingway too was an older man when he wrote this in 1952.  After early success, he had struggled personally and professionally, and just two years earlier, his book Over the River and Through the Woods, had been universally panned.  He seemed like another old man with no luck.  Then he published this novella, first in Life Magazine, and it sold 2 million copies in a week.  Two years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and this work was specifically cited, as well as his earlier work.  But Hemingway’s troubles continued, and in 1961 he shot himself.  Not really that old, only 62, but like Santiago, a tired man with failure as well as success, after a hard life of wars and women and drinking and adventures on four continents.

Santiago sails alone, but he keeps in mind his two friends, a boy who cares for him on land and cries when he sees the marlin carcass, and Joe DiMaggio, who Santiago admires, himself the son of a fisherman.  He dreams of his dead wife, but otherwise there are no women in this story.  You could say it is a lonely man’s story.  But there is the sea.

“He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her.  Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman.  Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines, and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had bought them money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine.  They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy.  But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors.”

For all his macho hunter persona, Hemingway seems, like Santiago, to embrace the sea as a lover, not a contestant or enemy.  He and the old man both won and lost, landed huge prizes, but came home with just a carcass.  It’s a sad tale, but one that lasts.  Like the boy, I ended the novel in tears.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter

Ocean Fiction II: The Essex Serpent

After writing last week about the new novel Manhattan Beach, I got to thinking about other fiction where the ocean is not just scenery but a character itself, for good or ill.   

Sarah Perry’s 2016 novel The Essex Serpent practically reeks of the sea.  Its setting is a small coastal town on the Blackwater Estuary in 1890’s Essex, England and its titular mystery is whether there is a large sea serpent in the marsh’s literally black water, killing sheep and children.  Some fear it’s divine punishment, but for what?   Others recall that strange skeletons have been found in that region, named by their discoverers ichthyorsaurs, ocean dinosaurs.  Is the past still present?

Even the main character’s name is marine:  Cora Seaborne.  Born of the sea?  Borne by the sea?  She is indeed born anew when her abusive husband dies and she can leave gritty sooty London for the town Colchester and then a small fictional swampy town on the water.  She is curious about fossils and makes interesting new friends as she roams the countryside, free of convention and expectation.

But this is no Rosamunde Pilcher Shell Seekers seaside romance novel.  Perry wrote her PhD thesis on the Gothic in Iris Murdoch novels, so we can expect tragedy and mystery.  Indeed I was drawn to the book after hearing NPR’s review, which began, “The best kind of nature writing celebrates not the placidly, distantly picturesque — mountaintops and sunsets — but the near, dank, and teeming. The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry's gloriously alive historical novel, squirms with bugs, moss and marsh.”

The main character of the ocean novel I wrote about last week, Manhattan Beach, was a diver, and the dark ocean depths seemed to represent her path to freedom and to recover what she had lost.   The Essex Serpent is a novel full of ambiguity and challenging boundaries, and the landscape of permeable estuaries and fens seems to mirror this ambiguity as land and sea dangerously meet.  As Cora befriends the rector, spirited children, rich and poor, a doctor who is challenging medical convention, she takes part in all kinds of conversations and adventures that push back traditional distinctions (there’s a lot on science and religion), and she too is “borne by the sea” to new possibilities.

I was reminded of what another nature writer, John Murray, wrote in his introduction to The Seacoast Reader, “There are all manner of coasts.  Every person born in this world has a coast, an edge, a boundary, a transitional zone between themselves and the world.”  Cora’s coastal explorations are as much about herself and her future as they are about fossils and the mysteries of the past. 

Murray’s coastal metaphor of human psychology, that some people are like hard rocky shores, others more sunny and open, helped me understand Cora’s fearless walking day and night on these fens, and her ultimate discovery of the real story of the serpent.  Hers is a more ambiguous marshy personality, neither wet nor dry, but both.  It’s not that she is wishy washy (Washy? Wet?) but that she refuses to accept conventional boxes for her future, or, for that matter for various causes she is involved in, like the interesting parallel plot lines about urban poverty and new forms of surgery.

We call areas like the Blackwater Estuary “wetlands,” wet – lands, low, fetid and fertile meetings of land and sea.  There we find danger, confusion, boundary, the sucking mud and the lurking beast beneath the waters.

The Essex Serpent is a novel of ideas as well as a cracking good tale.  Perry mercifully does not wrap everything up neatly or solve the various love triangles, but it is still a novel of hope and possibility.  The borders are messy but permeable; they are not walls designed to keep things apart but life enhancing wet-lands.

Reading The Essex Serpent makes me want to go back to Norwich and East Anglia and see those mysterious waters and fens.  Or to reread some regional fiction like Phillip Pullman’s His Darker Materials with the rebel communities living on houseboats in East Anglia’s canals.  Or WG Sebald’s moving ruminations about walking in that area in his The Rings of Saturn. 

I think I’ll spend the summer reading ocean fiction.  Suggestions welcome.

 Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter