At Large and At Small (21 page)

My coffee is in every way a weaker brew than it once was,
but I could never give it up entirely. This is not just a matter of habit, sentiment, or taste; it is more akin to the reasons that, long ago, the Galla people of Ethiopia ate ground coffee mixed with animal fat before they went off to fight, or that the night before every battle of the Civil War, you would have seen hundreds of campfires flickering in the darkness, each surmounted by a pot of thick,
black, courage-inducing coffee.

I remember a morning five years ago when I took a dawn flight to Fort Myers, Florida. My father had just been hospitalized with what looked like—and in fact turned out to be—terminal cancer, and the task of dealing with doctors, nurses, and hospice workers had fallen to me. I’d been up all night, and I stumbled off the plane so bleary I could hardly walk. There,
shimmering like a mirage at the end of the jetway, in the midst of what on my last visit had been a wasteland of Pizza Huts and Burger Kings, stood a newly opened Starbucks.

I know, I know. Heartless corporate giant. Monster of coast-to-coast uniformity. Killer of mom-and-pop cafés. But that’s not what I thought at that moment. I thought: I’m going to order a grande latte with whole milk. I’m
going to pour in two packets of Sugar in the Raw, and stir really well so there are no undissolved crystals at the bottom. I’m going to sit down and drink it slowly.
Then
I’m going to drive to the hospital.

As I walked toward the counter, I said to myself:
I can do this.

was an impatient child who disliked obstructions: traffic jams, clogged bathtub drains, cat-sup bottles you had to bang. I liked to drop twigs into the stream that ran through our backyard and watch them float downstream, coaxed around rocks and branches by the distant pull of the ocean.
If they hit a snag, I freed them.

When I was eighteen, rushing through life as fast as I could, I was a student on a month-long wilderness program in western Wyoming. On the third day of the course we went canoeing on the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado that begins in the glaciers of the Wind River range and flows south across the sagebrush plains. Swollen by warm-weather runoff from
an unusually deep snowpack, the Green was higher and swifter that month—June of 1972—than it had been in forty years. A river at flood stage can have strange currents. There is not enough room in the channel for the water to move downstream in an orderly fashion, so it collides with itself and
forms whirlpools and boils and souseholes. Our instructors decided to stick to their itinerary nevertheless,
but they put in at a relatively easy section of the Green, one that the flood had merely upgraded, in the international system of whitewater classification, from Class I to Class II. There are six levels of difficulty, and Class II was not an unreasonable challenge for novice paddlers.

The Green River did not seem dangerous to me. It seemed magnificently unobstructed. Impediments to progress—the
rocks and stranded trees that under normal conditions would protrude above the surface—were mostly submerged. The river carried our aluminum canoe high and lightly, like a child on a pair of broad shoulders. We could rest our paddles on the gunwales and let the water do our work. The sun was bright and hot. Every few minutes I dipped my bandanna in the river, draped it over my head, and let an
ounce or two of melted glacier run down my neck.

I was in the bow of the third canoe. We rounded a bend and saw, fifty feet ahead, a standing wave in the wake of a large black boulder. The students in the lead canoe were attempting to avoid the boulder by backferrying, slipping crabwise across the current by angling their boat diagonally and stroking backward. Done right, back-ferrying allows
paddlers to hover midstream and carefully plan their course instead of surrendering to the water’s impetuous pace. But if they lean upstream—a natural inclination, as few people choose to lean toward the difficulties that lie ahead—the current can overflow the lowered gunwale and flip the boat. And that is what happened to the lead canoe.

I wasn’t worried when I saw it go over. Knowing that we
might capsize in the fast water, our instructors had arranged to have our gear trucked to our next campsite. The packs were safe. The water was little more than waist-deep, and the paddlers were both wearing life jackets. They would be fine. One was already scrambling onto the right-hand bank.

But where was the second paddler? Gary, a local boy from Rawlins a year or two younger than I, seemed
to be hung up on something. He was standing at a strange angle in the middle of the river, just downstream from the boulder. Gary was the only student on the course who had not brought sneakers, and one of his mountaineering boots had become wedged between two rocks. The instructors would come around the bend in a moment and pluck him out, like a twig from a snag.

But they didn’t come. The second
canoe pulled over to the bank and ours followed. Thirty seconds passed, maybe a minute. Then we saw the standing wave bend Gary’s body forward at the waist, push his face underwater, stretch his arms in front of him, and slip his orange life jacket off his shoulders. The life jacket lingered for a moment at his wrists before it floated downstream, its long white straps twisting in the current.
His shirtless torso was pale and undulating, and it changed shape as hills and valleys of water flowed over him, altering the curve of the liquid lens through which we watched him. I thought:
He looks like the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel
. As soon as I had the thought, I knew that it was dishonorable. To think about anything outside the moment, outside Gary, was a crime
of inattention. I
swallowed a small, sour piece of self-knowledge: I was the sort of person who, instead of weeping or shouting or praying during a crisis, thought about something from a textbook (H. W. Janson’s
History of Art
, page 360).

Once the flayed man had come, I could not stop the stream of images: Gary looked like a piece of seaweed. Gary looked like a waving handkerchief, Gary looked
like a hula dancer. Each simile was a way to avoid thinking about what Gary
was
, a drowning boy. To remember these things is dishonorable, too, for I have long since forgotten Gary’s last name and the color of his hair and the sound of his voice.

I do not remember a single word that anyone said. Somehow we got into one of the canoes, all five of us, and tried to ferry the twenty feet or so to
the middle of the river. The current was so strong, and we were so incompetent, that we never even got close. Then we tried it on foot, linking arms to form a chain. The water was so cold that it stung. And it was noisy, not the roar and crash of whitewater but a groan, a terrible bass grumble, from the stones that were rolling and leaping down the riverbed. When we got close to Gary, we couldn’t
see him. All we could see was the reflection of the sky. A couple of times, groping blindly, one of us touched him, but he was as slippery as soap. Then our knees buckled and our elbows unlocked, and we rolled downstream, like the stones. The river’s rocky load, moving invisibly beneath its smooth surface, pounded and scraped us. Eventually the current heaved us, blue-lipped and panting, onto the
bank. In that other world above the water, the only
sounds were the buzzing of bees and flies. Our wet sneakers kicked up red dust. The air smelled of sage and rabbitbrush and sunbaked earth.

We tried again and again, back and forth between the worlds. Wet, dry, cold, hot, turbulent, still.

At first I assumed that we would save him. He would lie on the bank and the sun would warm him while we
administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. If we couldn’t get him out, we would hold him upright in the river; maybe he could still breathe. But the Green River was flowing at nearly three thousand cubic feet—about ninety tons—per second. At that rate, water can wrap a canoe around a boulder like tinfoil. Water can uproot a tree. Water can squeeze the air out of a boy’s lungs, undo knots, drag off
a life jacket, lever a boot so tightly into the riverbed that even if we had had ropes—the ropes that were in the packs that were in the trucks—we never could have budged him.

We kept going in, not because we had any hope of saving Gary after the first ten minutes but because we needed to save face. It would have been humiliating if the instructors had come around the bend and found us sitting
in the sagebrush, a docile row of five with no hypothermia and no skinned knees. Eventually, they did come. The boats had been delayed because one of them had nearly capsized, and the instructors had made the students stop and practice backferrying until they learned not to lean upstream. Even though Gary had already drowned, the instructors did all the same things we had done, more competently
but no more effectively, be
cause they, too, would have been humiliated if they hadn’t skinned their knees. Men in wetsuits, belayed with ropes, pried the body out the next morning.

Twenty-seven years have passed. My life seems too fast now, so obstructions bother me less than they once did. I am no longer in a hurry to see what is around the next bend. I find myself wanting to backferry, to hover
midstream, suspended. If I could do that, I might avoid many things: harsh words, foolish decisions, moments of inattention, regrets that wash over me, like water.

I am an enthusiastic amateur, not a scholar. My bookshelves and file cabinets resemble the nest of a magpie that collects shiny objects, with diamond rings tucked next to tinfoil candy wrappers. Though the bibliography that follows contains some valuable standard works and some obscure gems, along with some oddities, I’m sure it leaves out many helpful books that I would have known about,
and made good use of, if I were an expert on any of the topics below.

P
REFACE

The best recent works on the personal essay—and its subset, the familiar essay—are, unsurprisingly, by two of its leading practitioners, Joseph Epstein and Phillip Lopate. Those interested in the history of the essay may enjoy the online roundtable, a transcription of a radio conversation with four participants, including
Epstein. Readers who share my enthusiasm for the work of Lamb and Hazlitt may be charmed, as I was, by the elegance with which Marie Hamilton Law captures the essential characteristics of the familiar essay.

Bryan, William Frank, and Ronald S. Crane.
The English Familiar Essay
. Boston: Atheneum Press, 1916.

Epstein, Joseph. “The Personal Essay: A Form of Discovery.” In
The Norton Book of Personal
Essays
, ed. Joseph Epstein. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Epstein, Joseph, et al. “Roundtable: The History of the Essay.”
Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction
,
www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Robert_Root/background/Roundtable.html
.

Fadiman, Clifton. “A Gentle Dirge for the Familiar Essay.” In
Party of One
. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1955.

———. Introduction. In
Party of Twenty
. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1963. Hazlitt, William.
Table-Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
. London: Grant Richards, 1903.

Law, Marie Hamilton. “The English Familiar Essay in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1934. Reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1965.

Lopate, Phillip. Introduction. In
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present
. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.

Robertson, Stuart.
Familiar Essays
. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1930.

C
OLLECTING
N
ATURE

Both my essay and my childhood owe a great deal to Alexander B. Klots’s splendid field guide to butterflies. I am also particularly fond of—and drew many details from—David Elliston Allen’s charming and learned book on amateur natural history in Britain.

Though the Darwin biography
by Adrian Desmond and James Moore is admirable, those who know Darwin only from secondary sources should try the
Voyage of the
Beagle—and then move on to Darwin’s captivating contemporaries, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates.

Brian Boyd’s two-volume biography of Nabokov is thoughtful and comprehensive. Readers of my essay already know that I consider the sixth chapter of Nabokov’s
Speak
,
Memory
the holy grail of butterfly literature.

O
N BUTTERFLIES

Antram, Charles B.
The Collecting and Preservation of Butterflies and Moths, with Practical Hints for Collecting in the Field
. Lymington, U.K.: Charles T. King, 1951.

Harman, Ian.
Collecting Butterflies and Moths
. London: Williams and Norgate, 1950.

Ingpen, Abel.
Instructions for Collecting, Rearing, and Preserving British
& Foreign Insects
. London: William Smith, 1843.

Klots, Alexander B.
A Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America, East of the Great Plains
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951.