Essays of E. B. White (32 page)

“No one knew what to expect,” I wrote. “There was a good deal of speculation at first about whether the ship would be fired on. In a general way, the passengers felt that there was something hostile about Russia.” Hostile or not, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce was experiencing its most adventurous hour, and possibly its most footless, and I don't doubt that if we had been fired on, Mr. Snow would have returned the fire with what ammunition remained after our assaults on Taku and on the walruses. Mr. Hubbard, wandering gingerly among pools of blood, saw that Siberia was represented by a couple of dozen furry Eskimos and one squaw man; they came aboard from a skin boat as soon as the
Buford
dropped her hook. On shore we could see dogs curled up asleep among patches of tired snow. At this point, I shall quote from that other diarist of the
Buford
, J. Wilbur Wolf. Wilbur managed to get ashore. “Here,” he wrote, “I witnessed the first real Eskimo huts. How shy the natives are, and how unsanitary.”

Wilbur traded a few pieces of silver for a Siberian gun holster, Mr. Snow traded an old cap for a polar-bear skin, and we were off for East Cape, which proved to be a repetition of Serdze—headlands, a gray beach, a gray shack flying a small red flag, skin dwellings, vagrant fogs, snow in patches along the shore, and low hills hinting at the vast continent that lay beyond the fog and beyond the power of the imagination. (It may have been memories of the utter drabness of Siberia that caused the
Buford
's co-owner Mr. Ogden to seek greener pastures for his boat; her next excursion was to Samoa and the Marquesas—a financial bust like the Siberian affair, but at least a languorous one.) Emotionally, the
Buford
and her passengers had had it; we were ready for home. Captain Lane guided his ship across the Strait, called again at Nome, just long enough to take on ten passengers, and then started the homeward journey, with parting salutes from the Coast Guard cutter
Bear
, the tug
Genevieve
, the Hudson's Bay Company's ship, and a whistle ashore. We steamed to False Pass, took aboard some workers from the cannery, and struck boldly out across the North Pacific in a direct line for Seattle. We had not been at sea long when the gale hit.

The new passengers at Nome had put a strain on the
Buford
's accommodations, and Wilbur and I had been the first to feel the squeeze. We had been booted out of first class. There seemed to be no place to put us until some genius in the Steward Department remembered the ship's prison. This was a tiny steel cell, six feet by six feet, containing two hard, narrow bunks, one above the other—a cute little poky, well off the beaten track. It was located in the 'tween-decks, and Wilbur and I, after the surprise had worn off, were well pleased with it. For my part, I was glad to move into the brig because it relieved me of my fear of being discovered in first class by a fireman. Wilbur liked our new home because it was an outside room. “Somehow or other,” he wrote in his diary, “a person can always adapt himself to new environment.”

The gayest feature of our new environment was a large, noisy soil pipe running vertically through the room from a very popular toilet on the deck above. We arranged our clothes, wrapped in a sheet, behind this pipe. The door of our cell was heavy steel, and there was a steel sill about a foot high that you stepped over to get in or out. “We have fitted the cell out like a palace,” wrote Wilbur in the first fine flush of nest-building. “Advantages: more secrecy [this was for hiding stolen food]; more light, outside room; better air, and more independence. The disadvantages will loom up later, I suppose.”

They weren't long looming up. Our pint-sized palace felt the impact of the gale as soon as the
Buford
took her first big roll. The deadlight was leaky; it kept air out but let sea water in, in the mysterious manner of deadlights. Trapped by the high sill, the water in the room built up to a mean depth of about ten inches. Wilbur's stomach collapsed with the first roll of the ship, and he went to bed in the lower bunk, where he lay for three days
in extremis
, his groans blending with the mighty complaints of the soil pipe, his bunk awash like some bleak outer ledge, subject to the incessant rising and falling of our interior tides.

Most of the
Buford
's passengers, from long days and nights of wining and dining, fell horribly ill. More than half the crew were sick. My messroom was almost deserted, but as a matter of routine I had to set food on the table, regardless of the men's ability to retain it. I was also very busy mixing the extraordinary cocktails by which my men hoped to get relief from their agonies—pineapple ice cream laced with piccalilli, prune juice and tomato juice in equal parts with a sprinkle of mace, soft-boiled egg and marinated carrot, ginger snaps with ketchup.

On the second day of the storm, I had no sooner got the table set for lunch than the
Buford
rolled everything off onto the deck. The ship, which had been so quiet in the Arctic, set up a frightful banging. Down in the hold, the cargo shifted, and the sailors—those that could still stand—worked all one night getting it back in place. Barrels of fish, loose in the cold room, thrashed around and broke the refrigeration pipes, letting brine out all over the deck. On the main deck forward, some Husky dogs that were being brought back to the States by the more enterprising of our souvenir hunters took an awful beating from the storm. Two, I think, were washed overboard. Others got loose and wandered into the paint room, and soon were beyond recognition. Two of my firemen showed up in my messroom and engaged in a long, closely reasoned argument about whether one of them was sick and had vomited. During the storm, Luis lost his job—I never learned why.

For most of the passengers, the voyage ended on a note of nausea and gloom. For me, it ended on a note of triumph. The three gale-tossed days gave me a feeling of elation and well-being; it seemed exciting to be up and about, busily tending the sick and doing my duty. I felt victorious and hearty. My stomach held together and I was able to watch my first great storm at sea unimpaired. Even when a heavy mess bench fell on my foot and broke one toe, the accident and the pain failed to quiet my enthusiasm for the life of a messboy in a full gale. I was drunk with power, the Florence Nightingale of the mess and the brig, and this sensation of drunkenness was heightened by a trick I invented as an antisickness device; instead of bracing myself against the lurches of the ship, I let myself go and yielded to her every pitch and roll, on the theory that bodily resistance is—in part, at least—the true cause of nausea. There may have been nothing to this eccentric notion of mine, but for three days in the wild North Pacific I reeled crazily through the corridors, responding to the sea physically, as though the sea were a dancing partner whose lead I followed.

In a matter of hours, my long, evasive excursion to the far north would be over. I was headed now toward the south and the east, toward unemployment and the insoluble problem of what to do with myself. My spice route to nowhere was behind me; I would soon be host again to the specter that I commonly entertained—the shape of a desk in an office, the dreaded tick of the nine-to-five day, the joyless afternoons of a Sunday suburb, the endless and ineffectual escapes that unemployed young men practice (a trip to the zoo, a walk in the night, the opium pipe of a dark cinema). The shape was amorphous—I seldom attempted to fill in the outlines; it hung above me like a bird of death. But in the final hours of the
Buford
the gale granted me a reprieve. In the fury of the storm, thought was impossible; the future was expunged by wind and water; I lived at last in the present, and the present was magnificent—rich and beautiful and awesome. It gave me all the things I wanted from life, and it was as though I drank each towering wave as it came aboard, as though I would ever after be athirst. At last I had adjusted, temporarily, to a difficult world and had conquered it; others were sick, I bloomed with health. In the noise of battle, all the sad silences of my brooding and foreboding were lost. I had always feared and loved the sea, and this gale was my bride and we had a three-day honeymoon, a violent, tumultuous rime of undreamed-of ecstasy and satisfaction. Youth is almost always in deep trouble—of the mind, the heart, the flesh. And as a youth I think I managed to heap myself with more than my share. It took an upheaval of the elements and a job at the lowest level to give me the relief I craved.

The honeymoon was soon over; the wind abated, the
Buford
recovered her poise. On September 4, we docked at Seattle. I collected my pay and went ashore. My next entry is dated September 6, from a room in the Frye Hotel—a poem called “Chantecler.”

How many orders of beef have you passed over the counter,
Girl with white arms, since I've been gone?
How many times have you said,
“Gravy?”

Your arms are still white
,
And you're still the thing in all the room
That transcends foodstuffs.

By standing there
You make the restaurant part of September,
And September, girl, is part of the world
—
A sad-voiced, beautiful part.

How many orders of beef have you passed over the counter,
Girl with white arms, since I've been gone?

Like so many other questions that stirred in me in those years of wonder and of wandering, this one was to go forever unanswered.

A
UGUST
1941

One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake
in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond's Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine. We returned summer after summer—always on August 1 for one month. I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind that blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods. A few weeks ago this feeling got so strong I bought myself a couple of bass hooks and a spinner and returned to the lake where we used to go, for a week's fishing and to revisit old haunts.

I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows. On the journey over to the lake I began to wonder what it would be like. I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot—the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the paths behind the camps. I was sure that the tarred road would have found it out, and I wondered in what other ways it would be desolated. It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen. The partitions in the camp were thin and did not extend clear to the top of the rooms, and as I was always the first up I would dress softly so as not to wake the others, and sneak out into the sweet outdoors and start out in the canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the pines. I remembered being very careful never to rub my paddle against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the cathedral.

The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake. There were cottages sprinkled around the shores, and it was in farming country although the shores of the lake were quite heavily wooded. Some of the cottages were owned by nearby farmers, and you would live at the shore and eat your meals at the farmhouse. That's what our family did. But although it wasn't wild, it was a fairly large and undisturbed lake and there were places in it that, to a child at least, seemed infinitely remote and primeval.

I was right about the tar: it led to within half a mile of the shore. But when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into a camp near a farmhouse and into the kind of summertime I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it had been before—I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the bedroom and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat. I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation.

We went fishing the first morning. I felt the same damp moss covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and that there had been no years. The small waves were the same, chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the boat was the same boat, the same color green and the ribs broken in the same places, and under the floorboards the same fresh-water leavings and débris—the dead helgramite, the wisps of moss, the rusty discarded fishhook, and dried blood from yesterday's catch. We stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the dragonflies that came and went. I lowered the tip of mine into the water, tentatively, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet away, poised, darted two feet back, and came to rest again a little farther up the rod. There had been no years between the ducking of this dragonfly and the other one—the one that was part of memory. I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn't know which rod I was at the end of.