The Sheila Variations

Next up on the essays shelf:

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick

Life Stories is a collection of “profiles” from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick. The pieces span the 20th century, one of the best parts of these compilations. I also love that it’s not just celebrities who are covered, although they are represented here too. There are celebrities in certain sub-cultures, and then also a couple of people who are virtually unknown (“Mr. Hunter” from Staten Island), and yet fascinating. The best part of the profiles is that they are so in-depth and so lengthy (some of them run to 40 pages long), that you actually feel like you have met these people.

I haven’t read much John McPhee, the author of today’s excerpt – a long melodic travel piece which is both informative, haunting, and evocative of a time and place. But I checked out his background and found (not surprisingly) that he has written a ton of books, and was known as one of the pioneers of the “new journalism”, which incorporated literary elements into non-fiction stories. Folks like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson, were all pioneers, and McPhee was very influential. It’s funny: now this kind of stuff is par for the course. You read long-form journalistic pieces in The Atlantic or Rolling Stone, and often they read like short stories. This is how much these influential writers have helped shape our culture.

As someone who is not into creepy-crawly insects and stuff, at times this piece is challenging to get through. But what a payoff! This is the kind of stuff The New Yorker excels at. It’s hard to imagine this long piece, almost 40 pages long, fitting in at any other magazine. It takes time to get through it. You might not get through it in one sitting. It reads like literature. And yet it is an informative piece of writing, all about bugs, snakes, animals, the terrain in Georgia, and things like stream re-channelization, and conservation efforts.

Published in 1973, “Travels in Georgia” tells the story of John McPhee traveling down to Georgia to follow around two biological researchers/geologists named Carol and Sam. They both work for Georgia State University, and also work for a preservation society, making the case for this swamp, or this buffalo lick, or this patch of woods to be protected from desecration, due to its geological interest or animal-world interest. Carol and Sam are both serious woods-people. Carol lives in Atlanta and her place is overrun by animals, either in the freezer (she eats roadkill), or alive, in jars. She has rattlesnakes, and beetles. She keeps gerbils to feed to the snake. She rescues wounded animals. A gigantic red-tailed hawk with an injured wing sits in her house, glaring at the people who come near him. She reaches into a dark pool of water, feeling around for the snake that she knows is down there. Like I said, if you are afraid of snakes, this will be a challenging piece. Carol and Sam travel around the wilderness of Georgia, and pull over to inspect all of the “D.O.R”s, animals killed on the road. Many of them are fresh kills, and perfect for a university biology class, so Carol puts the corpses in a cooler to be delivered. Some of them she saves for herself. She knows everything about animals. She’s a fascinating woman. McPhee describes following along behind her through the woods, and she’s babbling on about poisonous snakes all around them, and she’s only wearing tennis shoes. Sam and Carol go out in canoes to check out the river life, where the frogs are hanging out, where the snakes are. These are all then put into reports for the “Natural Areas Council”.

James Dickey’s Deliverance had come out, and had caused quite a stir. In it are all of the issues that McPhee senses in the landscape and community: the corporations, the bureaucracies, changing the natural course of a river, completely obliterating entire ecosystems as well as communities. In this piece, the movie had not been filmed yet, but there had been scouts sent out to find the cliff that Jon Voight climbs up at the end.

The whole piece ends with Governor Jimmy Carter going out into the canoe with Carol, Sam and John, to see the areas they are investigating. Then they go to the governor’s mansion and shoot some hoops with Jimmy Carter.

McPhee’s style is melodic and compelling. He does not editorialize. It’s hard to find him giving an opinion. He is not omniscient. He is a participant, and sometimes a cautious one. They take a canoe ride down a narrow river with overhanging tree branches and he is truly fearful of a cottonmouth dropping down on him from above. But more than anything, he just describes what he does with his two guides, he describes Carol’s background, and then stands back as he watches her do her thing. And, like all great profiles, you come away with a sense that you have really just met someone rather extraordinary.

Hopefully we find our destiny in this world. Carol, climbing up trees covered in snakes and raccoons, fearless and intelligent (she wants the animals in the area, many of whom have not seen that many humans, to be afraid of her: they need to learn to fear humans) has found her destiny. You can’t imagine her living any other sort of life. She listens to Johnny Cash constantly, telling McPhee that Cash has gotten her through some very rough spots in her life.

And Georgia. Georgia is another character here: a rich, complex, fertile, diverse land filled with beautiful animals and insects and amphibians, all living side by side, eating one another, sunning themselves on rocks, or getting run over by 18-wheelers. McPhee is given a look at Carol’s journal, where she takes notes every day, and in one section, where she is camping out (she spends most of her time outdoors), she notes that the fireflies are so thick you mistake them for stars. And, startlingly, because you really don’t learn much about Carol personally (you don’t have to: all you need to do is watch her at work to know who she is), right after the firefly comment, she writes, “As of old, I wished for a human companion.”

Fascinating. Carol is in her thirties. She is fit, brown-skinned, outdoorsy, with a ponytail. We never learn that much about her but that one comment speaks volumes. I am drawn to the “as of old”, which implies that this was a familiar longing in her past, but she is now somewhat “past” it.

Regardless: Great!

Gorgeous piece of writing – from her, and from McPhee.

Here’s an excerpt. The piece is huge, this excerpt is just a small section.

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick; ‘Travels in Georgia’, by John McPhee

D.O.R. cat. D.O.R. dog. Near the Mitchell County line. Carol sighed, but no move was made to stop. We were heading west on 37 to check out a river that the Natural Areas Council had been told was like no other in Georgia. Florida was only forty miles away. The terrain was flat and serene between the quiet towns – Camilla, Newton, Elmodel. Cattle stood on light-green grassland under groves of dark pecans. Sometimes the road was a corridor walled with pines. Sometimes the margins opened out into farms, then closed down toward small cabins, more palisades of pine.

D.O.R. grey squrrel. “We could eat him,” Carol said.

“We’ve got enough food,” said Sam.

More pines, more pecans, more farms, a mild morning under a blue-and-white sky. Out of the sky came country music – the Carter Sisters, Johnny Cash, philosophy falling like hail: “It’s not easy to be all alone, but time goes by and life goes on … for after night there comes a dawn. Yes, time goes by and life goes on.”

D.O.R. fox squirrel. Baker County. He was as warm as in life, and he was in perfect shape. Kneeling in the road, Carol held out his long, feathery silver-gray tail so that it caught the sunlight. “There aren’t many things prettier than that,” she said. “Makes a human being sort of jealous not to have a pretty tail like that.” Gently, she brushed the squirrel and daubed blood from his head. He looked alive in her hands. She put him in a plastic bag. The ice was low. We stopped at the next icehouse and bought twenty-five pounds.

D.O.R. nighthawk, fresh as the squirrel. Carol kept the hawk for a while in her lap, just to look at him. He could have been an Aztec emblem – wings half spread, head in profile, feathers patterned in blacks and browns and patches of white. Around the mouth were stiff bristles, fanned out like a radar screen, adapted for catching insects.

D.O.R. box turtle.

D.O.R. loggerhead shrike.

D.O.R. gas station. It was abandoned, its old pumps rusting; beside the pumps, a twenty-year-old Dodge with four flat tires.

D.O.R. cottonmouth. Three miles east of Bluffton. Clay County. Finding him there was exciting to Carol. We were nearing the Cemocheckobee, the river we had come to see, and the presence of one cottonmouth here on the road implied crowded colonies along the river. There was no traffic, no point in moving him immediately off the road. Carol knelt beside him. “He was getting ready to shed. He would have been a lot prettier when he had,” she said. The skin was dull olive. Carol felt along the spine to a point about three-quarters of the way back and squeezed. The dead snake coiled. “That is what really frightens some people,” she said. She lifted the head and turned it so that we could see, between the mouth and the nostrils, the deep pits, sensory organs, through which the striking snake had homed on his targets. Slowly, Carol opened the creature’s mouth. The manuals of herpetology tell you not to do that, tell you, in fact, not to touch a dead cottonmouth, because through reflex action a dead one can strike and kill a human being. Now a fang was visible – a short brown needle projecting down from the upper jaw. “You have to be very careful not to scratch your finger on one of those,” Carol said. She pressed with her fingertips behind the eyes, directly on the poison sacs, and a drop of milky fluid fell onto a stick she held in her other hand. Four more drops followed, forming a dome of venom. “That amount could kill you,” she said, and she pressed out another drop. “Did you know that this is where they got the idea for the hypodermic syringe?” Another drop. “It has to get into the bloodstream. You could drink all you want and it wouldn’t hurt you.” She placed the cottonmouth off the road. Carol once milked honeysuckle until she had about two ounces, which she then drank. The fluid was so concentratedly sweet it almost made her sick.

Carol’s purse fell open as we got back into the car, and out of it spilled a .22-calibre revolver in a case that looked much like a compact. Also in the purse was a Big Brother tear-gas gun, flashlight bulbs, chapstick, shampoo, suntan lotion, and several headbands. Once, when she was off in a swamp frogging and salamandering, a state trooper came upon the car – thinking it might be an abandoned vehicle – rummaged through it. He found the purse and opened it. He discovered the pistol, the chapstick, the shampoo, et cetera, and a pink garter belt and black net stockings. He might have sent out a five-state alert, but Carol just then emerged from the swamp. She was on her way, she told him, to make a call on Kimberly-Clark executives in an attempt to get them to register some forest and riverbank land with the Natural Areas Council, and for that mission the black net stockings would be as useful as the pistol might be in a swamp or the chapstick in a blistering sun. “Yes, Ma’am.” The visit to the Kleenex people was successful, as it happened , and the result was the Griffin’s Landing Registered Natural Area, fifty acres – a series of fossil beds on the Savannah River containing the many thousands Crassostrea gigantissima, forty-million-year-old oysters, the largest that ever lived.

Down a dirt road, across a railroad track, and on through woods that scraped the car on both sides, Sam worked his way as far as he could toward the river’s edge. We took down the canoe, and carried it to the water. The Cemocheckobee was a rejuvenated stream. Widening its valley, long ago, it had formed relaxed meanders, and now, apparently, the land was rising beneath it, and the river had speeded up and was cutting deeply into the meanders. The current was strong – nothing spectacular, nothing white, but forceful and swift. It ran beneath a jungle of overhanging trees. The river was compact and intimate. The distance from bank to bank was only about thirty feet, so there could be no getting away from the trees. “I’d venture to say we’ll see our share of snakes today,” Carol exulted. “Let’s go! This is cottonmouth country!”

Next up on the essays shelf:

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick

Life Stories is a collection of “profiles” from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick. The pieces span the 20th century, one of the best parts of these compilations. I also love that it’s not just celebrities who are covered, although they are represented here too. There are celebrities in certain sub-cultures, and then also a couple of people who are virtually unknown (“Mr. Hunter” from Staten Island), and yet fascinating. The best part of the profiles is that they are so in-depth and so lengthy (some of them run to 40 pages long), that you actually feel like you have met these people.

Today’s piece is a famous one by Calvin Trillin, about Edna Buchanan, a crime reporter for the Miami Herald, from 1986 (the year she won a Pulitzer Prize). It’s delightful. An improbable tale. Edna Buchanan spent her career “covering the cops” in Miami, a beat usually reserved for brand-new green reporters. But something about crime set Buchanan’s genius free. At the time of the article, she lived alone (well, except for her five cats), and spent her days tracking down leads, calling up the police department (they all knew her by name: “It’s Edna”) and asking “what’s going on over there?” The cops had a love-hate relationship with her. She had to be told to stay behind the yellow crime tape. Repeatedly. Sometimes, just to freak her out, a cop would show her the crime scene of some gruesome homicide – maybe hoping that the gory details would turn the little lady’s stomach. The opposite result would occur. Edna was like a dog with a bone. She would interview neighbors of suspects, she was interested in the small detail, the human detail that could make a story come to life.

She wrote an article whose first line has since become hallowed-ground in crime reporting, generally considered one of the best first lines in an article ever: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”

I Googled her this morning to see what she was up to, if she was still around, and found this very interesting article. She just got married. Her background was fascinating. She didn’t go to journalism school or anything like that. She took a creative writing course, wrote a short story (a thriller) and the teacher praised some of it as reminding him of Tennessee Williams. That was it. She was a writer. She heard the Miami Sun was looking for reporters. She applied and got the job. She wrote up all kinds of things: society events, local politics, and crime. It was in crime that she found her niche.

Trillin hangs out with Edna, picks up on her way of speaking (she’ll look over a report from the cops over some crime and say to herself, “That’s interesting as heck”), and tries to break down for us what is so unique about Edna Buchanan. It’s great.

Here’s an excerpt, the opening of the profile.

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick; ‘Covering the Cops’, by Calvin Trillin

In the newsroom of the Miami Herald, there is some disagreement about which of Edna Buchanan’s first paragraphs stands as the classic Edna lead. I line up with the fried-chicken faction. The fried-chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late one Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a Church’s outlet, shoved his way to the front of the line, and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken. Persuaded to wait his turn, he reached the counter again five or ten minutes later, only to be told that Church’s had run out of fried chicken. The young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead. Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson’s being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the murder for the Herald – there are policemen in Miami who say that it wouldn’t be a murder without her – and her story began with what the fried-chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lead: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”

All connoisseurs would agree, I think, that the classic Edna lead would have to include one staple of crime reporting – the simple, matter-of-fact statement that registers with a jolt. The question is where the jolt should be. There’s a lot to be said for starting right out with it. I’m rather partial to the Edna lead on a story last year about a woman about to go on trial for a murder conspiracy: “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin.” On the other hand, I can understand the preference that others have for the device of beginning a crime story with a more or less conventional sentence or two, then snapping the reader back in his chair with an abbreviated sentence that is used like a blunt instrument. One student of the form at the Herald refers to that device as the Miller Chop. The reference is to Gene Miller, now a Herald editor, who, in a remarkable reporting career that concentrated on the felonious, won the Pulitzer Prize twice for stories that resulted in the release of people in prison for murder. Miller likes short sentences in general – it is sometimes said at the Herald that he writes as if he were paid by the period – and he particularly likes to use a short sentence after a couple of rather long ones. Some years ago, Gene Miller and Edna Buchanan did a story together on the murder of a high-living Miami lawyer who was shot to death on a day he had planned to while away on the golf course at La Gorce Country Club, and the lead said, “… he had his golf clubs in the trunk of his Cadillac. Wednesday looked like an easy day. He figured he might pick up a game later with Eddie Arcaro, the jockey. He didn’t.”

These days, Miller sometimes edits the longer pieces that Edna Buchanan does for the Herald, and she often uses the Miller Chop – as in a piece about a lovers’ spat: “The man she loved slapped her face. Furious, she says she told him never, ever to do that again. ‘What are you going to do, kill me?’ he asked, and handed her a gun. ‘Here, kill me,’ he challenged. She did.”

Now that I think of it, that may be the classic Edna lead.