Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

Two passages in this post, for reasons that I hope are obvious. The first concerns Krakauer meeting with Billie McCandless, the mother of Chris McCandless, who died after venturing into the Alaska wild:

A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris’s final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the  fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreperable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow. “I just don’t understand why he had to take those kind of chances,” Billie protests through her tears. “I just don’t understand it at all.”

The second passage, ten pages later in my paperback edition, is from Krakauer recalling his own near-death experience as a young climber in Alaska:

All that held me to the mountainside, all that held me to the world, were two thin spikes of chrome molybdenum stuck half an inch into a smear of frozen water, yet the higher I climbed, the more comfortable I became. Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your  back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used t rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the  reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.

By and by your attention becomes so intensely focussed that you no longer notice  the  raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson

In which Bryson travels through small-town America. Not as good as In a Sunburned Nation, because Bryson is often too cursory in his visits, and grouchy, and he goes to the gational parks on days when they are veiled in fog. But still enjoyable, because Bryson is still by and large such a wonderful narrator. To wit:

I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there’s another arresting name for you. Tetons means tits in French. That’s an interesting fact—a topographical tit-bit, so to speak—that Miss Mucous, my junior-high geography teacher, failed to share with use in the eighth grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If I’d known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopless drunk who couldn’t button his own fly without falling over, I would have had a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure you.

At any rate, the first French explorers who passed through Northwestern Wyomning took one look at the mountains and said “Zut alors! Hey Jacques, clock those mountains. They look just like my wife’s tetons.” Isn’t it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of sexual vulgarity? Thank goodness they didn’t discover the Grand Canyon, that’s all I can say. And the remarkable thing is that the Tetons look about as much like tits as….well, as a frying pan or a pair of hiking boots. In a word, they don’t look like tits at all, except perhaps to despreately lonely men who have been away from home for a very long time. They looked a little like tits to me.

In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson, I

Bryson’s hilarious and brilliant book about Australia. Just a piece from early on in which he sells what makes this country/continent so remarkable:
I have a story about a little bug called Nothomyrmecia macrops that I think illustrates perfectly, if a little obliquely, what an exceptional country this is. It’s a slightly involved tale but a good one, so bear with me.

In 1931 on the Cape Arid peninsula in Western Australia, some amateur naturalists were poking about in the scrubby wastes when they found an insect none had ever seen before. It looked vaguely like an ant, but was an unusual pale yellow and had strange, staring, distinctly unsettling eyes. Some specimens were collected and these found their way to the desk of an expert at the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, who identified the insect at once as Nothomyrmecia. The discovery caused great excitement because, as far as anyone knew, nothing like it had existed on earth for a hundred million years. Nothomyrmecia was a proto-ant, a living relic from a time when ants were evolving from wasps. In entomological terms, it was extraordinary, as if someone had found a herd of triceratops grazing on some distant grassy plain.

As expedition was organized at once, but despite the most scrupulous searching, no one could find the Cape Arid colony. Subsequent searches came up equally empty-handed. Almost half a century later, when word got out that a team of American scientists was planning to search for the ant, almost certainly with the kind of high-tech gadgetry that would make the Australians look amateurish and underorganized, government scientists decided to make one final, preemptive effort to find the ants alive. So a party of them set out in a convoy across the country.

On the second day out, while driving across the South Australia desert, one of their vehicles began to smoke and sputter, and they were forced to make an unscheduled overnight stop at a lonely pause in the highway called Poochera. During the evening one of the scientists, a man named Bob Taylor, stepped out for a breath of air and idly played his flashlight over the surrounding terrain. You may imagine his astonishment when he discovered, crawling over the trunk of a eucalyptus beside their campsite, a thriving colony of none other than Nothomyrmecia.

Now consider the possibilities. Taylor and his colleagues were eight hundred miles from their intended search site. In the almost 3 million square miles of emptiness that is Australia, one of the handful of people able to identify it had just found one of the rarest, most sought-after insects on earth—an insect seen alive just once, almost half a century earlier—and all because their van had broken down where it did. Nothomyrmecia, incidentally, has still never been found at its original site.

You take my point again, I’m sure. This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found.

Trust me, this is an interesting place.

Seek, by Denis Johnson

Seek is a collection of Denis Johnson’s non-fiction writing. The following passage comes from ‘Hippies,” a wonderfully dyspeptic account of his visit to the Rainbow Gathering, a seven-day festival in the woods of northwest Oregon. He and is traveling companion, Joey, have just bought $100 worth of mushrooms:

It makes me sort of depressed to report that as we accomplish this exchange the man actually says “far out, dude.”

We now possess this baggie furl of gnarled dried vegetation that definitely looks like some sort of fungi. Back at my tent I dig out my canteen and prepare to split the stuff, whatever it is, with Joey while he finds his own canteen so we can wash it down quick. And here is why I can’t permit myself even to try and coexist with these substances: I said I’d split it, but I give him only about a quarter. Less than a quarter. Yeah. I never quite became a hippie. And I’ll never stop being a junkie.

For a half hour or so we sat on the earth between our two tents and watched the folks go by. In a copse of trees just uphill from us the Ohana group had started a drum circle and were slowly hypnotizing themselves with mad rhythm. Joey revealed he did, in fact, eat these things once in a while and probably had a tolerance. He wasn’t sensing much effect.

“Oh,’ I said.

In a few minutes he said, “Yeah, I’m definitely not getting off.”

I could only reply by saying “Off.”

I was sitting on the ground with my back against a tree. My limbs and torso had filled up with a molten psychedelic lead and I couldn’t move. Objects became pimpled like cactuses. Ornately and methodically and intricately pimpled. Everything looked crafted, an inarticulate attention worked at every surface.
People walked along a trail. Each carried a deeply private shameful secret, no, a joke they couldn’t tell anyone, yes, their heads raged almost unbearably with consciousness and their souls carried their bodies along. 
“Those are some serious drums.”
Anything you say sounds like the understatement of the century. But to get all hyperbolic would be to hint dreadfully at the truth that no hyperbole whatsoever is possible—that is, it’s hopelessly impossible to exaggerate the unprecedented impact of those drums. And the sinister, amused, helpless, defeated, worshipful, ecstatic, awed, snide, reeling, happy, criminal, resigned, insinuating tone of the message of those drums. And above all we don’t wish to make the grave error of hinting at the truth of those drums and then, perhaps, give way to panic. Panic at the ultimateness—panic at the fact that in those drums, and with those drums, and before those drums,and above all because of those drums, the world is ending. That one is one we don’t touch—the apocalypse all around us. These concepts are wound up inside the word “serious” like the rubber bands packed explosively inside a golf ball.

“Yeah, they sure are,” Joey says.

Jackson Pollock, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

The two authors spent ten years working on this biography of Jackson Pollock; after reading it, you wonder how they got it all done so quickly. They get everything. Legislation should be passed requiring that all biographies are prepared with such care and thoroughness.

The depth of their research, and their skill at doling out their information, rather than beating you over the head with it, shows in this climactic scene at a Hamptons dinner party, where Pollock lashes out at Hans Namuth, who made those famous movies of Pollock’s painting process:

…In his rage, he tore a belt of sleigh bells from the living room door and swung it at Namuth. “Jackson, put those back,” Namuth ordered.

It was the wrong thing to say. At the sound of another “direction” from Namuth, Jackson imploded. All the repressed anger and self-hatred—from months of standing in the cold, waiting for the next shot, the next angle, painting on cue; the months of “Where do I stand?” “When do I come in?” and “Should I do it now?”—flooded back. All the phoniness and self-deception seemed suddenly, excruciatingly, obvious. “Maybe those natives who figure they’re being robbed of their souls by having their image taken have something,” Jackson later told a friend. His brothers had been right. His desperate effort to prove them wrong by striking a Faustian bargain with Namuth—celluloid immortality for artistic integrity—by clinging to the image of the great artist, had only confirmed it; he was a fraud. Celebrity had betrayed him, just as his family had.

Jackson fought the recognition with rage. “You’re a phony,” he sputtered at Namuth, pointing his blunted finger. “I’m not a phony, you’re a phony. ” Lee tried to dispel the gathering storm by calling everyone to the table, but Jackson and Namuth brought their argument with them, carried on in ferocious whispers. They sat down, oblivious to the other guests, Jackson at the head of the table, Namuth at his right. The whispering grew more intense. “I’m not a phony, you’re a phony,’ Jackson repeated—they were the “tiresome, awful repetitions of a drunk,” recalls one witness—”You know I’m not a phony, but you’re a phony.” Suddenly, Jackson stood up, breathing heavily and glaring at Namuth. He clutched the end of the table with both hands. “Should I do it now?” he demanded in fierce self-mockery. “Jackson—No!” Namuth commanded. Yet another command. One guest remembered wanting to throw something at Namuth or to shout, “`Shut up Hans.’ He was being so pompous and authoritarian.” Jackson never took his eyes off Namuth. There was a long pause before he repeated, louder this time, “Now?” Immediately Namuth shouted, “Jackson—this you must not do!” One last time, in a roar, Jackson demanded, “Now?” but before Namuth could answer, he heaved the heavy table up in the air.

My favorite biography. Hated to see it end.