Essays of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  To start for Alaska this way, alone and with no assurance of work and a strong likelihood of being stranded in Skagway, was a dippy thing to do, but I believed in giving Luck frequent workouts. It was part of my philosophy at that time to keep Luck toned up by putting her to the test; otherwise she might get rusty. Besides, the 1920s, somehow or other, provided the winy air that supported dippiness. The twenties even supported the word “dippy.”

  You might suppose that the next few entries in my journal, covering the days when I must have been winding up my affairs and getting ready to sail on a long voyage of discovery, would offer a few crumbs of solid information. Not at all. From Friday morning, when I announced that I would soon be off, until the departure of the Buford, several days later, my journal contains no helpful remarks, no hint of preparation, no facts about clothes, money, friends, family, anything. A few aphorisms; a long, serious poem to the girl on Lake Union (“Those countless, dim, immeasurable years,” it begins); a Morley clipping from the “Bowling Green” about writing (“A child writes well, and a highly trained and long-suffering performer may sometimes write with intelligence. It is the middle stages that are appalling. . . .”); a short effort in vers libre written on Sunday morning and describing my boardinghouse slatting around in the doldrums of a summer Sabbath—that is all I find in these tantalizing pages. Mr. Morley was right; the middle stages are appalling. As a diarist, I was a master of suspense, leaving to the reader’s imagination everything pertinent to the action of my play. I operated, generally, on too high a level for routine reporting, and had not at that time discovered the eloquence of facts. I can see why the Times fired me. A youth who persisted in rising above facts must have been a headache to a city editor.

  Memory helps out on a couple of points. I recall that winding up my affairs was chiefly a matter of getting a Ford coupé repossessed by the finance company. My other affairs were portable and would go along—a Corona typewriter, a copy of Lyric Forms from France, and my wardrobe, which fitted cozily into one droopy suitcase. I owned an unabridged Webster’s, but I am quite sure I did not take it—probably placed it in safekeeping with a friend. The luckiest thing that happened to me was that my wardrobe included a very old and shabby flannel shirt and a dirty pair of dungarees. Without these I would have been in some difficulty later on.

  The Buford did not get away until almost ten on Tuesday evening, thirty-four hours behind schedule. As the lines were cast off, I stood at the starboard rail and watched the lights of the city—the Bon Marché sign, the tower of the Smith Building—and was shaken by the sudden loud blast of the whistle giving finality to my adventure. Then, it would appear, I sat right down and wrote what was for me a fairly lucid account of the departure. I listed some of the items that had come aboard: beeves, hams, nuts, machinery for Cold Bay, oranges, short ribs, and a barber’s chair. I noted that when this last item was carried up the plank, the passengers lining the rail broke into applause. (Already they were starved for entertainment.)

  At sundown the following evening, July 25, we passed a tall gray ship that rode at anchor in a small cove near a fishing village. On board was President Harding, homeward bound from Alaska. A band on his ship played, and the President came to the rail and waved a handkerchief borrowed from his wife. The incident caused a stir among the passengers and crew of our ship; seeing the President of the United States in such an unlikely spot, on our way to the mysterious North, was reassuring. About a week later came the radiogram telling of his death.

  The voyage of the Buford carrying the men of commerce to the Arctic wasteland was an excursion both innocent and peculiar. It inaugurated a new steamship line, the Alaskan-Siberian Navigation Company, and I think the company had been hard up for passengers and had persuaded the Chamber to conduct a trade tour and bring wives. The Buford herself, however, was in no way peculiar; she was a fine little ship. She had been a troop carrier in the war, and afterward had been reconverted to carry passengers and freight. She was deep, was not overburdened with superstructure, and had a wide, clear main deck. Painted in tall block letters on her topsides and extending half her length were the words SAN FRANCISCO CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. This enormous label gave her a little the look of a lightship—all name and no boat—and in many a desolate northern port, where the only commerce was with Eskimos who swarmed aboard to peddle ivory paper cutters, the label acquired a bizarre and wistful meaning.

  One of the things I know now, and did not know at the time, is that the Buford was being bought from the government on the installment plan. The owners never managed to complete their payments, and by 1925 she was being referred to in the San Francisco Chronicle as “the hard-luck ship Buford.” Everything she touched turned to dross. The owners not only never completed their payments, they never fully completed the reconversion of the ship, either. I remember a room in the ’tween-decks that obviously dated from troop-carrying days. It was a spacious room furnished with a truly magnificent battery of urinals and toilets standing at attention and perfectly exposed—a palace of open convenience, seldom visited, except by me, who happened, at one juncture, to live close by. A lonely, impressive room. I have an idea that when the owners took possession of their ship, they must have taken one look at this panorama of plumbing and decided to let it stand. To have laid a wrench to it would have cost a fortune.

  Our commander was Captain Louis L. Lane, a handsome, sociable man who delighted the ladies by his strong profile and reassured us all by his fine handling of the ship. He had been in the Arctic before, loved it, and was known and welcomed everywhere. I think he quite enjoyed the adventurous role he was cast in: shepherd of a crowd of landlubbers and dudes in wild, remote places where he had local knowledge and could display his special talents. No gunkhole was too small for Captain Lane to squeeze the Buford into. Before we were done with the voyage, though, I got the impression that our captain operated under unusual difficulties. The strong tides and treacherous currents of the Inside Passage, the cold, enveloping fogs of the Bering Sea, the shifting floes of the ice pack in the lonely, silent, too bright Arctic—these were strain enough on a man, but they were slight compared to the cold white bank of boredom that gradually enveloped the passengers, several of whom, I believe, would gladly have paid any reasonable sum to have the ship turn about and head back for the Golden Gate. Captain Lane in mid-passage was the host at a party that was not going too well.

  All pleasure cruises have moments of tedium, but usually the passengers can relax on sunny decks, swim in warm pools, go ashore every day or two where the ladies can plunder the shops and the men can stretch their legs and bend their elbows. The Buford, skirting the long coastline of Alaska in the early twenties, did not offer much relief of this sort. For some the Buford became a high-class floating jail—the food good, the scenery magnificent, but no escape. A hundred and seventy-odd passengers did a six-week stretch, and their spirits sagged as the scenery became increasingly familiar. In the fog, the scenic effect was dampening to many a spirit; for long periods the forecastlehead was barely visible from the door of the main cabin. The horn sounded daylong and nightlong.

  Whoever planned this odd voyage for the expansion of trade had, of course, foreseen the need of entertainment and had done his best. Provision had been made for music, dancing, gaming, and drinking. Music was in charge of the Six Brown Brothers, a saxophone combo that had once performed in a show with Fred Stone. I have a fine, sharp photograph of the Brothers taken at the Akutan whaling station; they are standing in front of a dead whale, their saxophones at the ready. Adventure was in charge of H. A. Snow, a big-game hunter, who brought along his elephant gun, his movie camera, and his son Sydney. The ship was well stocked with private supplies of liquor. One of the owners of the ship, J. C. Ogden, came along for the ride, and this gave the thing the air of a real outing. But although there was an occasional diversion, the days were largely without incident and without cheer. Even such advertised treats as the stop at the Pribilofs to see the seal rooker
ies proved anticlimactic to many of the students of trade conditions; the place smelled bad and the seals looked like the ones you had seen in zoos and circuses. Some of the passengers, having gone to the great trouble and expense of reaching the Pribilof Islands, chose, when they got there, to remain on board and play bridge. As for me, I never had a dull moment. I lived on three successive levels socially, a gradual descent that to me seemed a climb: first the promenade deck, then the main deck, then below. I was busy, but not too busy to journalize, and I was young enough to absorb with gratitude and wonder the vast, splendid scene of Alaska in the time before the airplane brought it to our door and when it was still inaccessible and legendary.

  When, in Seattle, I presented myself to the purser as a paying passenger, he assigned me to a small room with another man. This fellow turned out to be an oddball like me—not a member of the Chamber. He was a Laplander, a short, stocky man with a long mustache. His clothes were rough; he had no white shirts and almost no English. “I go Nomee,” was all he could tell me at first. His name was Isak Nakkalo, and he was a reindeer butcher on his way to a job. Isak and I dwelt in peace and in silence day after day, until life changed abruptly for me and I began my descent. All up the Inside Passage, while the Buford skirted headlands and dodged rocks and reefs, Isak took no part in the social life aboard ship, but I did. I struck up a few acquaintances, danced to the sweet jazz of the Brown Brothers, nursed my clean shirts to get the maximum mileage out of them, and displayed affability (if not knowledge) in the matter of trade relations. I also lived a secret life. At every opportunity, I bearded stewards, engineers, and deck officers, and asked for work. My encounters with these people must have mystified them; at sea, a first-class passenger looking for work is irregular. I was probably worse than irregular; I was annoying.

  Ketchikan was our first Alaskan port of call and the scene of the passengers’ first disillusionment. In the minds of most of us aboard was an image of Alaska formed by Robert W. Service and Jack London—a land of deep snow, igloos, Eskimos, polar bears, rough men, fancy women, saloons, fighting sled dogs, intense cold, and gold everywhere. Ketchikan as we rounded the bend, delivered a shattering blow to this fine image; the village was a warm, mosquitoey place, smelling of fish. Not an igloo was in sight, and on the dock to greet us was a small, moth-eaten band of Shriners in their caps. But, image or no image, this was our frontier, and long before the ship was close enough for voices to carry, the passengers began shouting questions to the group ashore. One of our shipboard Shriners ached to know whether there was going to be a ceremonial that night. The distant welcoming group cupped their ears. “I say is there going to be a ceremonial tonight?” he bellowed. The words were lost in air. Mr. Hubbard, our tour master, began bellowing, too. He wanted to know whether a representative of the Ketchikan Commercial Club was on hand.

  I sat on a bollard in the warm sun, watching these antics indulgently, I, a graduate of the University of Mencken and Lewis, studying the spectacle of Babbittry northbound—men visiting a strange land yet craving not strangeness but a renewal of what was familiar. I can still recall the agitation of Mr. Hubbard on this occasion—a pioneer in a sack suit glimpsing his frontier at last and taut with emotion. As the ship was being warped alongside, Mr. Hubbard saw the boatswain swing himself over the rail, grasp a hawser, and slide down onto the dock. Eager to make contact with the Commercial Club man, Mr. Hubbard stepped over the rail and took hold of the hawser. But the dock was a long way down, and there was still an ugly gully of water between ship and dock. Twice Mr. Hubbard flexed his legs in a test take-off, both times lost his nerve. His face wore a grim look, and he soon had an audience, just as a suicide on a ledge gets one. For a few tense moments, the launching of Mr. Hubbard into Alaska held everyone spellbound, but it never came off. Prudence conquered zeal, and our first brush with the frontier was a defeat for the spirit of San Francisco.

  Later, when I went ashore, via the plank, I “lounged down the street” (I was always “lounging” or “sauntering” in my journal) and bought a copy of Faint Perfume, by Zona Gale. Because the town smelled of fish, I considered this purchase clownish. Of such flimsy delights were my days made in those delectable years.

  That evening, the Shriners had their ceremonial, the Commercial Club had its meeting, the ladies from the ship bought great numbers of Indian baskets, and one of the oilers from the Buford’s engine-room crew managed to get ashore and establish trade relations with a half-breed girl. “Big, like that,” he told me afterward. (I was already cultivating the society of firemen and sailors, hoping to be admitted.) When everyone had satisfied his own peculiar needs and refreshed himself in the way he knew best, the Buford let go her lines and continued north through the tortuous straits of the Alexander Archipelago. I was an extremely callow and insecure young man, but as I examine my record of Ketchikan and translate it from the Chinese in which it is written, I can see that I was not alone in my insecurity; all of us were seeking reassurance of one sort or another—some with mystic rites and robes, some with the metaphysics of commerce, some with expensive Indian baskets and inexpensive Indian girls. I was enraptured with my surroundings—contemptuous of all, envious of all, proud, courageous, and scared to death.

  On the morning of Sunday, July 29, we sighted Taku Glacier, a scheduled point of interest. When we brought it abeam, Captain Lane stopped the ship and everyone rushed on deck. “The bridegroom,” I noted in my journal, “dashed to get his polo coat and his yellow gloves. The bride put on her polo coat to match. Everybody put on something special. Walter Brunt, potentate of Islam Temple, put on his monkey cap in case he should get into a photograph with the glacier in the background.”

  The whale boat was lowered and Sydney Snow was rowed off to get pictures of the Buford against the glacier. But Captain Lane was not easily satisfied; he wanted his charges to see that a glacier is really a river of ice, discharging into the sea. Taku, in the manner of glaciers, was sulking in its tent and taking its own sweet time about discharging into the sea; it needed prodding. Accordingly, Mr. Snow was called on to stir things up. He hurried to the bridge with his elephant gun and opened fire on Taku, while Sydney, in the whaleboat, cranked away at his camera. Nothing happened. For about an hour, there was desultory fire from the bridge while the passengers hung expectantly at the rail. Then they wearied of the spectacle of a reluctant glacier, and most of them drifted away toward the dining saloon. A few minutes before noon, whether from rifle fire or from sheer readiness, a piece of ice did fall into the sea. It made a fine splash. Passengers who had deserted the deck rushed back but were, of course, too late.

  As I stood at the rail studying Taku Glacier, I was joined by the Buford’s storekeeper, a solemn, thoughtful man. For a few moments he stared quietly at the great wall of ice. “How do you like it?” I asked, between volleys. He took my question seriously and his answer was slow in coming. “I don’t care for it,” he replied, at last, and walked aft to resume his duties. As our voyage progressed and we ventured farther and farther into nowhere, with sea and sky and fog and ice and the white wings of gulls for our backdrop, the storekeeper’s measured words became more and more expressive of the inner feelings of many of the tourists; they did not care for it.

  At Juneau, I watched one of the Brown Brothers fishing in the rain, and wrote an unrhymed poem: “Grapefruit and oranges in the green water off Juneau dock—grapefruit and oranges, part of the ship’s scum.” Sandburg had me by the throat in those days. Alaskan towns, I reported in my journal, “are just murmurings at the foot of mountains.”

  One of the faintest of these murmurings was Skagway, where my ticket ran out. The Buford tied up at the dock there on the last day of July. My search for a job on board had been vain. I put my Corona in its case, packed my bag, and went on deck to sit awhile in sorrow and in fear, delaying until the last possible moment my walk down the plank and into the forlorn street of Skagway—a prospector twenty-five years late and not even primarily interested in gold
.

  While I was sitting there on deck (my journal says I was “browsing” there), trying to sort out my troubles and wondering how I had managed to get myself into this incredible mess, I received a summons to the bridge. A Miss Linderman, according to my account, presented herself to me and delivered the message. “The captain wants to see you right away” was all she said. Oddly enough, I did not associate this summons with my job-hunting; I had no idea what was up, and felt like a schoolboy called to the principal’s office. The message seemed ominous, but less ominous than the imminent trip down the gangplank into murmurous Skagway. I hustled to the bridge.

  Captain Lane stared at me for a moment. Then he said, “We can put you on as night saloonsman for the remainder of the voyage—workaway passage. Is that satisfactory?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied. I didn’t know what a night saloonsman was, or a workaway passage, but I was in no mood for quibbling, and if Captain Lane had offered to tow me astern at the end of a long rope I would have grabbed the chance. I thanked my captain, reported to the second steward, and that night turned up in the dining saloon wearing a white jacket and carrying a napkin slung over my left forearm, in the manner of right-handed waiters the world over. The crisis of Skagway was behind me, and pretty soon Skagway was, too, as the Buford steamed west toward the Aleutians at her steady pace of eleven knots.