Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  The canoemen sleep in motels, private houses, tents, their own cars, and, in some cases, in cabins and farmhouses they rent by the year so they can spend weekends and vacations on the river. (Incidentally, they refer to themselves as canoeists, but I may be unreformable on that one. From the age of eight, I was told that a canoeman was someone who knew how to handle a canoe anywhere, while a canoeist, typically, was someone flopping around ineptly in a sponson canoe on a lake in Central Park.) The canoemen, in their rooms and tents and farmhouses, after the movies, talked about the places they go to, their white-water circuit: Esopus Creek, at Phoenicia, New York; the Youghiogheny (yok-a-gainy) River at Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania; the Loyalsock, also in Pennsylvania (“If you flip, you might have to wash down a long way”); the Shenandoah Staircase, at Harper’s Ferry (five miles of ledges); and, nearby in the West Virginia mountains, the Dry Fork of the Cheat (“When it’s up, it just goes lickety-split. It was named that because men drowned and were cheated out of their lives running logs down the river” ) .

  Kauffmann and I stayed in a farmhouse owned by a man named Eston Yokum and accessible only by a cable-suspension footbridge that swayed and humped as you walked over the river. We were the guests of four canoemen, Yokum’s tenants. From them I learned that white water is now classified in six categories on an International Scale, based on drop, water velocity, characteristics of the stream. Class I and Class II water are easily negotiable. Classes III (“small falls, numerous rapids,” in the language of the International Scale) and IV (“high irregular waves with boulders directly in current, difficult broken water, eddies, and abrupt bends”) call for experience and high skill. Class V has “long rocky rapids with difficult and completely irregular broken water which must be run head on”; and Class VI has “all previously mentioned difficulties increased to the limit, cannot be attempted without risk of life.” The upper Hudson, not long after it pours out of Lake Tear of the Clouds, is in places a Class VI river, and segments of the Colorado are off the scale. The Potomac between Mouth of Seneca and Smoke Hole Cavern is a Class III and Class IV river, just right for general competition, being tough but not too tough. The West River in Vermont, where the national championships have often been held, was described as having less dramatic surroundings than the upper Potomac-going through farmland instead of through West Virginia’s high sedimentary mountains—but having, as its most attractive feature, an absolute reliability of water level. Three miles up the West River from the canoe course is Bald Mountain Dam. In close communication with the Army engineers at the dam, canoemen have the river turned up just so, until it is flowing at a steady Class IV. While slalom gates are being set, the river is turned off.

  That is as nothing to the story of the Nantahala, a river in North Carolina, where canoemen gather and stare fondly from its banks at its homicidal gradient. One inconvenience is that there is normally no water whatsoever in the riverbed. Upstream is a mammoth aluminum plant that impounds the water in a reservoir and lets it out once a day. The canoemen wait for that moment. They know it is coming because the water is cold from the depths of the reservoir, and in the warm North Carolina air it creates a cloud that hurtles and roils along with it and can be seen long before the sound is heard of the roar of the white water. Into the instant river the canoemen fly. They say that it is like going down the New Jersey Turnpike in a fog. Shooting downriver and around bends, they desperately call out one another’s names, trying to keep contact in the mists.

  The man who told us about the Nantahala was Robert Harrigan, from Bethesda, Maryland, who, with a friend named John Berry, designed and first built the Berrigan canoe. Harrigan—tall and impressive, with gray edges on a shock of brown hair—also told about the time he took Secretary Udall down the upper Hudson. He implied that he was scared out of his mind by the rampaging, irregular broken water, while Udall sat upright in the bow like a taxidermal hawk, looking left and right, and saying, “Beautiful river, Bob. Beautiful river.” Harrigan, in the stern, was desperately heaving himself flat out over the water in various directions against the conflicting currents, but Udall appeared not to notice and to be absolutely serene in the confidence that no canoe carrying the Secretary of the Interior was likely to flip.

  When modern canoemen go down a river in a wild-water race, covering distance against a clock, the amplitude of what they can do is not so immediately apparent as it is when, at a time of leisure, they stop to enjoy a rapid. They can, for example, go zipping down a braided white torrent and suddenly stop dead in the middle of it, turn around, and hover, like trout in a stream. Facing the current, they will nose down behind a ledge and let the full force of the river pour upon their bows while they sit there contemplating. They will come schussing through a rip, crash through an eddy wall, rest a moment, poised and quiet, then peel off through the far line of the eddy and drop so fast that soon only their heads are visible from the place where they paused to rest. Darting into an eddy on one side of the river, they will sit steady, facing in the direction from which they came, then slice the canoe decisively into the main current, paddling hard upstream. The result of this maneuver, called a ferry, is that they go skidding sidewise directly across the river, despite its velocity, without moving six inches downstream. To them, the white water is not a chaos of flow and spray but a legible language, and they know how to read it. Its currents don’t all flow in the same direction. Some tumble like barrels. Others, in eddies, flow gently upstream. Look for the tongue of water. Pick it. You pick the river. Lean away from the current. The fastest and deepest water is on the outside of a curve. Sometimes it’s too vicious there; hug the inside. Don’t go for quiet spots in the middle of turbulence—satin-water pillows are stuffed with rock. Watch yourself. Don’t eddy out if you don’t want to. Standing waves—haystacks—mark deep water. The man from the Hudson’s Bay Company steered to the side of standing waves, but these men go right through them. His entire goal, like mine as a boy, was to get safely to the bottom of the rapid. These modern canoemen want to stop and play. They roll like Eskimos. Their slalom courses loop. Some gates are actually upriver from previous ones. I was taught the J stroke as the absolute denominator of canoemanship, but they almost never use it. It’s inefficient. I was taught never to pry the bow of a moving canoe. They pry, and jump, like skiers, laterally, keeping parallel with the current. They may call themselves canoeists, but they are really fabulous.

  John Evans, short, strong, and soft-spoken, had come from Los Angeles and was the son of a Hollywood assistant director. He learned and developed many of his techniques in swimming pools, and practiced morning after morning in Ballona Creek—the outer reaches of the Los Angeles storm sewers—which has high concrete banks, and saline water where it approaches the sea. For white water, he had to make long trips to the Sierra, where he was sometimes discouraged because he was always dumping over, cutting his hands, and fighting shy of standing waves. After his graduation from high school, in 1968, he became a full-time canoeman. He made his own canoes, as nearly everyone does, and he worked for a while in a Fiberglas factory. Like Waldrop, he built a C-1 in something of a delta shape, but his delta was far more pronounced, and the canoe could have been a wind-tunnel model for a supersonic airplane. An advantage in this, Evans felt, is that he minimized width around the cockpit and could put the paddle straight down into the water. The delta, as it widened out behind him, gave stability and also conformed to the regulations on minimal width (thirty-one and a half inches). Evans had beaten the man who was acknowledged to be the best wild-water boater in southern California, and, encouraged by that, he had come East to win all he could.

  Crowds formed by all the important rapids in Hopeville Canyon—the Tree Rapid, the Cave Rapid, Table Rock Rapid —to see the C-1s go down the river. Starts were at one-minute intervals. Evans, in a field of twenty, was the seventh to begin, and Waldrop was the last. Using a fast, European, staccato stroke, between fifty and sixty per minute, Evans danced down through the rock gardens of the
low river with a light and absolute touch, barely skirting eddy walls, finding the fast water, reading and absorbing the river. One after another, he caught and passed his predecessors—a Pittsburgh canoeman, one from Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, one from Morgantown, West Virginia—and when he crossed the finish line he had covered five miles in just under forty-nine minutes. Waldrop took second place, as expected. What was remarkable, though, was that Evans had beaten him by almost four minutes.

  During the White Water Weekend, as the events agglomerately were called, Kauffmann and I had the luck to take a run with Bob Harrigan, who taught us all he could, except how to get out of the trough we capsized in, a humiliating development that gave us an ice-cold soaking. However, in the wild-water race for eager hacks, we found that the new Berrigan seemed to know the river almost as well as its designer and to feel vertebrate beneath us and our paddles. We went the distance, nine miles, in an hour and thirty-one minutes. Forever after that trip, I’m here to tell you, an open, conventional canoe—aluminum, canvas, or birch-bark—will feel to me about as riverworthy as a rickshaw. We placed third, and were given engraved and ribboned medals. I couldn’t care less whether Hiawatha would sanction all this. I, for one, will.

  The Search for Marvin Gardens

  GO. I ROLL THE DICE—A SIX AND A TWO. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range.

  The dogs are moving (some are limping) through ruins, rubble, fire damage, open garbage. Doorways are gone. Lath is visible in the crumbling walls of the buildings. The street sparkles with shattered glass. I have never seen, anywhere, so many broken windows. A sign—“Slow, Children at Play”—has been bent backward by an automobile. At the lighthouse, the dogs turn up Pacific and disappear. George Meade, Army engineer, built the lighthouse—brick upon brick, six hundred thousand bricks, to reach up high enough to throw a beam twenty miles over the sea. Meade, seven years later, saved the Union at Gettysburg.

  I buy Vermont Avenue for $100. My opponent is a tall, shadowy figure, across from me, but I know him well, and I know his game like a favorite tune. If he can, he will always go for the quick kill. And when it is foolish to go for the quick kill he will be foolish. On the whole, though, he is a master assessor of percentages. It is a mistake to underestimate him. His eleven carries his top hat to St. Charles Place, which he buys for $140.

  The sidewalks of St. Charles Place have been cracked to shards by through-growing weeds. There are no buildings. Mansions, hotels once stood here. A few street lamps now drop cones of light on broken glass and vacant space behind a chain-link fence that some great machine has in places bent to the ground. Five plane trees—in full summer leaf, flecking the light—are all that live on St. Charles Place.

  Block upon block, gradually, we are cancelling each other out—in the blues, the lavenders, the oranges, the greens. My opponent follows a plan of his own devising. I use the Hornblower & Weeks opening and the Zuricher defense. The first game draws tight, will soon finish. In 1971, a group of people in Racine, Wisconsin, played for seven hundred and sixty-eight hours. A game begun a month later in Danville, California, lasted eight hundred and twenty hours. These are official records, and they stun us. We have been playing for eight minutes. It amazes us that Monopoly is thought of as a long game. It is possible to play to a complete, absolute, and final conclusion in less than fifteen minutes, all within the rules as written. My opponent and I have done so thousands of times. No wonder we are sitting across from each other now in this best-of-seven series for the international singles championship of the world.

  On Illinois Avenue, three men lean out from second-story windows. A girl is coming down the street. She wears dungarees and a bright-red shirt, has ample breasts and a Hadendoan Afro, a black halo, two feet in diameter. Ice rattles in the glasses in the hands of the men.

  “Hey, sister!”

  “Come on up!”

  She looks up, looks from one to another to the other, looks them flat in the eye.

  “What for?” she says, and she walks on.

  I buy Illinois for $240. It solidifies my chances, for I already own Kentucky and Indiana. My opponent pales. If he had landed first on Illinois, the game would have been over then and there, for he has houses built on Boardwalk and Park Place, we share the railroads equally, and we have cancelled each other everywhere else. We never trade.

  In 1852, R. B. Osborne, an immigrant Englishman, civil engineer, surveyed the route of a railroad line that would run from Camden to Absecon Island, in New Jersey, traversing the state from the Delaware River to the barrier beaches of the sea. He then sketched in the plan of a “bathing village” that would surround the eastern terminus of the line. His pen flew glibly, framing and naming spacious avenues parallel to the shore—Mediterranean, Baltic, Oriental, Ventnor—and narrower transsecting avenues: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Connecticut, States, Virginia, Tennessee, New York, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois. The place as a whole had no name, so when he had completed the plan Osborne wrote in large letters over the ocean, “Atlantic City.” No one ever challenged the name, or the names of Osborne’s streets. Monopoly was invented in the early nineteen-thirties by Charles B. Darrow, but Darrow was only transliterating what Osborne had created. The railroads, crucial to any player, were the making of Atlantic City. After the rails were down, houses and hotels burgeoned from Mediterranean and Baltic to New York and Kentucky. Properties—building lots—sold for as little as six dollars apiece and as much as a thousand dollars. The original investors in the railroads and the real estate called themselves the Camden & Atlantic Land Company. Reverently, I repeat their names: Dwight Bell, William Coffin, John DaCosta, Daniel Deal, William Fleming, Andrew Hay, Joseph Porter, Jonathan Pitney, Samuel Richards—founders, fathers, forerunners, archetypical masters of the quick kill.

  My opponent and I are now in a deep situation of classical Monopoly. The torsion is almost perfect—Boardwalk and Park Place versus the brilliant reds. His cash position is weak, though, and if I escape him now he may fade. I land on Luxury Tax, contiguous to but in sanctuary from his power. I have four houses on Indiana. He lands there. He concedes.

  Indiana Avenue was the address of the Brighton Hotel, gone now. The Brighton was exclusive—a word that no longer has retail value in the city. If you arrived by automobile and tried to register at the Brighton, you were sent away. Brighton-class people came in private railroad cars. Brighton-class people had other private railroad cars for their horses—dawn rides on the firm sand at water’s edge, skirts flying. Colonel Anthony J. Drexel Biddle—the sort of name that would constrict throats in Philadelphia—lived, much of the year, in the Brighton.

  Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken is on Kentucky Avenue. So is Clifton’s Club Harlem, with the Sepia Revue and the Sepia Follies, featuring the Honey Bees, the Fashions, and the Lords.

  My opponent and I, many years ago, played 2,428 games of Monopoly in a single season. He was then a recent graduate of the Harvard Law School, and he was working for a downtown firm, looking up law. Two people we knew—one from Chase Manhattan, the other from Morgan, Stanley—tried to get into the game, but after a few rounds we found that they were not in the conversation and we sent them home. Monopoly should always be mano a mano anyway. My opponent won 1,199 games, and so did I. Thirty were ties. He was called into the Army, and we stopped just there. Now, in Game 2 of the series, I go immediately to jail, and again to jail while my opponent seines property. He is dumbfoundingly lucky. He wins in twelve minutes.

  Visiting hours are daily, eleven to two; Sunday, eleven to one; evenings, six to nine. “NO MINORS, NO FOOD, Immediate Family Only Allowed in Jail.” All this above a blue steel door in a blue cement wall in the windowless interior of the basement of the city hall. The desk sergeant sits opposite the door to the jail. In a cigar box in front of him are pills in every color, a banquet of fruit salad an inch and a half deep—leapers, co-pilots, footballs, truck drivers, peanuts, blue angels, yellow j
ackets, redbirds, rainbows. Near the desk are two soldiers, waiting to go through the blue door. They are about eighteen years old. One of them is trying hard to light a cigarette. His wrists are in steel cuffs. A military policeman waits, too. He is a year or so older than the soldiers, taller, studious in appearance, gentle, fat. On a bench against a wall sits a good-looking girl in slacks. The blue door rattles, swings heavily open. A turnkey stands in the doorway. “Don’t you guys kill yourselves back there now,” says the sergeant to the soldiers.

  “One kid, he overdosed himself about ten and a half hours ago,” says the M.P.

  The M.P., the soldiers, the turnkey, and the girl on the bench are white. The sergeant is black. “If you take off the handcuffs, take off the belts,” says the sergeant to the M.P. “I don’t want them hanging themselves back there.” The door shuts and its tumblers move. When it opens again, five minutes later, a young white man in sandals and dungarees and a blue polo shirt emerges. His hair is in a ponytail. He has no beard. He grins at the good-looking girl. She rises, joins him. The sergeant hands him a manila envelope. From it he removes his belt and a small notebook. He borrows a pencil, makes an entry in the notebook. He is out of jail, free. What did he do? He offended Atlantic City in some way. He spent a night in the jail. In the nineteen-thirties, men visiting Atlantic City went to jail, directly to jail, did not pass Go, for appearing in topless bathing suits on the beach. A city statute requiring all men to wear full-length bathing suits was not seriously challenged until 1937, and the first year in which a man could legally go bare-chested on the beach was 1940.