Essays of E. B. White (28 page)

On July 2, I entered in my journal a copy of a poem I had written and mailed anonymously to the Reverend Mark A. Matthews, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, who had preached a sermon I found offensive. A résumé of the sermon had appeared in the Monday morning paper. Dr. Matthews had attacked non-churchgoers, of whom I was one. On the following Sunday, I departed from my usual stance and became a churchgoer, attending the morning service at the First Presbyterian to make a routine check on my man. “The smugness of his doctrine,” I wrote in my journal, “made the air stifling.” Probably what really made the air stifling for me was that in his sermon the minister made no mention of having received my stinging communication.

For one week I worked on Hearst's
Post-Intelligencer
, commonly called the
P.I.
, substituting for a reporter on vacation. My entry for July 18 (1:30
A.M.
) begins, “A man scarce realizes what a terrible thing scorn is until he begins to despise himself.” I doubt that I found myself despicable; I simply found life perplexing. I did not know where to go. On Friday, July 20 (3
A.M.
), appears the abrupt entry, “I sail Monday on S.S. Buford for Skagway.” No explanation or amplification follows, only an account of an evening spent with a girl who lived on Lake Union. (She fed me bread and apple jelly.)

I did, however, clip from the
P.I.
and paste into my journal the item that started me on my way to Alaska. The story was headed

S. F. CHAMBER
TO SEE ALASKA

and began:

A number of things must have attracted me to this item in the news. First, the ship was to call at Seattle. I was a dockside regular at this period, and any ship at all was of interest to me. Second, Alaska was in the opposite direction from home, where I considered it unsuitable to be at my age. Third, a Chamber of Commerce was involved, and this opened up familiar vistas. As a reporter, I had spent many a lunch hour covering the noonday gatherings of fraternal and civic groups; Seattle was a hotbed of Elks, Eagles, Moose, Lions, Kiwanians, Rotarians, and members of the Young Men's Business Association. I had broken the hard roll countless times with Chamber of Commerce people, had laughed courteously at their jokes and listened patiently to their tales of industrial growth. I was under the influence of Mencken and Lewis, and felt proud disdain for business and for businessmen. It was important to me at that time to move among people toward whom I felt aloof and superior, even though I secretly envied their ability to earn a living.

Perhaps the clincher in the news story of the
Buford
was the list of the ports of call, names that were music to the ear of youth: Ketchikan, Taku Glacier, Juneau, Skagway, Sitka, Cordova, Seward, Kodiak, Cold Bay, Lighthouse Rocks, Dutch Harbor, Bogoslof Island, the Pribilof Islands, Cape Chaplin, Anadir. “From Nome, they [the voyagers] will pass the ice pack, proceeding to East Cape, Siberia, and then return to Nome. On the home trip they will stop at St. Michael, Akutan and Seattle, the entire trip requiring forty days.”

Forty days! To me, forty days was a mere siesta in time's long afternoon, and I could cling, for lack of anything else, to the ship. The Pribilof Islands with ten Boston capitalists—sheer enchantment! All I needed was a job on the ship, and this I determined to get. The
Buford
arrived in due course and tied up to Pier 7. Every day while she was there, I sneaked aboard and hung about the corridors, waylaying ship's officers and offering my services in any capacity. When, after three days, I found no taker, I made inquiries and learned that for $40 I could sail as a first-class passenger as far as Skagway, which is at the head of the Inside Passage. This enabled me to shift my strategy; I
had
$40 and I decided to launch myself in the direction of the Arctic by the sheer power of money. Once firmly entrenched in the ship, I could from that vantage point pursue my job-hunting. The second steward gave me a bit of encouragement. “Anything can happen in a ship,” he said. And he turned out to be right.

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 rookeries 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.