Essays of E. B. White (29 page)

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.

I cannot recall Miss Linderman—she is a name on a page, that is all—but among the handful of women who have distinguished themselves in some great way in my life she occupies a high position. I never found out exactly what happened; I never even tried to find out. This much is clear: the news that a job-hunter was loose on board finally reached the captain, just as the news would have reached him that a harmless snake was loose in the hold, and he reluctantly disposed of the matter in the easiest way, as he settled many another small but pesky problem in the business of running that crazy tour.

(Since beginning this account, I've been looking into the files of the San Francisco
Chronicle
for 1923 for news of the
Buford
and its company. One of the owners of the line, it appears, was a Mr. John Linderman, and the passenger list shows the presence on board of several Linderman girls—his daughters, I suppose. So I guess I was bailed out of Skagway by the daughter of an owner. Inasmuch as Mr. Linderman and his partner Mr. Ogden were buying the ship on the installment plan, and had slim prospects of making the thing pay, I think the management was foolhardy to take on another mouth to feed. But I still value Miss Linderman highly.)

Working in a ship is a far better life than sailing in one as a passenger. Alaska, the sea, and the ship herself became real to me as soon as I was employed; before that, all three had suffered from a sort of insubstantiality. Passengers never really come to know a ship; too much is hidden from their sight, too little is demanded of them. They may love their ship, but without their participating in her operation the identification is not established. As saloonsman, I was a participant—at first a slightly sick participant. I worked from eight in the evening till six in the morning. I set tables, prepared late supper for thirty, served it (sometimes carrying a full tray in a beam sea), cleaned the tables, washed the dishes, stropped the glasses, swept down the companionway leading to the social hall, and shined brass. This was hard work, dull work, and, until my stomach adjusted to the ripe smell of the pantry, touchy work. But when, at around three o'clock, I stepped out onto the forward deck for a smoke, with the sky showing bright in the north and the mate pacing the bridge and the throaty snores of the passengers issuing from the staterooms, the ship would throb and tremble under me and she was
my
ship, all mine and right on course, alive and purposeful and exciting. No longer was the
Buford
merely taking me from one benighted port to another; now she was transporting me from all my yesterdays to all my tomorrows. It was I who seemed to make her go, almost as though I were a quartermaster with my hand on the wheel.

My metamorphosis from passenger to saloonsman took the passengers by surprise and created a certain awkwardness at the late supper. A few of the first-class people knew me by name and most of them knew me by sight; naturally they felt uneasy when they found me at their service. There was the matter of tipping. Should a girl with whom I had danced between Seattle and Skagway leave a coin for me when I handed her a cold cut between Skagway and Cordova? A delicate question. One elderly female, flustered at seeing me in saloonsman's garb, cried, “Goodness! How long have
you
been a waitress?” I regarded my change in status as extremely comical, played it deadpan, and made quite a to-do about it in my journal, greatly exaggerating its comic value. Embarrassed at first, I soon felt an elevation of spirit and wore my white jacket like a plume. In my mouth was the taste of a fresh superiority over my fellow man; not only was I leading a secret literary life among the mercantile crowd but I was now a busy, employed man, gainfully occupied among wastrels and idlers. Always hungry myself and indulging in snacks at every opportunity, I nevertheless adopted a patronizing air toward those who appeared for the pre-bedtime meal, regarding their appetite at that hour as gross and contemptible. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering orders; I would stand attentively listening to a group of four telling me what they wanted, and by the time I reached the pantry the whole recital would be gone from my head. As a member of the Steward Department, I was permitted by the rules to go on deck to catch some air but was not permitted to sit down while on deck. I ceased mingling with the passengers and joined the much juicier fraternity of pantrymen and cooks, denizens of the glory hole in the stern of the ship next to the steering engine—a noisy, aromatic place, traditional seat of intrigue and corruption. I joined the glory-hole crowd, but I was not shifted to the glory hole itself; instead, I was assigned a bunk in a small, airless inside room, first class, with a young man named J. Wilbur Wolf. Wilbur was the other night saloonsman, and, like me, was burdened with a college education and an immaculate past. The second steward, a cagey man, chose not to inject Wilbur and me into the glory hole, where we properly belonged. The second may have feared that our morals would be corrupted, but I think he simply did not wish to disturb the gamy society of the hole by introducing two young dudes of almost unparalleled innocence. It would have made him uneasy.

At Cordova, we received by radio the news of Harding's death, and I copied into my journal the notice on the ship's bulletin board:

S
AN
F
RANCISCO

“Here,” I wrote in pensive vein, “is a very fine illustration of how the world jogs on, come what may.” Apparently the realization that people would continue to have their dirty clothes washed after the death of Warren Gamaliel Harding struck me forcibly.

At all events, the
Buford
jogged on, come what might. As she glided up the wide aisle of Resurrection Bay toward Seward, the Brown Brothers gathered in the social hall and rehearsed suitable numbers for an impromptu memorial service. Hearing the sad sounds of their muted horns drifting out and mingling with the crying of gulls, I was afflicted with melancholy at the loss of my President—I felt bereft. Mr. Harding is not greatly mourned these days, but we of the
Buford
blew him a heartfelt tribute from Seward that night, on six jolly saxophones hastily converted to solemnity.