Waiting for a Ship

The other evening I made my way to the end of John McPhee's 1990 book Waiting for a Ship, in which our author first hangs out with a member of the US Merchant Marine waiting to be assigned to a seagoing vessel and then tags along for a ride from Charleston down through the Panama Canal and then down the West Coast of South America and back. Somewhere in the middle I put it down and read another book, but then I picked it back up.

It was not the best of McPhee's books that I've read (that honor still belongs to the first one: The Control of Nature), and I've read maybe five or six, and yet it was still better than most books, because in general he's just better than most writers. In some sense the book suffers from the rigid parataxis of the sea-going voyage, the endless one thing after another of it all. It is a little amorphous. At many of the ports he lays out detailed and complete inventories of what they deliver and what they pick up:  "400 tons of desiccated beef liver, 6 containers of assorted refrigerator parts, 200 cows, 8,000 pairs of jeans," that sort of thing. It all seems sort of random and formless. As does his journey, at times, and I think that's kind of his point. There are many great stories of things the crew has seen in this or that port on the other side of the world, of great storms in the seas of the North Atlantic in winter, of pirates boldly scaling the sides of the massive, undercrewed ships and making off with booty often without anyone knowing they were even there.

And then they return to port in Charleston.

I will read more McPhee. I have at least one more on my shelf and am interested in reading his first book, about his Princeton classmate Bill Bradley, after I made my way not long ago through Bradley's book on basketball and life. But I will take a little break.