In the Country of the Blind
Page 1
Praise for Edward Hoagland
“The best essayist of my generation.”
—John Updike
“He is a marvelous writer … generous, full of odd detail, very moving … to read two pages of Hoagland at random is to know immediately that you are in the hands of a supremely tough-minded man and a man of perfect honesty.”
—Newsweek
“A writer born, a writer obsessed.”
—Alfred Kazin
“Edward Hoagland is a strong, solid writer with a splendid feel for the intricacy, queerness, and stubborn pertinacity of life. He is also, so far as I know, the best essayist working in our perishing republic.”
—Edward Abbey
“America’s most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist.”
—Philip Roth, London Sunday Times
“Edward Hoagland is a natural. His essays flow like running water, pure and clear.”
—Studs Terkel
“One of the very best writers of his generation.”
—Saul Bellow
“Literally, we are plunged and immersed in the Yukon or Yemen or Belize and made not only to experience it and hear about it but to absorb and understand it.”
—Wallace Stegner
“No contemporary essayist sifting through his own experience can match the unadorned clarity of Hoagland’s voice.”
—The Los Angeles Times
“Hoagland’s genius is being in touch with both the natural world and his own life…. He is that rare animal, an unpedantic essayist, and like his greatest predecessors he has found a way to turn self-consciousness into a fine art.”
—Paul Theroux
“Hoagland is our wild world’s literary virtuoso.”
—Annie Proulx
“The Thoreau of our time, an essayist so intensely personal, so sharp-eyed and deep-sighted, so tender and tough, lyrical and elegiac, as to transmute a simple stroll into a full-blown mystical experience.”
—Washington Post
“The best of Edward Hoagland is the best in the land.”
—Annie Dillard
“Hoagland, one of the few American writers who has forged a brilliant career out of essays, is our Chopin of the genre.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“One of the best celebrants of the natural world.”
—The Atlantic
“Hoagland is surely one of our most truthful writers about nature.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Children are Diamonds
“Children Are Diamonds is the latest addition to a remarkable collection of books about the war in southern Sudan, including Aidan Hartley’s Zanzibar Chest, Deborah Scroggins’s Emma’s War, and Dave Eggers’s What Is the What. Like them, Hoagland’s novel evokes the time and place with haunting imagery. Hoagland aptly captures the lives of Western do-gooders and opportunists lured by the adrenaline rush of Africa, evoking the closeness, and the randomness, of death in a war zone.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“The ferocious lucidity of Hoagland’s language and the depth of his characters as they navigate political complexity, hellish violence, endless fear, persistent desire, and desperate calculations of survival make for a shattering tale of epic suffering, bitter irony, and miraculous flashes of beauty.”
—Booklist
“Edward Hoagland has long been both a resolute explorer and a preternaturally versatile writer. He’s written more nonfiction than fiction, but what he brings to this terrifying novel—I mean, in addition to his humane vision and exquisite craft—is everything he has learned (as Graham Greene learned) from the world. The range and depth of Hoagland’s travel books, and of his many remarkable essays, are on display in this novel set in Africa, where killing and sexual brutality are juxtaposed with humanitarian care. Hoagland’s aid workers are damaged souls, but they haven’t quit. In a world of unbearable inhumanity, what comes across in this intrepid novel is the power of doing the right thing—even, or especially, in a moral outback.”
—John Irving
“A gritty cinematic story wrapped in brilliant African detail, mesmerizing, from the unforgettable opening scene, on to the end. Quite simply, a masterpiece.”
—Garrison Keillor
“Children are Diamonds is a compelling and adventurous book by a writer who has been great for a very long time and who has earned his standing as a national treasure.”
—Tom McGuane
“Edward Hoagland’s African apocalypse is the dramatic story of a savvy and likable young American named Hickey, a footloose knockabout in the tradition of Conrad and Hemingway, who, in an incredibly harrowing odyssey through central Africa, does everything in his power to rescue several damaged children from the ravages of that war-torn continent. At the heart of the novel is Hickey’s friend and sometime lover, Ruthie, a sharp-tongued and warm-hearted nurse. Ruthie may well be the most appealing character in American fiction since Ruby in Cold Mountain. Written with enormous energy, skill, and immediacy, Children are Diamonds is a noble paean to love and endurance in the face of the very worst that we human beings are capable of doing to one another.”
—Howard Frank Mosher
Notes from a Century Before
“This book is as remarkable as the landscape it describes.”
—Newsweek
“One of the most interesting, revealing, and delightful travel books I have read.”
—The New York Review of Books
“His journal is about tangles and unrealized ambitions … and he understands wonderfully what to make of what he sees and hears…. A strange and beautiful book.”
—The Washington Post
“Hoagland builds up an extensive, vivid picture of a place and people and, like all good travel writers, makes the reader want to start right out over his tracks.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“A beautiful book: so sharp and persistent in rendering the visible world, and yet so strangely wild with feeling.”
—Philip Roth
“A spellbinding document.”
—George Plimpton
Alaskan Travels
“Alaskan Travels is a hauntingly lyrical look back at the ‘national dreamscape’ of 1980s Alaska. Hoagland’s pre-Palin Alaska is ‘a destination created out of anger and quests,’ full of outcasts and fortune seekers mixing with an indigenous population struggling against a fast-changing world. Fur-trapping hippies, boomtown realtors, jail-breaking Eskimos, amputee Vietnam vets on snowmobiles—Hoagland gathers their stories as if laying in stores against the Arctic winter.”
—Outside Magazine
“Alaskan Travels is much more than a travel book. It is the chronicle of a love affair, with a powerful landscape and a powerful woman—a wonderful double portrait.”
—Paul Theroux
“A pleasing combination of personal essays and reflections, a love story and a naturalist’s view of one of the last unspoiled lands.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Alaskan Travels
“He’s at his best … when he circles a subject from many vantage points, teasing and digressing, piling up gorgeously angled syntaxes and frank admissions … hallmarks of a true essayist…. It’s good to have this courageous account … contemplating the landscape of old age and mortality.”
—Phillip Lopate, The New York Review of Books
Books by Edward Hoagland
—Essays—
The Courage of Turtles
Walking the Dead Diamond River
Red Wolves and Black Bears
The Edward Hoagland Reader
The Tugman’s Passage
Heart’s Desire
Balancing Acts
Tigers and Ice
Hoagland on Nature
Sex and the River Styx
—Travel—
Notes from the Century Before
African Calliope
Early in the Season
Alaskan Travels
—Fiction—
Cat Man
The Circle Home
The Peacock’s Tail
Seven Rivers West
Children are Diamonds
The Devil’s Tub
In the Country of the Blind
—Memoir—
Compass Points
Copyright © 2016 by Edward Hoagland
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-721-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-722-7
Printed in the United States of America
For Mary and Molly
Chapter 1
Carol’s fluctuating needs or whims occupied more than their fair share of his thoughts, since her visits were irregular, but on the other hand, she claimed she thought of him too. “Fugitive thoughts,” he labeled them, although of course they were a lifeline of a sort. What would his children discover of him in closets or wherever? Would Claire scrub all remnants of him out of the house, bundle his clothes into cardboard boxes for the thrift shop, throw out even the briefcases he’d emptied his desk drawers into? They didn’t just contain tax receipts, but jottings of the personal kind that could give a grandson or daughter inklings about an absent parent to stir affection and nostalgia. He’d left them there because, although he couldn’t read anymore, he didn’t want to hire strangers to read these private musings to him later on, and he couldn’t bear to simply pitch them out yet either. Maybe Molly or Jeremy someday would be the ones to discover, retrieve, maybe even read them to him in old age. He trusted that his better nature was recorded there, not doggerel or folderol, but would Claire by and by throw them out? His own father’s papers had disappeared during his mother’s widowhood—also his grandfather’s World War I uniform—and she’d been grieving for him, not feeling guilty like Claire, or angry. What did you give your kids, besides a lottery of genes? A stance—that mix of bluff and confidence, backbone and wussiness that passes for personality or character. One talks less about ethics after third grade. Don’t steal candy or hit other children, if they hadn’t learned the costs of violence on their own. Press transposed himself to half-imagined school settings, buildings he remembered at least, although the teachers would have changed. And Claire too; her harried routine was the politics of her job in marketing, which was more fluid than his had been at Merrill Lynch. He had no idea how her new relationship was going, but found he wished her well. Fatalism about his fading eyesight produced more generosity than bitterness he found.
Survival seemed the watchword at first, but that had proved a given when you had money trickling into the local bank from a trust he had created to live on. On either side his neighbors, the Swinnertons and the Clarks, watched out for him, the former in particular because he had bought the old Swinnerton farmhouse and much of the property that went with it and biked over for hearty lunches, farm-style, at the house they lived in now, for five dollars a day or so, and company. Karl Swinnerton was a woodsman, content to see his father’s dairy herd sold off, except for a relic Jersey in Press’s barn, with a Percheron that hauled logs, and banty hens nesting in the hayloft. Fiftyish and living a few miles south of Canada in uppermost Vermont, Karl had never been to the cities, but knew city men from training their duck dogs in Ten Mile Swamp, which stretched below the downhill pasture, or else guiding them in deer season, grouse season, bear season, or traveling to field trials where setters he’d trained competed, pointing at game-farm pheasants placed in the brush to shoot. A World War II veteran, he was good with guns and a Legion stalwart but not a gun nut, and believed, like Press, that Richard Nixon was letting the Vietnam mess drag on too long. Press had been a customer’s man at the brokerage firm before losing his sight, but Karl believed in private enterprise, so they’d found little to argue about at lunch. Anyway, Karl’s radio scanner was always on because he was Athol’s volunteer fire chief, so they heard every ambulance call and police bulletin; even the nearest railroad dispatcher and airport control tower, not to mention sheriff’s natter. Karl had seen action at Anzio in Italy and combat at the Colmar Pocket in France, on a continent he never wanted to return to, so he judged a man not by surface geography, like birthplace, education, money, but how he might hold up during a fire or in a firefight. Thus Press, though an unknown quantity, pleased him by grittily riding a bicycle over for lunch on a road he couldn’t see, but felt the gravel along the shoulder crunch under his wheels and navigated by the telephone poles intermittently alongside, quite topsy-tilty on his retinas.
Dorothy Swinnerton, by contrast, had been to Boston and New York even as a child with her brothers, selling a truckload of Christmas trees on the sidewalk to passersby. They’d sleep in the cab that night, but Dorothy was sometimes invited to stay in the apartment of one of her family’s summer boarders, city spinsters of both sexes who paid to spend a couple of weeks in the fresh air on their front porch, eating homemade cottage cheese and berry pies, eggs they collected themselves warm from the henhouse, nervous folks with tics and allergies and phobias, to escape the vise of city life. She’d hung about them in July and August while growing up and in her teens sold raw milk, cream, maple syrup, basswood honey, and pies to summer people around the lake from a horse-drawn wagon, getting to know a wide assortment of relatively sophisticated or metropolitan characters, almost like going to college, she thought. They read books and magazines, questioned her gently but intelligently, maybe even suggesting she show them poems or school papers she’d written, which turned out to seem important in retrospect when she began writing for the women’s page of the local paper—successful partly because her viewpoint was sympathetic to and informed by seasonal visitors too. So she took Press under her wing matter-of-factly, careful to display no pity, just friendliness and tolerance.
The Clarks were a different kettle of fish. Evangelicals, they took Press to church with them as well as to the supermarket. In the pews he was hugged comfortably by everybody, invited to Sunday luncheons after the service by strangers whose faces he couldn’t see, and then driven home by them after possibly being asked a little about mortgages or such, but nothing to argue about apart from Evolution. The congregation supported a mission in Africa, but charity of course begins at home. The Clarks, Darryl and Avis, liked farming and milked sixty cows, twice a day, three-hundred-sixty-five days a year and grew the corn and hay that fed them. Karl called them “Christers,” but Dorothy respected them and confided that people had doubted she should marry into the Swinnerton clan because Karl’s father was known for cooking moonshine and brewing and selling bathtub beer right on the place, and his granddad had run rum from Canada through Ten Mile Swamp during Prohibition, once shooting a revenuer, people said. Karl was a pillar of the town as fire chief and Legion commander, but his dad, besides bootlegging, had controversially employed jailbird crews in his logging operati
ons down in the swamp, renting them from the county or the state. This meant familiarizing a further criminal element with the trails down there, leading into Canada, now used not for whiskey but by people-smugglers. Karl himself—though a fireman, not a lawman, by his own description, preserving that much family loyalty—had recently found a dead “Chinaman” on one of the paths, he told Press and Dorothy. Buried him decently but didn’t report it. Not that the sheriff would especially want to know, and he didn’t care for the Border Patrol. But it preyed on Karl’s mind.
“You don’t know he was from China. The poor fellow. He might have been Vietnamese or from Thailand,” Dorothy pointed out, arguing with the term but not suggesting the Feds should have been notified. There was enough hubbub on the road anyhow, what with hippies coming in to join the commune up the hill and doubtless planting pot. She was afraid one of them was going to hit Press on his bike, they drove so fast. But she’d contributed a scarf with an Oriental motif for the burial of the unfortunate victim Karl, working alone, had performed. It was pitiful to think of him shot maybe for giving his smugglers some lip. She had to bite her tongue not to write a column about it for the Weekly Chronicle. The editor turned down plenty of her ideas, but surely this would float. Last week, for example, she’d wanted to explore the rumor that the hippie women at the commune were gardening bare-breasted to “help the veggies grow.” Benny, the junkyard owner, adjoining the Swinnertons on the other side, had unlimbered his telescope, yet both Karl and the editor had said no. Her last piece had been about the moccasin-flower orchids in the swamp that savvy families used to pick for their daughters’ senior prom. Karl had helped with that, as well as another on how to catch snapping turtles and cook them into savory stews. Her most popular this year had been “Explaining Summer People,” which was funny yet so respectful to everybody that nobody was mad.
Dodging the bullet of loneliness this way and that, Press listened to the regulars morning and evening on the radio, including French DJs emanating from Quebec, conversed at normal voice with himself, his absent children and friends, and listened to the aviary of songs and sounds outside: owls, finches, loons, and wrens; a buddy having mailed him a bird tape. To lose one of your senses was a test of character. Could you grow a new limb? He felt undressed sometimes, semi-blind, as if he’d left off his shirt or pants. Though he didn’t understand French, he tuned in a certain female classical music host every day for her comforting, wifely but seductive voice. A smart parishioner at the Clark’s Solid Rock Gospel Church loaned him a sizeable sundial to read on good days instead of deciphering his clock. His ears, nose, and sense of touch felt alert to duties enhanced. Feeling the windchill, he gazed into the sky for a forecast, triangulating by the wind. He could hear rain and smell humidity. The big barn’s shape, the house, and shade trees were visible, along with the overgrown log truck track leading down from his drive into a cedar and tamarack forest bordering the swamp. For exercise he liked to descend and wend back up, careful not to stray onto a game trail or side path, where he’d get lost. The wood thrush calls around his house were a beacon, like the meadow’s pale green, where a friend of Karl’s still grazed heifers, the mountain’s bulk rising gradually across the paved road. White birch trees beckoned there, among the beech and maple. The spring which fed his plumbing was located there and Benny Messer, the bearlike junkyard man, had submerged himself in it to clean out the silt and broken tiles and a boulder that had fallen in. Press traced the backhoe path over the new pipe Benny had laid, though the tumbly, noisy stream paralleling it nearby was more intriguing—with its pools underneath mini-waterfalls, amber sands, and rooster combs of clashing current he admired while laying his cheek against the moss.