“What do you have to be to be carried away by bullfighting and by Ernest Hemingway’s descriptions of it? Immature comes to mind.” John McPhee on his early fascination with Hemingway—and a chance encounter, in Spain, with a papa lookalike.
I thought once of writing about what happens to some books. I had in mind my own. A grizzly ate one—in a trapper’s cabin on a Yukon tributary a couple of hundred miles northeast of Fairbanks—or at least destroyed it, tore it apart, and whole chapters were missing. The book, “,” was in some measure about the grizzly, and the trapper figured prominently in it, too. I sent him another copy, with an inscription noting that I was glad he had not been in the cabin when the bear broke in.
In the book that I later wrote is this passage: “When Captain Washburn looks landward from the bridge of his ship, he will readily say, ‘I would rather be here for the worst that could be here than over there for the best that could be there. . . . I once thought I was going to college and be a history teacher, but I have never been able to concentrate on anything else but this . . . By the end of 1945, I had passed the point of no return. I was in the soup now good.
And forty-two years later, in predawn darkness on the bridge of the Stella Lykes, he was frustrated anew as he approached Valparaíso and tried and tried again to radio the port. “So much for moving ships at this hour in the morning,” the captain said. “The port isn’t even awake yet. When Ethan Allen was expiring, people said to him, ‘Ethan, the angels expect you,’ and Ethan said, ‘God damn them. Let them wait.’ Then he expired.
When they neared Gibraltar, there was no way he was going to let them off. To dock in Gibraltar would have cost him five thousand dollars. He had been talking to them non-stop since he picked them up, and he went on talking to them as the Ro/Ro went through the Mediterranean.
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