Bill Murray's Blog, page 73
December 16, 2017
Quotes: On Joni Mitchell
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Each record was unlike the last, each with fresh aesthetic propositions to test, each ready to die trying. Listen to the right one at the right time in your life, and you feel like a doctor just handed you an ultrasound of your soul.
Carl Wilson reviewing Reckless Daughter, the book.
Speaking for myself, I can testify. Maybe that was then.
Turkey, History, Clarity
In front of the fire and across the valley from a wall of snow (previous post), it’s a natural time to do some reading. At the same time, it is harder than ever to keep up with everything that needs to be read. I’ve just put up a list of recommended reading including The Dawn Watch, but just now I’m still stuck on last week’s recommendation of Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country, a memoir of her time in Istanbul.
Ataturk’s trick, she proposes (I think without sarcasm), is to have been “the man who had saved (the Turks) from Western rapaciousness, Islamic torpor, even death itself. And so, she implies, the Kemalists had the legitimacy to rule the country for the next decades.
This single sentence has the clarity, all in one go, to explain Ataturk’s appeal to a wide swath of the ruined Ottoman empire from the Bosphorus across Anatolia.
Pure, concise, commendable writing. Cheers, Ms. Hansen.
December 15, 2017
Weekend Reading
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First, I invite you to drop back by tomorrow. We’ll have a lengthy photo feature, a look at how shopping around the world is done pretty much every conceivable way except the way Americans do it at Christmastime.
For now, our little corner of Appalachia saw a freak amount of snow last week. The weekly paper boasted of eleven inches. That’s 28 centimeters. The farm sits opposite the north face of a ridge that crests at 4783 feet (1458 meters). That entire ridge is still packed end to end with snow, so this weekend calls for inside by-the-fire activity. Toward that end, here is a chunky list of absorbing articles to read by the hearth.
The Secret History of the Russian Consulate in San Fransisco by Zach S Dorfman in Foreign Policy
One of Us by John Jeremiah Sullivan at Lapham’s Quarterly
Beyond the animal brain: plants have cognitive capacities too by Laura Ruggles at Aeon
Gained in Translation by Tim Parks at the New York Review of Books blog
Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21 in the Paris Review
State of Sleaze by Suzy Hansen at The Baffler
Review: Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos by Nicholas Gane at theoryculturesociety.org
The global dominance of white people is thanks to the potato by Gwynn Guilford at Quartzy
And a travel-related book suggestion: I say suggestion instead of recommendation, because this is newly arrived and I’ll only begin it this weekend, but The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World is well reviewed, and the Polish-born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was a larger than life literary figure. Besides, I’m going through an all-things-Congo phase just now. Perhaps we can enjoy it together.
Cheers for now.
Thank You
Thanks for the big response to my recent post Getting to Greenland: Book Excerpt. You can read several more excerpts from Out in the Cold by clicking here. Or, get yourself a hard copy.
December 14, 2017
Kill Two Birds with One Stone in European Languages
An interesting map, used with permission, from an interesting web site, jakubmarian.com. It’s full of this kind of stuff.
Another interesting site for cartophiles is A Map A Day, on Instagram.
December 8, 2017
Weekend Reading
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An unexpected snowfall outside my window this morning, always a treat here in Georgia, USA. It provides a cozy backdrop to this week’s list of items worthy of your time over the weekend. Today, instead of articles, here are a few thought-provoking videos (If you prefer the written word, here are suggestions from weeks past):
• Mother Canada – One man’s quest to have Canada’s largest war memorial erected in Green Cove, Cape Breton, is met with fervent responses from a community that’s divided on the issue.
• The Big Picture: From the Big Bang to the Meaning of Life – with Sean Carroll – Sean Carroll ties together the fundamental laws of physics governing the workings of the cosmos with the everyday human experience we all share.
• On Snow Leopard Mountain – Planet Earth II – Behind The Scenes – In a remote village in the Himalaya Tsewang Norboo has grown up with snow leopards. An ambient portrait of a life high in the mountains, full of silence, dark interiors and mysterious glimpses of mystical cats.
• Paul Mason | PostCapitalism, February 2017, Stockholm
• We’re Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads – Zeynep Tufecki – We’re building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci.
• “Age of Delirium” Film by David Satter, in ENGLISH / Фильм Дэвида Саттера “Век безумия” – “Age of Delirium,” a documentary by David Satter, tells the story of the fall of the Soviet Union as lived and experienced by the Soviet people.
• Tom Waits | Tales from a Cracked Jukebox | James Maycock | Documentary | 2017
Everybody is out with their ‘best books of the year’ lists, adding months of reading material to my bookshelves. I’ll chime in with my own list next week, but for now, here’s one to get us started: Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen. I’ve just gotten started but so far, it’s brilliant.
Stay tuned for more reading matter next week. Cheers for now, and a good weekend to all.
December 7, 2017
Book Excerpt: Train Thing
My two best Irish friends have gone all in on their first trip to Russia. Not just Dublin to Moscow for a long weekend, not these two. They’re right this minute bound for Irkutsk on a Moscow to Beijing Trans-Siberian train ride. They sent this picture, a frozen river, somewhere in Siberia:
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It’s a good opportunity to share a chapter from my first book Common Sense and Whiskey, about our own trip across Russia. Please enjoy it.
THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY
If you don’t speak Russian and if you decode Cyrillic gingerly, one letter at a time, it’s not completely effortless to come up with bottled water in Ekaterinburg, but it is possible, and I bought six litres.
The kiosk, alongside a tram stop, was just big enough to be a walk-in affair, not big enough for four, let alone our steamy tensome. The boys in front argued over what beer and candy to order one each of. I motioned for six bottles way up high on a shelf and all kinds of consternation rippled through the mottled impatience behind me.
In a few hours Mirja and I would be climbing aboard the Trans-Siberian railroad to Ulan Bataar, Mongolia. We’d be a week en route, so we needed all kinds of stuff.
As soon as I had all those bottles, though, I calculated we could get everything else at the train station. Six litres of water is heavy.
Today was Labor Day in the U.S. On the edge of Siberia, autumn held full sway. E-kat’s denizens plodded by cold and damp in an insistent, heavy shower. A lot of the older folks wore long coats. All day the rain beset.
•••••
Every account of coming upon the Ural mountains speaks of disappointment, and for good reason. The dividing line between Europe and Asia is just hills, really, and Ekaterinburg nestles just beyond their eastern slopes.
The Atrium Palace Hotel Ekaterinburg looked so nice on the internet that we mused back home that it had to be either German or mafia owned. Well, it wasn’t German. It was E-kat’s only “5-star,” with glass elevators and snuggly, fluffy Scandinavian bedding and BBC World on TV.
Still, it had its Russian characteristics: There was the hourly rate, Rule #2: If you stay for less than six hours, you are charged for twelve hour accommodation. And Rule #7: “The guests who troubled a lot before can not be allowed to stay at the hotel.” Hard to know if the guys in track suits grouped around the lobby drinking coffee were part of the problem or there to enforce the solution.
•••••
Mid-rises glowered down on ancient Siberian carved–wood houses. There wasn’t much spring in E-kat’s civic step. Down Ulitsa Malysheva, a second-tier comrade (maybe it was Malysheva himself) stood statuary guard near a canal. The flowers at his feet had long since conceded to summer weeds.
Old and dusty women tended the old and dusty local history museum. They turned the lights on and off as you moved through the rooms. The Communism section was closed.
During the revolution, in July 1918, The entire family of deposed Czar Nicholas was shot while holed up at the home of a merchant named Ipatiev here in Ekaterinburg – then called Sverdlovsk – and some days later the besieged Bolsheviks burned and buried the bodies outside town.
In 1977, local Sverdlovsk party boss Boris Yeltsin ordered the Ipatiev House destroyed. Fourteen years later Yeltsin, then in the Kremlin, financed exhumation of the bodies from the burial pit, and exactly eighty years after their murder, on July 17, 1998 the bones of Russia’s last Czar were laid beside the bones of previous Czars in the crypt of the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. In the museum, black and white pictures of Nicholas and Alexandra were pinned up alongside diagrams of skeletons.
In a dainty candle-lit Orthodox church-let, hardly big enough for the two women inside, Mirja and I bought a tiny cross and a few icons. With a glass, the women inspected the back of each, like kids examine trading cards, and they proclaimed one Nikolai and explained of another, “Blogodot Denyaba.”
E-kat’s youth did a kind of country swagger beneath a huge billboard for “Ural Westcom” Cellular – written in Latin, not Cyrillic. Every kid in town walked up and down the sidewalk drinking big brown half litre bottles of beer. Maybe it was because they could.
Muddy Ekaterinburg, east of the Urals
If your baseline was vodka, pivo (beer) was positively a soft drink in comparison. None of these young people – old enough to aspire to fashion and to drink and flirt and smoke – none of them remembered the days of vodka and The State. They were all eight or twelve at the Soviet Union’s demise.
The train station was white, granite and huge, a city block long and probably more, but it was hard to see why – they only used a tiny slice of it. There was just time to lug our stuff into the steamy waiting hall, and before you knew it, up rolled train number two, the Rossiya.
Here was a moment of some import. They told us our first class compartment was “very expensive,” but we didn’t care about that (it wasn’t that expensive), we just wanted to find it very empty. And so it was.
The woman under whose iron will Trans-Siberian lore demanded we cower – the provodnitsa – while no nonsense, appeared kindly enough as she studied our tickets, nodded, and handed over the key to cabin nine, between cabin eight, with a baby, and the toilet.
Inside – impeccably clean. Mirrors on each wall made a not very big space bigger. All six lights worked – the overhead fluorescent, lights on the walls, and tiny reading lights over each bunk.
The window was structurally shut and it was warmer than it needed to be. Satiny print curtains covered the window but Mirja moved them above the door. That way we could have it open and see out, but people in the corridor couldn’t see in. Brilliant.
A small writing/eating table. Bunks with bedding, the rough blankets in a Scottish tartan pattern.
A samovar sat at the provodnitsa’s end of each car (ours with bits of drying, fresh-picked wild mushrooms arrayed across the top) to provide water for chai or coffee. I’d remembered every possible gadget, but I’d forgotten plates and towels. I stole a towel and paid good money for plates from the hotel, but there was a plate with sweets and sugar and packets of chai, and a towel for each of us.
All the hubbub and noise of the station mixed with a sustained period of fiddling and adjusting as we fell over and bumped into one another, settling into home for the next several days.
Ours was the last unoccupied cabin in the carriage, so it made sense it was down at the end by the toilet, and Mirja rather liked the idea because it was convenient. And the toilet flushed with water, there was ready cold water in the wash basin, and there was even a roll of toilet paper, at least to start. They scrubbed it down sometimes. It didn’t even smell.
The baby next door kept waddling down to peer into our compartment. His parents, bless them, kept the kid quiet.
Everything eventually settled out and darkness came up to close around the Rossiya as we moved east of E-kat, in the rain.
•••••
Movement and noise, action and business at every stop. Traders crowded under the lights with food, furs and shawls. The Europeans and Americans popped onto the platform to stretch and take videos of the locals, and the wheels were checked and the kiosks thrived (and they were well-provisioned) and then the Rossiya groaned back to life and pulled away, and everything aboard settled back into the torpor induced by the rhythm of the rails.
I slept from 1:00 a.m. and as I drifted in and out I saw Mirja sitting by the window gazing out at the countryside far into Siberia. The clouds pulled back, because later you could see that somewhere there was a moon. By 5:00 I was ready for coffee and sunrise but Mirja wanted darkness for a little while more, and I fell right back and slept until 10:00.
You could wash your hair in the wash basin if you had a sink stopper, and even feel positively fresh in the morning, as pale blue sky, high, benign clouds and beautiful white birch trunks rolled by. Shrubs and some of the smaller trees were giving over to yellow leaves.
During the night we’d stopped at Tyumen and Omsk, and by now we’d entered a region a hundred kilometers from Kazakhstan called the Baraba steppe.
The guide book: “It appears as if there is a continuous forest in the distance.” Right about that, so it does….
“However if you walk towards it you will never get there as what you are seeing are clumps of birches and aspen trees that are spaced several kilometers apart. The lack of landmarks in this area has claimed hundreds of lives.” The Baraba steppe extends 600 kilometers.
Barabinsk train station
By afternoon we’d reached Barabinsk (population 36,000), 1222 kilometers east of Ekaterinburg, founded a hundred plus years ago around the construction of the railroad, which curiously missed the older town of Kuibyshev, in view in the distance to the north.
Must’ve been 68 or 70 degrees, perfect air, as we all clambered out to stretch. They sold tons of some particular flayed and dried fish. The good people of Barabinsk still looked thoroughly European, not a bit Asian.
Alongside the rails, cabbages stood ready for picking and there were acres of sunflowers, but everything – plants, people, stray dogs – clung tight to civilization as represented by the rail line. Beyond lay nothing. We never saw a tarmac road between Ekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, over 25oo kilometers.
East of Barabinsk a particular aquamarine colored paint took hold of all the buildings. Siberian Green. The sky settled into a deep blue with puffy clouds, the kind of pollution-free weather you don’t get anymore back home.
The dining car menu spoke four languages, using “mith” for “with,” as a sensible cross between the English “with” and the German “mit.” On the theory that they can’t hurt you with soup, we enjoyed chicken noodle. The whole dining car smelled like last night’s party. Old beer and cigarettes.
The idea of keeping up with the hours fell away. The timetable showed local time and Moscow time, and we were either fifty minutes early or four hours ten minutes late, take your pick, at the next stop.
The sun slanted in as the Rossiya chugged into and out of the biggest city in Siberia, Novosibirsk, at 1.6 million, here solely because of the construction of the Ob River railroad bridge. In Novosibirsk boulevards were made of real tarmac. There was said to be an enormous opera house, and somewhere nearby was the purpose-built city of Akademgorodok – a city of scientists.
Housing blocks stretched out, too many to count. Since this was a mere settlement in Czarist times, and didn’t really get going until Stalinism was the style, Novosibirsk was just flat plug ugly.
Out on the platform, Roma beggars displayed whining snotty children as evidence they were miserable.
•••••
Sunflowers hung their heads with nowhere to point. Pumpkins lay on the vine alongside the cabbage fields. All the hay was cut and piled in heaps tall as houses. Smoke rose above a few chimneys, but the temperature was bracing, and in light of the months to come you’d think they wouldn’t bother with fires.
It was morning, early, barely six, but already the villages stirred, those that rose up the rainy hillsides east of Krasnoyarsk. Children played on the gravel track.
A man all in gray, smoking, walked a sodden path, coat flapping at his flanks – a scene that could have taken place in the last century – or the one before that. From compartment nine Mirja and I took it all in – the mists in the trees, the elderly people clustered at the storefront door, the birches steadily losing their autumn fight, the smoke rising from this odd shack or that.
A battleship gray sky defined the whole world.
The Rossiya crossed the mighty River Yenisei, that rises in Mongolia, bisects Siberia, and means “wide river” in the local Evenki language. The Yenisei waterway energizes Krasnoyarsk industry, and the bridge across it brought a dramatic start to our day, as the clack-clacking sound of crossing the bridge jolted us awake. The train was still quiet as Mirja and I took drinks from the Samovar.
She drank the chai provided in a heavy glass mug she got from the provodnitsa (whose name was Lydia Ivanova), and I, rather less in harmony with my surroundings, enjoyed Eight O’Clock brand instant coffee in my Evernew brand silver titanium 400 mug.
In Greenland, each settlement presents its worst side to arriving visitors. Since the only contact there is by sea, your arrival by boat is met by benzene storage tanks and refuse waiting to be hauled away. There was a little of that first-things-first frontier utilitarianism in these villages, too.
Giant metal gantries extended the power grid right straight over and through residential areas, and a hundred TV antennas sprouted, and then over time listed randomly over the rooftops.
After Novosibirsk, especially east of the River Yenisei, the Rossiya would crest a hill and we’d stare down at birch and aspen forest as far as the eye could see, broken sometimes by patches logged for firewood.
In valleys the sky was slate. Only from hilltops might you peek at distant pale blue, which might foreshadow improving weather in the afternoon – or might not.
•••••
By now it was easy to spend hours between stops in a dreamy half-consciousness – just be still and the movement of the train would do the work of the hypnotist’s pocket watch. Over the course of the week I dipped in and out of epic dreams starring everyone I’d ever known and featuring vague, unfulfilled intimations of desperate evil.
The hypnosis of the rails made travel across the taiga deeply restful. Hours slipped happily by. I imagined that in winter, with the darkness, that would be all the more true.
Kilometer 4375, Ilanskaya. Twenty minute stop. It felt good to get out of the train and stand in the rain. As you began to miss refrigerated drink, the cure was ice cream from the kiosks. Here, kerchiefed babushkas sold cucumbers from a bowl and the provodnitsa bought carrots. The baby next door was the star of the train and everybody played with him at the stops.
Buying dried fish on the platform
By a town called Taishet, the music from tinny speakers on the platforms had ceased to be repetitive, cloying Russian pop. It had an Asian, maybe Indian rhythm. The Rossiya didn’t stop for long, just three or five minutes.
Taishet was once a gulag transit camp. The factory in Taishet where prisoners once died creosoting railroad ties still operates.
•••••
We planned to leave the train for a few days at Irkutsk, so one morning before her daily vacuuming tour, I visited Lydia Ivanova’s provodnitsa den down by the samovar and the drying mushrooms to make sure of our arrival time in Irkutsk. It sure was 2:25 in the morning. I had written “Irkutsk” in Cyrillic on a card and I said “pazhalsta,” or please. She smiled and turned away from her gossip magazine. I pointed at the word, my watch, and turned up my palms and shrugged.
She asked, speaking fast Russian and gesturing, “Moscow time or local time?” and since I knew how to say the word Moskva, I chose Moscow time and she clucked “nyet nyet nyet” and wrote it for me in local time (2:25 a.m.) and then in Moscow time (9:25 p.m.).
•••••
5:00 p.m., Nizhny Udinsk, kilometer 4680: A big stop. Fifteen minutes. The taiga had been running dense and hilly, and Mirja had been reclaiming sleep in bulk.
I shook some instant coffee into my mug and stopped at the samovar by the door. First we were trapped on a narrow siding, then a local train pulled away that opened up a long promenade of kiosks across the tracks.
A whitewashed building painted “toilet” was bigger than most houses, with six multi-paned windows along the side. The usual scruffy commerce went on beside the train, and three girls with high, Asian cheekbones and reddish hair panhandled. Only two, really, and very quietly. The other was too meek.
They were insistent, but not even faintly in the way of the souk, and they slipped away of their own volition just before Lydia Ivanova, Provodnitsa-in-Chief, strode up to shoo them away.
Basic provisions, gossip magazines, a newspaper. Things to pass the time were for sale in the kiosks. And cassettes: bootlegs with typed covers like Captain Jack ’97, Dance Rocket Part 2 and Hit Hammer, and several with women in lurid poses.
Gray and chillier now, and for the first time, in patches, the birches were completely yellow.
At dusk, lights glowed from inside the old wooden Siberian houses and smoke rose straight into the air from the chimneys. We sat before the window and considered compartment nine in carriage seven of train number two our own personal traveling theatre.
House along the rail line
The mist-green of the taiga and the soldier-blue sky merged in the fading light, and the light in the compartment reflected on the glass an image of the accumulated odds and ends of travel: Ms. Ivanova’s heavy, stout glass, chai bags and books and sugar cubes. Reading glasses and a roll of tissue, hot sauce and a plate and aqua minerale. Plastic cutlery and half a pack of raspberry sweet crackers.
Now we were stopped in front of an unlit stretch of track and people bustled about. Someone came and someone went, but it was all in the dark and we couldn’t tell. Was it Zima?
No, it was too short a stop. Zima would be more important than that, and then it would be four hours 53 minutes to Irkutsk.
But Zima never came. No cluster of lights ever suggested suburbs, and the Rossiya hurtled on through the dark. So I did the sensible thing. I went to buy some beers.
In the restaurant car, Sasha exuberantly proclaimed our friendship. He sat with the lady in charge. Muscles bulged from his t-shirt, which was inexplicably drenched with sweat. He ordered three bottles of wine for himself. The attendant had to do the invoice on a calculator and in longhand and deliver the bottles before it was my turn, giving Sasha time to uncork and decant a couple of glasses.
“Sasha, Weelyum,” he shouted and stuck his finger in our chests. I had a gulp, we professed friendship, and I turned to find every eye in the restaurant car, amused, on me.
I pointed and explained, “Sasha.” They smiled and agreed.
Finally it was time to get back to our berth and break out the bags and fuss about, because we’d be getting off the train in four hours, or three, or five.
I am sure only God will ever know why, of all the world’s music, Funky Nassau (“Mini-skirts, maxi-skirts, Afro hair DOOs….”) ran in a continuous loop through my brain from Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk.
And then Zima came to us as a slight strip of concrete between two trains populated by smoking Siberians, and nothing more.
The night provodnitsa said it was ten till seven Moscow time. According to Lydia Ivanova, day provodnitsa (who must have been kicking up her heels at this hour in the provodnitsa lounge), arrival in Irkutsk was expected at 9:25 Moscow, 2:25 Irkutsk.
•••••
At 2:00 I tried the bar car for a last minute take-away pivo. At 2:00 a.m. it was a rockin’, smoky, all-Russian party car.
The short-order cook by day ruled tonight, and he rose from beside Ludmyla, his puffy-haired paramour, and wondered what kind of pivo I wanted, starting to tick off Baltica, …. And I said Melnick (which means Miller) and he went to get some.
Ludmyla was convinced I was a secret Russian.
“Russki?”
“Nyet, Amerikanski.”
“Russki!” with a wag of a finger and a suggestion that we would all have champanski. But by now we were minutes from arrival in Irkutsk.
I paid the smiling short-order cook and smelled like a smoking factory as I bumped back down the corridor, and I got in the way of a woman entering the toilet. She stepped back – in her nightie – with her husband.
Flustered, I summoned the Russian “Spaseba,” and she replied, “Not at all” in flawless English.
•••••
This is chapter five of my book Common Sense and Whiskey. The other chapters describe travel to Lake Baikal, Greenland, Papua New Guinea, Bhutan, Burma, Chilean Patagonia, Guangxi Province, China, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Tibet, Paraguay, Borneo, Malawi and the Southern Caucasus. It sure does make a fine Christmas gift.
Get yourself a copy
at Amazon in the US
at Amazon.co.uk
or get the audio version from Audible.
And see more photos from the Trans-Siberian and elsewhere in Russia at EarthPhotos.com.
Book Excerpt: Forgotten History
Finland, a land to which I am related by marriage, celebrated the 100th anniversary of its independence yesterday, and that distracted me from noting another centenary on the same day, that of the largest man-made explosion in history prior to nuclear weapons. This article in Macleans quotes a local arborist who cut down a tree near the site of the explosion as finding that “the entire core of (the) trunk was a column of metal shards.”
Along those lines, from my book Out in the Cold,
“You can’t grow up in Halifax without knowing everything about the explosion. It simply can’t be done, A downtown furniture maker tells us. Not long ago he petitioned for and was granted rights to cut down a maple tree under the McKay bridge built across the narrows, just about where the blast occurred.
A 22-inch maple, with the growth rate at one inch equals five years, it would have been ten years old in 1917, the year of the disaster and, sure enough, it has a seared ring near its center. He will market it to the cognizant community.”
Here is another excerpt from Out in the Cold, about Halifax and the explosion:
FORGOTTEN HISTORY
Beautiful maidens and wildflowers fragrant o’er the moor grace few pages of Nova Scotia’s history. A town brought up on hard work, Halifax has a history of hard luck. Some of it is other peoples’ hard luck, it is true, but that only helps so much.
In September 1998 Swissair Flight 111 fell into Margaret’s Bay just outside town, about five miles out in the ocean. Private fishing boats, the Coast Guard and then the Halifax military bases responded, but the plane had broken up on impact and all 229 passengers were lost. There are two memorials out along the bay.
After the crash, Ian Shaw, a Swiss national who last saw his daughter Stephanie when he drove her to the Geneva airport, moved from Switzerland to the tourist village of Peggy’s Cove and built a restaurant called Shaw’s Landing to be near his deceased daughter. Shaw’s Landing only recently closed, Shaw presumably having finally worked through his loss.
Peggy’s Cove
As in the Swissair tragedy, when the Titanic sank in April 1912, ships were dispatched from Halifax to recover bodies, since Halifax, then as now, was the nearest big port with continental rail connections.
The Mackay-Bennet, a Halifax-based steamer normally used for laying communications cable, led the recovery effort. Two days after the sinking she set out with a cargo of coffins and canvas bags, an undertaker and a preacher.
Over the next four weeks two ships from Halifax followed, the Minia and the CGS Montmagny. Together they and the SS Algerine, sailing from St. John’s, Newfoundland, recovered over three hundred bodies. Some were buried at sea, but 209 bodies returned to the Halifax shore.
Just 59 were sent away to their families. The rest, including the Titanic’s unidentifiable and unclaimed victims, were buried in Halifax, and local businesses donated bouquets of lilies. The Maritime Museum on Halifax’s waterfront has an extensive Titanic exhibit – complete with deck chair.
Deck Chair from the Titanic
Haligonians couldn’t have imagined it, but after the Titanic an even more horrific tragedy lay five years down the road, and this was all Halifax’s own. In 1917 Halifax harbor fell victim to the greatest conflagration of the Great War. I don’t know if it’s just me, but polling people I know, it sounds like nobody else knew about the largest man made explosion before Hiroshima either.
Halifax is a mid-rise city, but if it aspires to more, it might not take kindly to my saying so. Pardon. An attractive, purposeful, working town with a population just under a million, it hosts 200,000 cruise ship passengers a year and some 40 percent of Canada’s defense assets. Nova Scotia is the world’s largest exporter of Christmas trees and lobster, although Mirja makes a run at eating all the lobster in Halifax before it can be sold abroad.
It doesn’t look like a place afflicted. Perched on two rocky shores, Halifax and it’s sister city Dartmouth across the water enjoy refuge from Atlantic storms, set back from the ocean. Still further back, the Bedford Basin affords a strategic ice-free port, invaluable in wartime.
Because it has one of the world’s deepest and most protected harbors, Halifax prospered in wartime, providing men and materiel from the War of 1812 through to the onset of World War 1.
Canada entered the Great War in 1914 as a colony when Britain declared war on Germany. Canadians were just about unanimous in support. Halifax boomed, and harbor traffic rose to seventeen million tons a year from just two.
By 1917 businesses were bursting. Industry struggled to keep up with demand. A quarter of the men in Halifax were serving overseas. Foreshadowing the U.S. experience in World War Two, women took jobs formerly thought of as men’s work. Women’s suffrage came to Canada in 1918, two years ahead of the United States.
The first regular, systematic convoy of war materiel from Canada left Sydney, Nova Scotia’s easternmost harbor, on 24 June, 1917. By October as many as 36 supply ships were assembled for each convoy.
The Maritime Museum maps out a typical convoy: Two corvettes out front and one on each flank, trailed by five ships abreast, typically freighters with deck cargo of tanks, trucks and tankers, other freighters with aircraft, maybe a heavy lift ship with locomotives, sailing alongside rescue ships and an oiler with fuel for the corvettes. A destroyer carrying the escort force commander brought up the rear.
Convoy traffic moved from Sydney to Halifax during winter, owing to Halifax’s back bay. The basin, with a surface area of six and a half square miles, jammed up with ships in winter.
•••••
By autumn 1917, a jittery uncertainty hung over the twin cities Halifax and Dartmouth; it had for months. The Canadians dragged submarine nets across the harbor each night against U-boats.
Thursday, 6 December: The SS Imo, an empty Norwegian relief ship in transit from Rotterdam bound for New York to load civilian relief supplies, was keen to sail at first light.
Coal for its boilers arrived too late the day before, trapping the ship in the Bedford Basin behind the submarine nets overnight. The Imo had to bide its time one more night. The Norwegian captain, Hakaan From, stormed about the ship, livid.
The submarine nets prevented the French ship Mont Blanc, arriving from New York, from sailing into the harbor to join up with an assembling convoy. Laden with war supplies, it stood at anchor outside the nets overnight.
There was a time just four years before, when a munitions ship like the Mont Blanc wouldn’t have been allowed into the back bay. But with the outbreak of the war, control of the harbor transferred to the British Admiralty and they, considerably more detatched, allowed munitions ships in.
The Mont Blanc carried a fearsome load – 5.8 million pounds of picric acid, 200 tons of TNT, ten tons of guncotton and 35 tons of benzol, a high-octane gasoline, stacked in drums across her decks.
Picric acid was a relic of the time, an explosive chemical compound used in artillery shells by the Allies. It was less stable than TNT, which largely replaced it for war applications between the World Wars.
So worried had been the New York port authority when loading the incendiary Mont Blanc that before putting the cargo aboard they lined its holds with wood secured by non-sparking copper nails, and stevedores wore cloth over their boots.
Now both ships, the Imo leaving the Bedford Basin and the Mont Blanc coming in, were intent on making time, and Halifax became ground zero in its own unique horror.
Riding high in the water, the empty and impatient Imo was ready to move. Captain From, having sailed twice through Halifax before, felt familiar enough with the harbor to drive the Imo to its limits.
The Narrows is the smallest space between Bedford Basin and the twin cities of Halifax and Dartmouth. Scarcely two thousand feet wide, it is precisely where the Imo and Mont Blanc collided.
Benzol spilled from the drums onto the deck of the Mont Blanc. Fires broke out. The smoke was so thick the crew couldn’t tell if it was the benzol or the picric acid that was burning, but every sailor realized it didn’t matter. All too aware of what was to come, they bailed frantically for shore, for safety. Townspeople, unaware of the Mont Blanc’s deadly cargo, gathered at the waterfront to watch the flames engulf the ships.
Halifax’s fire crews raced to the waterfront in their horse-drawn wagons and the fire chief arrived aboard the town’s only combustion-engine fire truck. He and most of the town’s fire brigade were incinerated.
When the big blast came it laid bare two square kilometers. The Mont Blanc became the most potent bomb exploded until Hiroshima. The windows in most of Halifax’s houses were blown into their inhabitants’ faces.
The Mont Blanc heaved into the air and rained fire back down on the town. Its big gun landed two kilometers away. Rocks sucked up from the sea floor fell onto the town as deadly shrapnel.
So terrific was the blast that it created a tsunami. Water drained from the Narrows, then flooded back in across the opposite, Dartmouth, shore, where a Mi’kmaq Indian settlement washed entirely away, just disappeared.
The town burned. Home heating in those days came predominately from coal and wood stoves, most of which were stoked and burning on a December day. The heaters overturned, setting further fires.
At nightfall a blizzard closed over the bay, the worst in years, with temperatures plunging to 10 or 15 degrees fahrenheit. People with no shelter who survived the blast died in place, trapped, frozen in the blizzard.
Halifax reeled. Worry spread that the naval artillery stores at the Wellington barracks would explode (they didn’t). Dazed and traumatized victims, many with their clothes and even skin burned right off, stumbled through the storm like zombies.
Rumors. Halifax was being bombed by the Luftstreitkräfte, the World War 1 German air force. How did they get their Fokkers all the way over here!? No, it was a naval bombardment. Some thought Halifax’s unique hell came from German zeppelins.
Some people were lucky, if only by comparison. People told of being lifted up and deposited up to a mile from where they lived. In the end, as many as 9,000 people lost their homes, some 6,000 were injured, many horrendously, and 2,000 were dead.
•••••
Get yourself a copy of Out in the Cold, or give it as a Christmas gift. As Amazon has it,
An inspired tale of high adventure, Out in the Cold is Bill Murray’s vivid portrait of adventure across the vast Northern Atlantic from the Arctic north of Norway to Nova Scotia. Murray begins in pursuit of a total solar eclipse in Svalbard, 800 miles from the North Pole. He tests the culinary appeal of wind-dried sheep in the tiny Faroe Islands, befriends Inuit bone carvers in Greenland and camps with an itinerant Italian musician who dreams of building Greenland’s first luxury resort. He stands naked and freezing on an Icelandic glacier and later (with his clothes on), on the wind-battered Canadian bog where the first European stood 500 years before Columbus.
With a light touch, wry analysis and remarkable depth of reportage, Bill Murray weaves high adventure with practical science and absorbing history, taking the pulse of an under-explored, fragile region on the precipice of change. By turns evocative, astonishing and always a jolly good ride, Out in the Cold is a sprawling and rewarding tour of the Atlantic northlands today.
Get Out in the Cold at Amazon.com or at Amazon.co.uk. Or get the audio version from Audible.
December 5, 2017
100th Anniversary of Finnish Independence
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One hundred years ago today Finland achieved freedom and independence from Russia. Hyvää Syntymäpäivää, Suomi!
