Who Will Know the Bluenose in the Sun?

  

 

 

Last weekend Emily and I saw the “Tall Ships” as they sailed into Boston Harbor. In 1976, I witnessed the first Tall Ships celebration in Baltimore, but I can’t recall much. You’d think I’d remember something like that, but Popeye the Sailor Man, I’m not.  (Toot toot!)

When friends envied me for seeing the ships in Boston, I smiled. In all truth, they’re not all that interesting if you’re a landlubber. By the time they come into close view their sails are struck because, well, they use wind power and you can’t approach a harbor that way. We could have seen them in full sail had we been on one of the Harbor islands, but that would’ve entailed arising at a time officially known as “Stupid Early” to make the 2-hour drive to a parking garage, grab the subway to Haymarket, and sprint to the ferry landing.

Plus, having seen “schooner” races, we know that sailing ships move slowly. Even “clipper” ships don’t go faster than 22 knots, which is 25 mph for fellow landlubbers. In Massachusetts, we drive faster than that in school zones. (I don’t mean nearby the school; I mean in the hallways.) I put “schooner” and “clipper” in quotes because they’re all just “boats” to me. I don’t sail, don’t like being on boats, and when forced aboard I think of all the sea shanties that commemorate wrecks. I had nightmares for a week after reading Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. The thought of being hundreds of miles out to sea is that of pre-Columbian flat-earth mariners who marked the edge of the world with: “There be monsters.”

I’m not knocking those who enjoy sailing. I do wonder, though, why so many devotees have repeated the joke about the two best days of a sailor’s life: the day they buy a boat and the day they sell it. Whadda I know? I thought that a capstan was where you hung your beanie-copter and a barque something dogs do. But my eyes tell me it takes a lot of skill to sail a small craft, let alone one of those huge boats in the distance that made me grab Emily’s hand and cry, “We’ve only got half an hour to get out of here before the pirates land and commence pillaging.”

One ship, though, made me grin so hard my ears were hidden: Bluenose II. It’s a rebuild of the first Bluenose, which is legendary in Canadian history. It was a fishing schooner launched in 1917 from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. It also raced and captured the first Fisherman’s Trophy by beating an American ship. Its crew held on to that trophy for the next 17 years, until engine-powered ships made sails obsolete. The Bluenose then plied the Grand Banks, a fish-rich region whose precise boundary between Canada and the U.S. remains under dispute.  

As you can imagine, anytime Canada bests the U.S. in anything, it’s a moment of pride. The Bluenose is commemorated on the Canadian dime, paintings, posters, stamps, legends, and a song written by Stan Rogers. He’s one of my all-time favorites. Bluenose I met a sorry fate. It was sold in 1942, was wrecked on a reef off Haiti in 1944, broke apart, and sank. No one died, but no one knows its exact location either, though many have tried to find it. Bluenose II was built in 1963, but had to be completely rebuilt between 2010-13. The steam-ferry and a catamaran between Bar Harbor, Maine, and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, has sometimes borne the name M.V.* Bluenose, but few would confuse those boring boats with the real thing. (Even worse, the catamaran is infamous for its malfunctions.)

We were near the Charlestown section of Boston Harbor where Bluenose II put up its canvas to turn around. As it sailed by, people cheered and shouts of “We love Canada!” rung out. The crew was elated and began dancing and waving. It was a beautiful moment.  

Emily and I still dislike boats, though we’ve been on many.  We hope to get back to Prince Edward Island, but we will drive through New Brunswick–motto: “The Most Boring Province in All of Canada”– and drive across the Confederation Bridge. Apologies to all who love to sail, but being atop water makes me hum Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

 

Rob Weir

* MV simply means motor vessel.

 

Untamed Coast: Mystery and Thriller in Alaska

 

 

 

UNTAMED COAST (2026)

By Kevin C. Morris

Ballantine Books, 304 pages.

★★★★★

Available after 9/1/26

 

I have not yet been to Alaska, though I had an Alaskan friend when I was in grad school. She told me that it’s a hard place to live, but that once it gets in your blood, it doesn’t let go. I reckon that’s why it holds a reputation as a refuge for those who keep to themselves, value independence, and prefer to live in the rough. Still another friend spends part of her summer volunteering at Katmai National Park and tells me that words and pictures cannot do Alaska justice.

 

Author Kevin C. Morris takes us there in Untamed Coast, a debut novel that reads like it came from an experienced hand. It is at once, a mystery, a thriller tour through Southeast Alaska, women’s fiction (if there is such a thing!), a tale of missed signals and healing, and a wrong that took 80 years to resolve. Morris jumps us between three different time periods: 1938, the 1980s, and 2017. In the last of these, Marco(ni) Franco is along fishing from his boat Radio Flyer. Pay attention to names in this novel, as about the only thing Morris throws away are fish entrails before their cleaned bodies are tossed into the onboard freezer. Marco is one of those people who moved to Alaska to work out anguish of his wife’s death six months earlier. He’d be a recluse were it not necessary to interact with those at bars, equipment stores, and boatyards.

 

Morris doesn’t mechanically divide his novel into three separate periods; he trusts readers to connect the dots. The 1930s were part of the Great Depression. A man named Joe Baxter lives alone in Radioville, a communications island. His day job lies on a nearby island where miners pan for gold that will never be theirs. At the end of each day, Joe collects and tallies the gold the miners found. Security is tight and the boss’ network lets him know if anyone shows up trying to assay gold. Joe holds his job because he is scrupulously honest–until he’s not! Joe, Sam, and the oily Virgil hatch a scheme, though Joe also “banks” some gold in a unique depository.

 

In the 1980s we meet Anya, who’s not so sure about Alaska. She has known comfort, but she cut that possibility by marrying a loser. He didn’t seem that way at first to anyone except Anya’s parents, but he jumps from scheme to scheme and makes a hash of each. He has run up a large debt and convinces Anya to move to Alaska. Alas, he drinks heavily and violently abuses Anya. Try as she will, Anya can’t avoid being beaten–until she does!

The sections on the 1980s and 2017 allow plenty of space for Morris to expound upon the vastness of Alaska and its dangers. Radioville was abandoned in 1938. Bill Bryson once said of Australia that there were more things there than can kill you than anywhere else in the world. Alaska would probably rank a close second. Those who fish its waters generally pack a survival suit, but some never put them on because for much of the year the suits would not prevent hypothermia. We also read of abrupt killer storms; unpredictable calving glaciers; on-land carnivorous brown bears, and wolves; and winter snowfalls that can crush or asphyxiate the unprepared. Yet, when an old pal from Marco’s earlier life visits, the boat tour to which he is treated seems like an icy magic kingdom. By the time they enter a narrow passage near Radioville and Chichagot Isalnd, where miners once toiled, though, Marco’s friend is pretty sure that they are going to die in the rough seas, wind, and ice. Marco says otherwise, but he knows that there is a distinct possibility of that.

 

Radioville is the novel’s key. Marco once picked up an SOS on an obsolete radio band while fishing nearby, a woman calling for help. Who and where is she? No one else heard it and the Coast Guard has no reports of a distressed boat or missing person. Has the cold and grief made Marco as daft as some say he is?  

 

What a series tales Morris weaves. And weave them he does! Remember that Morris doesn’t throw anything away. A few readers have criticized the novel’s feminist ending, but I think they failed to connect a few dots.

 

Rob Weir

 

#UntamedCoast #NetGalley

 

Colorized photo; Film in B & W

 

 

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Directed by Billy Wilder

Paramount Pictures, 110 minutes, not-rated

★★★★★

 

Sunset Boulevard is a masterpiece. The Hollywood Establishment hated it when it first came out, but not because Billy Wilder directed a bad film; many thought Wilder had disgraced Hollywood. That was certainly the opinion of director/producer Louis B. Mayer. In other words, it rang too close to true. (When Mayer made an insensitive remark, Wilder told Mayer to commit an act which is physically impossible.) Time’s verdict is that Sunset Boulevard is among the greatest films Hollywood ever made.

 

Early cinema was silent until 1929, when The Jazz Singer added the term “talkie” to the lexicon. What happened to all of the actresses who never transitioned to sound? Think of such famous names as Clara Bow, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, and Norma Shearer. Even the principal character’s name, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), was a mashup of silent stars Norma Talmadge and Florence Desmond. Swanson, of course, jumped at the part when offered as she was among the old stars put out to pasture. Was the picture a film noir, a searing drama, a black comedy, a period piece, or a faux biography? The best answer is to say Sunset Boulevard was all of those things.

 

The eponymous street was where oodles of silent stars built elaborate mansions. In the film, Desmond resides in a sprawling Neo-Renaissance/art deco estate occupied by just Norma, a pet chimpanzee, and her devoted butler Max von Mayerling (Max von Stroheim). Our first look at it is of murdered writer Joe Gillis (William Holden) lying face down in the swimming pool. Gillis is also the film’s narrator, though we don’t know from where, as he tells of the six-months before he became dead in Desmond’s pool! He suffered from writer’s block, took a drive, got a flat, and wandered into what he assumed was an abandoned property. He is stopped by Max, but Norma thought Joe was the underkeeper for her deceased chimp and is ushered into her presence. It takes Joe a moment, but recognition led to one of the most famous exchanges in movie history: “You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big!” She frostily replies, “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small!”

 

Joe hasn’t written a decent script in so long that his bank account is as dry as Death Valley. Before he knows what hit him, he’s in Norma’s employ, living in her home, trying to find time to write, and feeling creepy about the attention Norma sheds on him, not to mention that she thinks that Joe’s writing the part of Salome for her new film for Cecil B. DeMille. In private Joe calls her the “waxworks,” but he has no idea what’s next.

 

His eye is focused on Betty Schaefer, an aspirant screen writer dating his friend Artie Green (Jack Webb). Betty also thinks that Joe’s recent scripts are horrible, but with Artie traveling a lot, she needs a mentor to get her started, and she’s kind of falling for Joe. That too is bad news, as Norma has come to think of Joe as her late-in-life suitor. Though it revolts him, Joe becomes a de facto gigolo who shares Norma’s bed. When he tries to let her down easy, Norma slashes her wrists and becomes more and more delusional, even to the point of driving onto the Paramount lot to visit DeMille to discuss her role as Salome. (Paramount really only wanted to rent her 1929 Isotta Fraschini automobile.) Joe is trapped and returns to her boudoir.

 

Seldom has delusion and mental decay been so raw on the screen. Swanson’s performance is now recognized as a tour de force. The film garnered 11 Oscar nominations and won just three, but it truly a case of a movie that, despite its period-feel, has weathered better than it was received. Hedda Hopper’s customs were equally effective; she dressed Swanson in what might be called shabby elegance. Her garb was deliberately outdated, but just barely so. DeMille, Buster Keaton, Harry Warner, and gossip columnist Hedda Hooper played themselves, which lent the verisimilitude that so troubled Mayer. And check out the cinematography of John Seitz, who gave the film its noir gloss.

 

By the way, the butler did it, just not what you think he did. What more can one say about a film that concludes with another unforgettable line: “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille.”

 

Rob Weir