Looking for a Ship.

JOHN McPHEE has been called a chronicler of everyday things, an inaccurate description unless one considers crofting in the Hebrides, canoeing in Maine, and drilling with the Swiss army to be things one runs across every day. Because his material ventures far from the subject matter of fiction, and very far from the subject matter of most non-fiction, he quickly gained a reputation as one who could invest a seed catalogue with high drama. He is not a great prose writer, as many have claimed, but has always had a formidable grace, making his readers feel at home in the most alien of subjects. In Basin and Range, for example, there is nothing incongruous in his description of the Himalayas as being created by the Indian subcontinent "ramming into" Asia (over the course of X billion years), and his description of fossil evidence for despeciation during the Permian extinction can almost move one to tears.

McPhee is generally most interested in things as they are about to be demolished. At the end of The Pine Barrens, plans are under way to level that part of New Jersey for an international airport. In The Survival of the Bark Canoe, it appears that the bark canoe will not survive long. And one of the characters in "Travels in Georgia" launched his presidential campaign two years after the piece appeared in The New Yorker.

A similar sense of impending disaster pervades Looking for a Ship, in which McPhee joins first mate Andy Chase on the SS Stella Lykes, one of the last ships of the dying American merchant fleet, on a journey from Charleston, South Carolina, through the Panama Canal to the west coast of South America. North American shipping went into a free-fall in the 1980s. High salaries (some of McPhee's "old salts" pull in upwards of a hundred grand a year), soaring insurance premiums, and the new open-flagging" system that has created shipping giants of such places as Panama, Liberia, and Taiwan have made the merchant marine an economic dinosaur. The Soviet Union now ships fifty times as much of the world's sea cargo as the United States. The average age of the Stella Lykes crew is around sixty. There are no cargo ships being built in the United States. "Russia is going to have five thousand merchant ships in ten years," says the captain of the Stella Lykes. "And we are going to have none enn, oh, enn, ee, as in not any."

This has had disastrous geopolitical implications, as when the U.S. used Russian merchant ships-they were cheaper-to send "defense-sensitive" F-14s to Israel. But McPhee is more caught up in the human disaster of it: the loss of a livelihood, the loneliness of practicing an obsolescent trade. McPhee is a conservative green, who would like to keep not only the wilds uncontaminated, but human institutions as well. One feels certain he disapproves of Vatican II, fast food, the designated hitter, New Coke, Dolby, and Spandex.

Coke, Dolby, and Spandex.

McPhee has a great ear for the language of trade; the book is full of geezongs, demacs, astigmatizers, pad eyes, Panama chocks, pirogues, and gland steam. I like that one: gland steam. And his passion for Fun Facts to Know and Tell hasn't waned. We learn that a 665-foot-long cargo ship like the Stella Lykes gets 0.017 mile per gallon, that the Miraflores locks in the Panama Canal weigh 745 tons but are so perfectly balanced that they can be opened and closed with a handcrank, that Colombian drug dealers smear urine from wild dogs on shipping containers, in order to frighten off the sniffers at U.S. Customs.

McPhee fails gravely, however-and uncharacteristically-to give you a sense of where you are. No sooner has Andy Chase been assigned his duties on the Stella Lykes than we are steaming into the Humboldt Current six days south of Guayaquil. We avoid Tropical Depression #7 in the Gulf of Mexico only to dock in Callao (Peru). We get the voyage in snapshots, and the characters as well-a pity, since there are some interesting ones. There is a mechanic named David Carter who, while a student at Tulane, had two girlfriends: Betty Here (in New Orleans) and Betty There (in Auburn, Alabama). There is a Panamanian horse trainer named Carlos Rolando Lopez, who saves all his grain for Dr. Sab (out of White Reason by Seattle Slew); for his other charges, the only supplement to their hay is the wood they can gnaw off their stalls. There is Panama Canal pilot Jonas Thorsteinsson, who, McPhee tells us without batting an eyelash, is "the author of the basic Icelandic text on celestial navigation."

McPhee carries a tape recorder with him on the voyage, but it's hard to figure out what he uses it for. Only the ship's captain, Paul Washburn-a historian manqud who lives and dies by the Washington Redskins, holds intense and angry conversations with the Stella Lykes, and can parallel-park a 665-foot boat in a seven-hundredfoot space-has any depth at all. And how does McPhee always find the intellectual in any crowd-the Melvillean captain who describes a fellow sailor as "dark-visaged," the boiler technician who could be mistaken for Demosthenes? Why does Andy Chase happen to be the great-great-greatgrandson of the legendary nineteenth-century mariner Nathaniel Bowditch?

As the merchant marine dies, they may need the practice. This is not one of McPhee's best books, but it has the same strength-a loving attention to detail that makes us return to his pages after the canyons he writes of have been blasted and the trees poisoned. It is history of a sort, and this first history of the last merchant mariners will become all the more worth reading as its characters leave their ships to take up jobs in factories or get blasted on beer on the front porches of retirement homes.