The Angel on the Roof

Searching for Survivors

Poor Henry Hudson, I miss him. It’s almost as if I had been aboard the leaking Discovery myself, a cabin boy or maybe an ordinary seaman, and had been forced to decide, Which will it be, slip into line behind the callow mutineers and get the hell out of this closing, ice-booming bay and home again to dear, wet England? Or say nay and climb over the side behind the good Commodore, the gentle, overthrown master of the Discovery, settling down next to him in the open shallop, the slate gray, ice-flecked water lurking barely six inches below the gunwales of the overloaded rowboat, as the ship puts on sail, catches a safe slice of wind rising out of the Arctic, and drives for open seas, east and south.

I would’ve had no choice — assuming I was given one. I would have stuck with the bigger boat and would have watched the smaller one, Hudson standing darkly iron-willed in the low bow, as it gradually became a black speck on the gray, white-rimmed sheet behind us, and then disappeared altogether.

It’s so easy to forget him, to let my memory of him gradually disappear, the way his image, for one who stood at the stern of the Discovery, disappeared: 1611, after all, is a long ways back. Which is why I’m truly grateful whenever I happen to be reminded of him and his loss, and mine — when driving over the Hudson River, say, the fiery red sun setting behind feculent New Jersey marshes, or when driving the curly length of the Henry Hudson Parkway north of Manhattan.

Oddly, reminded of Hudson, I’m always reminded in turn of other things. Mainly automobiles. The automobiles of my adolescence, for some reason. There must be deep associations. When I end a dark day by suddenly, accidentally, conjuring bright images of Henry Hudson lost in the encroaching white silence of his bay, I usually remember the first car I ever owned. It was the unadorned frame of a 1929 Model A Ford. I was fifteen, not old enough to take a car out on the road legally, but that was all right because I intended to spend the next two years building the frame of a thirty-year-old car into a hot rod. Hot rods were very important to almost everyone, one way or another, in the late fifties. My closest friend, Daryl, who was sixteen, was building his hot rod out of a 1940 Ford coupe up on cinder blocks behind his father’s garage. He already had an engine for it, a ’53 Chrysler overhead valve V-8, which lay on the floor of the garage in front of his father’s parked car. That car was an impeccable 1949 Hudson Hornet, which Daryl, whenever his father felt reckless enough to grant it, was old enough to drive and did. This happened rarely, however, because the Hudson was Daryl’s father’s obsession. I remember him as a tense, thin man, short and drawn in on himself like a hair-triggered crossbow, always rubbing gently the sleek skin of that car with a clean, soft cloth in the speckled orange, autumn sunlight of a Saturday afternoon, the slow circles of the cloth seeming to tranquilize the grim man as he worked.

Almost a decade old, the Hudson was still in precisely the condition as the day Daryl’s father had purchased it, in 1949, March, at the Hudson assembly plant in Michigan, after having followed it step by step down the entire length of the assembly line, watching it magically becoming itself, until it was emptied out the dark mouth of the factory into the shattering sunlight of the test track. Then, with meticulously organized pleasure, he had driven it all the way home to Wakefield, Massachusetts.

No other single experience with a machine compared to the exquisitely abstracted, yet purely sensual pleasure provided by riding in Daryl’s father’s Hudson. The car was deep green, the color of oak leaves in July, and the restrained stabs of chrome on the grille and bumpers and around the headlights and taillights merely deepened the sense of well-being that one took from the huge expanses of color. Shaped more or less like an Indian burial mound from the Upper Mississippi Valley, whether stilled or in motion, the vehicle expressed permanence and stability, blocky, arrogant pacts with eternity.

Later on, when I was nineteen, I was footloose and almost broke, and needing transportation from central Florida out to the West Coast, I bought a breaking-down 1947 Studebaker for fifteen dollars, and it got me as far as Amarillo, Texas, where it wheezingly expired. Then for a long time I didn’t own a car. I hitchhiked or used public transportation or rode around passively in friends’ cars — lost touch completely with the needs of an earlier aesthetic.

Then, a few years after the Studebaker and Texas, when I was about twenty-three, I happened to be living in Boston, working as a timekeeper on a construction job at the Charlestown Navy Yard, and one silver-frosted morning in February, I walked sleepily out of the MTA station and headed down the brick sidewalk toward the dry-docked USS Constitution and the derrick-cluttered Navy Yard beyond and nearly collided with my old friend Daryl. He was dressed in an expensive-looking, charcoal gray, pin-striped suit with a vest and black wool overcoat with a silver fur collar. He wore a derby, a black bowler, perched atop his narrow head, and he was clenching a black, tightly furled umbrella.

Daryl! I shouted. I hadn’t seen him in five or six years at least. How the hell are you!

He responded politely, but with painful reserve, obviously eager to get away from me. He was working on State Street, he told me (when I asked), aiming to be a broker, taking night courses in business administration, living in a flat here in Charlestown in the interim. I asked him about his family, of course, as a matter of simple courtesy, but also because I really had liked and respected his father, that grimly organized sensualist. Daryl told me that his father, a foreman at the Wonder bread factory in Somerville, had retired two years ago and then had died six months later of a heart attack. His mother now lived alone in a condominium in Maryland.

We shook hands and exchanged addresses and promised to get in touch as soon as possible, so we could really sit down and have a talk. Then we rushed off in our opposite directions.

I strode quickly through the gate to the Yard and jogged past warehouses toward the new steam plant, and for a second I felt lonelier then I’d ever felt before. Nowadays loneliness was probably the last thing old Daryl was troubled by.

I pictured his small blue eyes darting past my own as they sought a spot in space over my shoulder and about twelve feet behind me, where they could rest easy while Daryl and I talked to each other. No way to deny it: I truly had expected him to become a successful racing driver. Or at least a well-known mechanic.

I live in the country now, in central New Hampshire, and two months ago I answered an ad in the local newspaper and bought a Norwegian elkhound puppy, a male, a gray puff of fur with a pointed black face and curl of a tail. I named him Hudson, giving him the second name of Frobisher, so I could be sure I was naming him, not for a car, but for the explorers of the Arctic seas — appropriate for a dog of that explicit a breeding.

It’s occurred to me lately that in a few years, if I want to, I can put together a team of these rugged Arctic dogs, and I can race them in nearby Laconia, where the annual National Sled Dog Championship Races are held. The prize money isn’t much, but it’s said that great satisfaction derives from handling a team of dogs under such strenuous circumstances. There’s a regular racecourse, and you’re supposed to end up back where you started, on Main Street in Laconia, after a couple hours of following red triangular flags through the surrounding countryside. I know that I would pull off the course after a while, never finishing the race. I’d light out for the backcountry, where you can drive all day on top of ten feet of snow and ice. Imagine driving a dozen half-wild, Norwegian elkhound sled dogs into billowing sheets of snow, leaving the settlement and swiftly disappearing behind the dogs into timeless, silent whiteness.

When spring came, I’d be circling the muddied edge of Hudson Bay on foot, looking at the wet ground for pieces of old iron or charred wood, or maybe a yellowed, half-rotted journal — signs that Hudson had made it to shore. If he made it that far, the Cree or the Esquimaux would have helped him, and he would have survived there peacefully into old age, telling and retelling to the few of us who’d elected to leave the Discovery with him the amazing tales of earlier voyages.

There was the 1607 attempt for the Moscovy Company to cut across the Arctic, north from Norway all the way to 80 degrees latitude at Hakluyt’s Headland on Spitsbergen, before fields of ice finally stopped him. There was the second voyage for the Muscovy, in 1608, eastward around the top of Russia, until he was blocked by ice, headlands, and headwinds.

There was the 1609 voyage, for the Dutch East India Company. This time, headed northeast around Russia again, mutiny stopped him, and he turned back.

Then there was the year, 1610, financed by a group of Englishmen, that Hudson and his entire crew in the Discovery lay icebound in his bay atop the North American continent.

After the second and final mutiny, there was the year it took for Hudson and his three loyal sailors to cross the bay to the western shore, dragging the shallop filled with their dwindling supplies all the way across the endless silent ice pack.