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BOOK EXCERPT Introduction to River Journeyby William Least Heat-MoonGiven that Americans often pay scant attention to how our ancestors reached the shores of the United States, it should come as no surprise, I suppose, for a reader to be amazed at the multitude of narratives about traveling America. All of us in the Western Hemisphere are descendants of wayfarers ancient and recent from the other side of the world. Overwhelmingly, those earlier travelers arrived by boat, so that for nearly all of us, somewhere in our past is a family history containing a water journey. To judge by the way Americans take to travel in its many forms, those voyages in our genealogies may also exist in our genes. Once our ancestors arrived, they typically continued to move on even farther in search of some sweet spot where they could uncoop their deep hopes and dreams and unfetter their capabilities. And we, their posterity, have continued moving in one quest after another until we've made ourselves the most mobile large nation ever. The American emblem is a bald eagle, but these days a bald automobile tire might be more accurate if less elegant. In my home not far from the Missouri River, I have shelf upon shelf of books about traveling in America; at last count nearly two thousand of them, rising from floor to ceiling, cover three centuries of peregrinations. There must be at least another four or five hundred I haven't come upon yet, some of them titles I've only heard of and others yet unknown to me. Exploring America through her travel narratives can be as rewarding and revealing as winding through the next curve of a two-lane road or coming around the bend of a river in full expectation of entering the unknown. Turn the wheel, turn the page, and step into a new realm. Of those two thousand books, more than a few are entirely or in part about excursions on rivers, beginning with the account of Robert Juet aboard the Half Moon under the command of Henry Hudson on its ascent part way up the New York estuary now bearing his name. Although I'm only reckoning, I believe the river appearing most often in all these narratives is the Mississippi. During the last half-century or so, that's unquestionably true. In our time a pattern of travel, seemingly on its way to becoming an archetype, has happened: taking a craft of whatever configuration down the Mississippi from somewhere not far below its headwaters in northern Minnesota on to New Orleans or even beyond to where the huge delta meets the Gulf of Mexico. This particular passage has become so repeated it's on the way to developing into a ritual for a nation shy on communal rituals. The Japanese climb their Mount Fuji in devotion, and we descend our Father of Waters. It's gone so far that I've read about one fellow who, over several warm seasons, set out to swim the Mississippi virtually stem to stern. While I'm fervently in favor of Americans exploring our native waters--and, when the sojourner is an adept scrivener, writing about it--I do wish we would develop a larger awareness of our thousands of underexplored or undervalued rivers, creeks, and streams capacious enough to carry a boat of appropriate length and beam into adventure and beauty. Having traveled ten thousand miles on American flowings of various kinds, I wish to testify to the capital allure of rivers other than the Mississippi. Why it has come to dominate our fluvial travels, I'm not sure. We can speak of the immense way it drains nearly all the land lying between the Appalachians and the Rockies. We can see how in a way no other watercourse does--given it's a river, a thing as reckless and unfixed as any major natural force--the Mississippi rather precisely halves the forty-eight states longitudinally as a pole does its globe. We can note its running about as straight as a river can and, in its movement north to south, seeming to roll easily down hill. We hum and whistle music that has flowed with it from steamboat calliopes ("O, Susannah"), one-steps ("Waiting for the Robert E. Lee"), the blues ("Frankie and Johnny"). And then there are the books. No other American river has had a spokesman like Mark Twain. Life on the Mississippi has a kind of twisty structure that charms like the river itself, while Huckleberry Finn is a tightly woven tale that depends on the Mississippi as Moby-Dick does the Pacific or The Red Badge of Courage the Civil War. Nonetheless, consider all the reasons you can come up with and still you must face the inevitable: The Mississippi has an encompassing mystique no other American river exerts, not even its two great tributaries. The longer and more treacherous Missouri (the steamboat captains used to say boys could go up the Mississippi but it required a man to take on the Missouri) or the Ohio with its greater volume at Cairo, Illinois, where it joins the Mississippi. Never mind that there are a couple of dozen other large rivers in this country of more obvious splendent beauty--"the great brown god," as St. Louisan T. S. Eliot called the Mississippi, still holds us in a grand cultural thrall. * * * * It captured Clarence Jonk, a central Minnesota farmboy in his twenty-seventh year, when he settled upon a plan to build a six-ton boat on a small lake five miles from the river (and considerably farther than that from its launching point). Once his cumbersome craft was underway, Jonk lived thereafter upon or near water and took from it the ineffabilities that can fill a soul and, if you will, ground it in the disorienting flux of modern human existence. He discovered a spiritual sustenance only moving water can give. As you shall see, his plan was to build a forty-four-foot-long houseboat from materials more scrounged than otherwise and to use it to enter an alluring and intoxicating realm of, in his word, "adventurings." After a visit to his parents' rural home, he writes: "Right now the finest farm place represents to me a place where the intellect is cooped up until it ceases to be curious, until it can spawn no brighter query than, 'How are your cows, your pigs, your chickens?'" I like this urge of Clarence Jonk, and I wish every young American--particularly in these early years of the twenty-first century--could embrace one like it. I admire this Minnesotan in the Great Depression taking up a wish to invigorate his intellect with capital comprised of little more than imagination, ingenuity, and tenacious insistence; from immaterial notions he built with his own hands a physical contraption to convey him into his longings. It doesn't matter that his original plan, to navigate the length from one City of the Saints to another, fell short by 1,550 miles. Over the 150 miles he did accomplish in the clumsy but sturdy Betsy-Nell, he floated into an adventure that allowed him to build a life he could only fancy before. Clarence was never the same after his voyage; then he could say with all the others who have traveled boldly, I went, and that has made all the difference. We know he merits the rewards of his difficult transit when he can write a sentence like this: The dinghy was like a garment to me; I wore it and went swimming in it. Squaring myself about, in the center seat, I would stretch my heels out until they felt the chocks on the boat's bottom; then, with a quick strong pull at one oar I would turn the dinghy upstream. Now, with my back toward home, I would spin the boat along, its slightly curved bottom gliding against the current. But even more significantly we know the depth of his short passage when he says at the end of his voyage: The river had been harsh to us, but I know it was hostile mainly because we were ignorant of its wiles, its whimsies, its strength. These are perceptions that reach us only after we've stepped forth, set out, and earned our passage by paying attention. For an American, there is no more native or affirming act than to achieve our spiritual citizenship by being able to say honestly, I went, I saw, I connected. Copyright © 2003 William Least Heat-Moon Copyright © 2003 Borealis Books · Send questions to the Webmaster |
