River-Horse : A Voyage Across America

by Heat Moon, William Least

• ISBN13: 9780395636268
• ISBN10: 0395636264
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-10-15
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

In RIVER-HORSE, the preeminent chronicler of American back roads -- who has given us the classics BLUE HIGHWAYS and PRAIRYERTH -- recounts his singular voyage on American waters from sea to sea. Along the route, he offers a lyrical and ceaselessly fascinating shipboard perspective on the country's rivers, lakes, canals, and towns. Brimming with history, drama, humor, and wisdom, RIVER-HORSE belongs in the pantheon of American travel literature. In his most ambitious journey ever, Heat-Moon sets off aboard a small boat he named Nikawa ("river horse" in Osage) from the Atlantic at New York Harbor in hopes of entering the Pacific near Astoria, Oregon. He and his companion, Pilotis, struggle to cover some five thousand watery miles -- more than any other cross-country river traveler has ever managed -- often following in the wakes of our most famous explorers, from Henry Hudson to Lewis and Clark. En route, the voyagers confront massive floods, submerged rocks, dangerous weather, and their own doubts about whether they can complete the trip. But the hard days yield up incomparable pleasures: strangers generous with help and eccentric tales, landscapes unchanged since Sacagawea saw them, riverscapes flowing with a lively past, and the growing belief that efforts to protect our lands and waters are beginning to pay off. And, throughout its course, the expedition enjoys coincidences so breathtaking as to suggest the intervention of a divine and witty Providence. Teeming with humanity and high adventure, Heat-Moon's account is an unsentimental and original arteriogram of our nation at the edge of the millennium. Masterly in its own right, RIVER-HORSE, when taken with BLUE HIGHWAYS and PRAIRYERTH, forms the capstone of a peerless and timeless trilogy.

Author Biography

Under the name of William Least Heat-Moon, William Trogdon is the author of two best-selling classics BLUE HIGHWAYS and PRAIRYERTH. His newest book is RIVER-HORSE: A VOYAGE ACR0SS AMERICA. He lives in Columbia, Missouri.

Table of Contents

My Lotic Mates	xi
The Boat	xv
The Hudson River
A Celestial Call to Board	3	(5)
Up Rivers Without Sources	8	(6)
There Lurk the Skid Demon	14	(5)
A Drowned River	19	(5)
Where Mohicans Would Not Sleep	24	(6)
Snowmelt and a Nameless Creek	30	(7)
The Erie Canal
The Pull of a Continent	37	(6)
Released from the Necessity of Mundane Toil	43	(7)
Like Jonah, We Enter the Leviathan	50	(6)
Knoticals and Hangman's Rope	56	(5)
We Sleep with a Bad-Tempered Woman Tossed by Fever	61	(8)
The Lakes
Hoisting the Blue Peter	69	(7)
How the Sun Rose in the West to Set Me Straight	76	(7)
The Allegheny River
An Ammonia Cocktail and a Sharp Onion-Knife	83	(8)
A Flight of Eagles, an Iron Bed, and So Forth	91	(5)
Unlimited Sprawl Area	96	(5)
Zing, Boom, Tararel!	101	(6)
The Ohio River
Proving the White Man a Liar	107	(7)
The Day Begins with a Goonieburger	114	(9)
Enamel Speaks	123	(4)
Along the Track of the Glaciers	127	(5)
From Humdrummery on down toward Tedium	132	(5)
A History of the Ohio in Three Words	137	(9)
A River Coughed Up from Hell	146	(3)
A Necessity of Topography and Heart	149	(7)
Nekked and Without No Posies	156	(5)
Eyeless Fish with Eight Tails	161	(5)
The Great Omphalos in Little Egypt	166	(7)
The Mississippi River
A Night Without Light on a River Without Exits	173	(5)
The Ghost of the Mississippi	178	(3)
Of Swampsuckers and Samaritans	181	(5)
To the Tune of ``Garry Owen'' We Get Ready	186	(7)
The Lower Missouri River
We Start up the Great Missouri	193	(7)
I Attach My Life to the Roots of a Cottonwood	200	(3)
A Language with No Word for Flood	203	(6)
Looking the River in the Eye	209	(5)
Clustered Coincidences and Peach Pie	214	(6)
Gone with the Windings	220	(6)
Pilotis's Cosmic View Gets Bad News	226	(5)
The Dream Lines of Thomas Jefferson	231	(6)
A Water Snake Across the Bow	237	(5)
Sacred Hoops and a Wheel of Cheddar	242	(7)
The Upper Missouri River
We Find the Fourth Missouri	249	(8)
The Phantom Ship of the Missouri Reeds	257	(6)
How to Steal Indian Land	263	(7)
A Conscientious Woman	270	(5)
Flux, Fixes, and Flumdiddle	275	(9)
Sitting Bull and the Broom of Heaven	284	(5)
How to Be a Hell of a Riverman	289	(9)
Yondering up the Broomsticks	298	(5)
Chances of Aught to Naught	303	(5)
We Walk under the Great River	308	(6)
Why Odysseus Didn't Discover America	314	(7)
Pilotis Concocts an Indian Name for God	321	(4)
Trickles, Dribbles, and Gurglets	325	(6)
My Life Becomes a Preposition	331	(12)
Little Gods and Small Catechisms	343	(3)
Eating Lightning	346	(6)
Imprecating the Wind	352	(4)
Into the Quincunx	356	(13)
Planning for Anything Less than Everything	369	(5)
Over the Ebullition	374	(3)
Ex Aqua Lux et Vis	377	(7)
Weaknesses in Mountains and Men	384	(4)
A Nightmare Alley	388	(5)
No Huzzahs in the Heart	393	(8)
The Mountain Streams
We Meet Mister Eleven	401	(8)
Eating the Force that Drives Your Life	409	(4)
An Ark from God or a Miracle of Shoshones	413	(5)
A Shameless Festal Board	418	(11)
The Salmon River
Bungholes and Bodacious Bounces	429	(20)
The Snake River
My Hermaphroditic Quest	449	(5)
Kissing a Triding Keepsake	454	(4)
Messing About in Boats	458	(7)
The Columbia River
The Far Side of the River Cocytus	465	(8)
Place of the Dead	473	(6)
Theater of the Graveyard	479	(3)
A Badger Called Plan A	482	(7)
Robot of the River	489	(4)
A Taproom Fit for Raggedy Ann	493	(5)
Salt to Salt, Tide to Tide	498	(7)
An Afterword of Appreciation	505	(2)
If You Want to Help	507

Excerpts

A Celestial Call to BoardFor about half a league after we came out of the little harbor on Newark Bay at Elizabeth, New Jersey - with its strewn alleys and broken buildings, its pervading aura of collapse, where the mayor himself had met us at the dock and stood before a podium his staff fetched up for him to set his speech on, words to launch us on that Earth Day across the continent as he reminded us of history here, of George Washington on nearly the same date being rowed across to New York City on the last leg of his inaugural journey - and for the half league down the Kill Van Kull (there Henry Hudson lost a sailor to an arrow through the neck), we had to lay in behind a rusting Norwegian freighter heading out to sea with so little cargo that her massive props were no more than half in the water and slapping up a thunderous wake and thrashing such a roil it sent our little teakettle of a boat rolling fore and aft. I quickly throttled back, and the following sea picked up our stern and threatened to ride over the low transom into the welldeck. We had no bilge pump to empty it, and the cabin door stood hooked open to the bright blue April morning and the sea air of New York Bay.My copilot roared, "Don't cut the motors so fast when we're riding a swell! You'll swamp us!" Only ten minutes out, we were nearly on our way to the bottom, sixty feet below. I turned toward the stern to see the bay rear above the transom just before the water raised Nikawa high enough to let the next wave ride under and shove her fast toward the chopping props of the freighter. Then her bow slipped down the other side of the swell, we pulled away from the big screws, and I idled to let the deep-water tramp move ahead until I got an open lane on her port side. We pushed past, cut through the wake of the Staten Island Ferry, and headed on toward the Atlantic."And that's how it begins," said my friend, a blue-water sailor, one whom I shall call Pilotis (rhymes with "my lotus"). It wasn't, of course, the beginning, for who can say where a voyage starts - not the actual passage but the dream of a journey and its urge to find a way? For this trip I can speak of a possible inception: I am a reader of maps, not usually nautical charts but road maps. I read them as others do holy writ, the same text again and again in quest of discoveries, and the books I've written each began with my gaze wandering over maps of American terrain. At home I have an old highway atlas, worn and rebound, the pages so soft from a thousand thumbings they whisper as I turn them. Every road I've ever driven I've marked in yellow, the pages densely highlighted, and I can now say I've visited every county in the contiguous states except for a handful in the Deep South, and those I'll get to soon. Put your finger at random anyplace in this United States atlas, and I've either been there or within twenty-five miles of it, but for the deserts of Nevada where the gap can be about twice that. I didn't se

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Excerpted from River-Horse: A Voyage Across America by William Least Heat-Moon
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