River-Horse: Across America by Boat

Rating:
Summary: No "Blue Highways"
Review: "River-Horse" is an OK summer read, but it's written by a Heat-Moon who's changed in the last twenty years, about a different sort of a journey. His motivation has changed from curiosity and wanderlust to a kind of grim obsession with executing a plan. Instead of a shoestring voyage of self-discovery and nation-discovery after the end of his first marriage, the transcontinental boat trip of "River-Horse" is conceived as a well-financed grind so hard that broke up his second. Heat-Moon's connectedness with the small towns he visited is what made "Blue Highways" such a wonderful book, but in "River-Horse" those connections are all but lost. "Pilotus" could have been seven interesting people, but instead is rendered as a somewhat pretentious and preachy amalgam. Sadly, I think "Blue Highways" was a flash in the pan, and the present Heat-Moon will never again charm us in the same way that the past one did.

Rating:
Summary: Westward Ho
Review: I am an armchair river freak. While I have not been on the waters of most great American rivers, I love sitting in my study and following the course of rivers, creeks, and various watersheds in the U.S. I love cataloging rivers too, using an encyclopedic approach, grouping entries under regions and by alphabetic order.

So we start with Maine and we have Allagash, Androscoggin, Aroostook; New Hampshire with Ammonoosuc, Ammonoosuc, Upper Fork, Androscoggin, Ashuelot, and so forth. So, I am, wholly unapologetically, a huge nerd.

This book, "River Horse" is the closest thing I have seen to my Bible. The only other one that has come close to it in terms of my hallowed readings is John McPhee's "Basin and Range" (oh, did I mention, I am a highlands freak as well).

This book is sumptuously chock full of delightfully evocative material of the great terra incognita of the midsection of our continent. I have not allowed myself to finish reading it. Bought it a couple of years back and have only gotten to Cape Girardeau. I indulge myself to reread chapters, take notes, reread them again, make new annotations, look them up in the Webster's Geographic Dictionary, check out things on USGS maps, and gaze endlessly at blocks of regions in Rand McNally's Road Atlas.

Thirty years back I had been a marathon hitchiker, taking off at a moment's notice from my college town of Bloomington, Indiana, finding myself in gorgeously geographically rich purlieus like Owego, NY, off The Southern Tier Expressway at sunset in high summer, walking the hills around New Paltz, NY, in the Lower Catskills on a sunny spring morning, in a field of grasshoppers off of I-69 north of Anderson, Indiana, on an Indian Summer day in October, riding a city bus into Oakland, PA, to stay for a night in the student union at the University of Pittsburgh...the list goes on.

So where do I begin descibing my joy with this book. Basically, it has it all, all the experiences of a wayward Tom Sawyer, set to music of the mind, perhaps something that John Hartford could have plucked out on his banjo in a river captain piece.

The gothic past of the Dutch Manor country of the mid-Hudson, the oceanic swells of redoubtable, but mostly unknown American lakes like Oneida and Chautauqua, the lustful callouts of tertiary waterways in the American interior, Anderson (IN), Chickamauga (OH), Beaver (PA), Schoharie (NY); the notations of random riverine circumstance, how the leviathan Tennessee and Cumberland, both emtpy only furlongs apart after coursing through abjectly differing regions of the Southern Plateau; the miasmic conditions of the great riparian epicenter at Cairo, IL, the ancient Indian mounds in the Upper Ohio Valley; the local pieces of great rivers (Long Reach, Smoky Island, Blennerhasset Island); the restored ancient hotels; the lost history of centuries of Native Americans, trappers, parsons, industrialists, speculators, soiled doves, aide-de-camps.

It's all there, the great drama of our continental drift. The denouement of the Erie Canal, the Roman a Clef of the Muskingum, the presagement of the Kentucky, the betrayal of the Wabash, the epiphany of the Scioto. The places: Newburgh, IN, Economy, PA, Port Gibson, NY, Willow Island, WV.

It must be read. Again. And Again. And again if need be. All citizens must be made to pass the River Horse test to renew their status as deserved denizens of our gilded country. This is the one.

Having said all that, Moon tends to love his metaphors just a wee too much (I never do :). His run-on descriptions get a bit too sinuous for all but the most devoted armchair river rats. But who cares. The guy has done it, one of the great shunpiking classics of our time.


This is the book that has it all

Rating:
Summary: USA from the river
Review: I found the book to be very readable and compelling. I read it in just a few long sittings and enjoyed it. At times, especially as Least Heat-Moon traversed the continental divide I felt the weariness of the author compared to the optimism at the beginning of the book. It was an immense undertaking and therefore a challenging book to write but in the end he discharged his task well. His account certainly gave me a new and valuable perspective on America's sadly neglected and abused waterways that were once the life blood of this nation.
I read some of the other reviews and was surprised by the triviality of several of the reviews. It is a much better book than they describe it.
One small cavill with our "Bill". In the section of the book where he makes fun of the silly town names in Pennsylvania which was based on the premise that these were all "made-up" names, there is one egregious error. NANTY GLO is not a made up name. It comes from the Welsh Nant-y-glo, meaning valley of coal and was imported to Pennsylvania by those same Welsh miners who named Bryn Mawr; big hill or mountain in the original Welsh. Both are names of real towns in south Wales.
It certainly has suffered some anglo modification but as Bill points out frequently so have many other town names which began with authentic American Indian names.

Rating:
Summary: No "Blue Highways"
Review: Of Heat-Moon's previous travel epics, I have not read *PrairyErth* but I did greatly enjoy *Blue Highways* and where that book is lean and to the point, *River-Horse* is big and bloated. Heat-Moon has pulled off a real accomplishment here, travelling across America east-to-west almost entirely in small boats. But you barely notice his rewarding revelations on the acts of traveling and soul searching, the state of America's natural places, and the people he meets. All of these are sunk under a never-ending wave of waterlogged writing.

Heat-Moon can't stop piling on his heavy-handed style, with a flood of arcane words that will make you run exasperated to your dictionary. Some examples include jactitation, brummagem, atraxia, atrabilious, genetrix, and lacustrene. Before you recommend use of a thesaurus to the lazy reader, these plodding words actually serve little purpose other than to illustrate Heat-Moon's use of a word-of-the-day calendar on his desk. Then there's soggy prose like "inspiration flowed like the sky" or "in my moustache I can smell river like a sweetly scented woman from night before." This is all showing off at best, with little reward to the increasingly weary reader.

Worst of all is Heat-Moon's impersonal treatment of his crew during the voyage. He combines seven different first-mates (one of whom was a woman) into an anonymous entity called Pilotis that has the same personality throughout the voyage. The same goes for at least two different people called merely Photographer, plus a succession of faceless folk with names like Reporter or Professor. Heat-Moon spends more time naming and describing passersby who he met for five minutes, than these valuable companions who he spent thousands of miles with, and who saved his voyage (and possibly his life) many times. Heat-Moon apparently meant this de-personalization as some sort of literary method to make a grand point about his narrative, but what that point should be he never explains. The result is a disservice to his many valuable companions, while he tries to draw all the attention to himself. This book is a potentially tremendous travelogue that could be fascinating but is only tedious and waterlogged. Heat-Moon's greatest strength is his achievements as a traveler, while his writing is a lesser strength. Unfortunately, this book wastes all its energy on the wrong strength.

Rating:
Summary: Obstructions of his own making
Review: One of the seven Nikawa co-pilots William Least Heat-Moon lumped into the singular entity of "Pilotis" was a woman, New Jersey registered nurse Linda Barton. That one female among seven presented Heat-Moon -- or as I knew him at my alma mater, the University of Missouri, professor Bill Trogdon -- with a little problem: To keep to his plan to create a singular Pilotis from this seven-headed hydra, he could never refer to the character with gender-specific he-she pronouns lest he reveal on which segment of the cross-country river journey Barton accompanied him (although he did slip once by calling his Erie Canal companion a "squire"). The result was an entire thick volume full of some of the most awkward, forced sentence structure I've encountered since substitute teaching sixth-graders at Orchard Farm Middle School, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

Bad or inexperienced writers paint themselves into such untenable corners. The Bill Trogdon I knew from the wonderfully flowing "Blue Highways" should have been better than this. What possible reason did he have for this incredibly clumsy device which he created and then had to nurse Boone-County-Ham-handedly through all those pages? It wasn't the co-pilots' privacy, for he names them all in a foreword. Was his resulting self-aggrandizing focus on himself at the expense of his fellow travelers devised so that readers who loved him from his past work would end up despising him as much as he despised himself?

The Bill Trogdon I knew in the '80s was not a pedantic boor. His quest was to gather insight with every mile and then share it with us, not to excruciatingly pound us with what he already knew before he rounded the next bend. I longed to travel every blue-highway mile with him in Ghost Dancing. The 20-years-older Trogdon aboard Nikawa seemed more Ted Baxter than Mark Twain, and I wouldn't want to travel around the block with him.

What a pity. What a waste.

Rating:
Summary: Preachy & Dull
Review: Overall the book is pretty dull. In order to liven up sections Heat=Moon tries to get us worried about whether or not he'll hit his timeline or even sink the boat. After a few of these exagerrated concerns are told the remaining ones are not at all believable.

Every few pages he also likes to remind us how bad Americans are at keeping our environment spotless and wild. This coming from a man cruising the rivers in a twin engine boat, and on shallower parts even puts a motor on his canoe. This, also coming from a man who would not have gotten past New York if it wasn't for the Erie Canal. Preaching, during a book like this, is normal and expected. He just takes it over the top and by the end of the book I was rooting for another dam to be built.

Finally, there are too many stories about himself and how he was feeling and not enough anecdotes about people he met along the way. It's those colorful stories that usually make travel books likes these interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Preachy & Dull
Review: Overall the book is pretty dull. In order to liven up sections Heat=Moon tries to get us worried about whether or not he'll hit his timeline or even sink the boat. After a few of these exagerrated concerns are told the remaining ones are not at all believable.

Every few pages he also likes to remind us how bad Americans are at keeping our environment spotless and wild. This coming from a man cruising the rivers in a twin engine boat, and on shallower parts even puts a motor on his canoe. This, also coming from a man who would not have gotten past New York if it wasn't for the Erie Canal. Preaching, during a book like this, is normal and expected. He just takes it over the top and by the end of the book I was rooting for another dam to be built.

Finally, there are too many stories about himself and how he was feeling and not enough anecdotes about people he met along the way. It's those colorful stories that usually make travel books likes these interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Riverhorse Sufers from High Expectations
Review: River-Horse has the unenvious distinction of being preceded by two other Heat-Moon books which were outstandingly great reads. My favorite was PrairyErth and coming in second was Blue Highways. River-Horse lacks the depth of PrairyErth and the wonderfull stories told to the author as he rambled around thirty eight states for thirteen thousand miles in Blue Highways.More importantly, where are all the gems of philosophy of which his other two books were loaded? However I did find the book fascinating as he related so much about the water ways and the envirommental challenges that face them in the future. Moreover he informs the reader of how important whether is to navigation on these water ways from rainstorms to snow melt. The best feature of the book was how it raised my consciousness regarding the trade-offs that are made when man chooses development over simply leaving nature alone. In particular, how the Corp of Engineers has robbed the upper Missouri of much of its august beauty through the construction of so many hydro- electric dams.All in all a good read, but one that left me wanting regarding the keen detail and observation which was so prevalent in his other two giants which he so brilliantly penned.

Rating:
Summary: Long, boring boat trip across America
Review: The late Spiro Agnew ("nattering nabobs of negativism") would have loved this book's language, even though he would have hated its sentiments. W. L. H-M offers the basic environmentalist's screed, and even though I personally agree with much of it, his is a novel approach: he will try to win your agreement through interminable boredom. If you like pedantry, you'll love this book.

Rating:
Summary: Water-Weary Traveler Challenges America's Tributaries
Review: This book is like the journey the author undertakes. There are frequent poignant moments, but they come after long stretches of tedium, with a final payoff at the end which makes it all worth it. I am a fan of the author's first book, Blue Highways. I read it in paperback and gave the book away to a charity. I remembered the book with such an intense degree of fondness that I re-purchased it just to return it to my bookcase, where it still resides. I actually could not NOT own it, which is to say, I had to have it. River Horse never really grabbed me in the same way. First, there are a few annoyances: the chapter titles, the name "Pilotis" (I never did get used to it), and the inadequate maps. Several times I found myself looking for spots on one of the book's maps, locations taken straight out of the narrative, but never did find them. It was as if the maps were prepared aside from the book. I recommend that readers get themselves a good map, even little ones copied from an atlas, to have along for the read, section by section. Another impression I get is that it is a narrative based on observations, not insight. Potential readers should note the book's other name; it is very much a "logbook of a ship." Despite references to marriage and ill parents and such, the author doesn't share much of himself on the pages here.

My knowledge of American river geography was poor beforehand and I don't know how much it improved having read River Horse. I did learn a smattering of good words, ones new to me: rampike, tautological, slumgullion, oddment, and fluviomariner. And a few newly created words, like "yondering," as in, to look down yonder.

There is a great deal more to be learned here, however. The author tells us that the Hudson River is a fjord, the only one in the contiguous states. That it is, mile for mile, richer in history, art, and literature than any other US river. That DeWitt Clinton's face was on cigarette tax stamps for nearly 100 years. That many canal towns are named after Mediterranean cities. That the east side of a river is deeper because of the earth's rotation, and that wind makes a river very complicated. That American perceptions of Indians come from the Sioux. That much of our weather is brewed up on the American Plains. That Lake Sakakawea (in North Dakota) is the largest manmade lake in the US. That the only contiguous state wider than Montana is Texas ("with its eccentric borders"). But there's a lot of reading ahead of you if you take up this book. So why take it on at all? Because, as the author's companion notes, "A river is not just about water."