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Introduction to River Journey
by William Least Heat-Moon
Given 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
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