River-horse: a logbook of a boat across america

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 crosscountry river traveler has ever managed--often following in the wakes of our most famous explorers, from Henry Hudson to Lewis and Clark.;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 landscapes. Brimming with history, drama, humor, and wisdom, River-Horse belongs in the pantheon of American travel literature.

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.

Publishers Weekly

Writing under the name Heat-Moon (Blue Highways), William Trogdon once again sets out across America, this time propelled chiefly by a dual-outboard boat dubbed Nikawa, "River Horse" in Osage. In this hardy craft, he and a small crew attempt to travel more than 5000 miles by inland waterways from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a single season. Citing 19th-century travelogues and dredging odd bits of the rivers' past, Heat-Moon conveys the significance of passing "beneath a bridge that has looked down on the stovepipe hat of Abraham Lincoln, the mustache of Mark Twain, the sooty funnels of a hundred thousand steamboats." Though at first he is struck by how river travel is "so primordial, so unchanged in its path," he later notes that the only thing Lewis and Clark would recognize on a dammed and severely altered stretch of the Missouri River is the bedeviling prairie wind. But what remains constant for him is "the greatest theme in our history: the journey." It is an American theme, though by "westering" and persistently believing that the voyage is destined to succeed, Heat-Moon seems to be on dangerous waters for someone who is part Native American. But his romantic attachment to the nature of exploration doesn't occlude his indictments of pollution, overzealous river management and aboriginal displacement. The book, though largely engaging, is not without its slow spots, which Heat-Moon avers are true to the trip's nature: "the river is no blue highway because the river removes reverie." Heat-Moon has written a rich chronicle of a massive and meaningful undertaking. Unlike Blue Highways, however, the focus is not so much on people and places as on the trials of a journey that bypasses them in favor of reaching its destination. Illus. 250,000 first printing; $250,000 ad/promo; 13-city author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

My Lotic Mates -- The Boat -- The Hudson River -- A Celestial Call to Board -- Up Rivers Without Sources -- There Lurk the Skid Demon -- A Drowned River -- Where Mohicans Would Not Sleep -- Snowmelt and a Nameless Creek -- The Erie Canal -- The Pull of a Continent -- Released from the Necessity of Mundane Toil -- Like Jonah, We Enter the Leviathan -- Knoticals and Hangman's Rope -- We Sleep with a Bad-Tempered Woman Tossed by Fever -- The Lakes -- Hoisting the Blue Peter. How the Sun Rose in the West to Set Me Straight -- The Allegheny River -- An Ammonia Cocktail and a Sharp Onion-Knife -- A Flight of Eagles, an Iron Bed, and So Forth -- Unlimited Sprawl Area -- Zing, Boom, Tararel! -- The Ohio River -- Proving the White Man a Liar -- The Day Begins with a Goonieburger -- Enamel Speaks -- Along the Track of the Glaciers -- From Humdrummery on down toward Tedium -- A History of the Ohio in Three Words -- A River Coughed Up from Hell. A Necessity of Topography and Heart -- Nekked and Without No Posies -- Eyeless Fish with Eight Tails -- The Great Omphalos in Little Egypt -- The Mississippi River -- A Night Without Light on a River Without Exits -- The Ghost of the Mississippi -- Of Swampsuckers and Samaritans -- To the Tune of "Garry Owen" We Get Ready -- The Lower Missouri River -- We Start up the Great Missouri -- I Attach My Life to the Roots of a Cottonwood -- A Language with No Word for Flood. Looking the River in the Eye -- Clustered Coincidences and Peach Pie -- Gone with the Windings -- Pilotis's Cosmic View Gets Bad News -- The Dream Lines of Thomas Jefferson -- A Water Snake across the Bow -- Sacred Hoops and a Wheel of Cheddar -- The Upper Missouri River -- We Find the Fourth Missouri -- The Phantom Ship of the Missouri Reeds -- How to Steal Indian Land -- A Conscientious Woman -- Flux, Fixes, and Flumdiddle -- Sitting Bull and the Broom of Heaven. How to Be a Hell of a Riverman -- Yondering up the Broomsticks -- Chances of Aught to Naught -- We Walk under the Great River -- Why Odysseus Didn't Discover America -- Pilotis Concocts an Indian Name for God -- Trickles, Dribbles, and Gurglets -- My Life Becomes a Preposition -- Little Gods and Small Catechisms -- Eating Lightning -- Imprecating the Wind -- Into the Quincunx -- Planning for Anything Less than Everything -- Over the Ebullition -- Ex Aqua Lux et Vis. Weaknesses in Mountains and Men -- A Nightmare Alley -- No Huzzahs in the Heart -- The Mountain Streams -- We Meet Mister Eleven -- Eating the Force that Drives Your Life -- An Ark from God or a Miracle of Shoshones -- A Shameless Festal Board -- The Salmon River -- Bungholes and Bodacious Bounces -- The Snake River -- My Hermaphroditic Quest -- Kissing a Triding Keepsake -- Messing About in Boats -- The Columbia River -- The Far Side of the River Cocytus -- Place of the Dead. Theater of the Graveyard -- A Badger Called Plan A -- Robot of the River -- A Taproom Fit for Raggedy Ann -- Salt to Salt, Tide to Tide -- If You Want to Help. New York Times bestseller: “A coast-to-coast journey by way of great rivers, conducted by a contemporary master of travel writing” ( Kirkus Reviews ). In this memoir brimming with history, humor, and wisdom, the author of Blue Highways and PrairyErth “voyages across the country, from Atlantic to Pacific, almost entirely by its rivers, lakes and canals in a small outboard-powered boat” ( San Francisco Chronicle ). Setting off from New York Harbor aboard the boat he named Nikawa (“river horse” in Osage), in hopes of entering the Pacific near Astoria, Oregon, William Least Heat-Moon 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 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. “Fizzes with intelligence and high spirits.” — Outside “Propels the reader with historical vignettes, ecological and geological detail, and often hilarious encounters with local eccentrics.” — Time "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 shipboard perspective on the country's rivers, lakes, canals, and landscapes."--BOOK JACKET. "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."--BOOK JACKET. "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."--BOOK JACKET. 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,... FOR 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.