An American Voyage (My copy had this subtitle)
by Jonathan Raban
I bought this book many years ago and somehow never got around to reading it. His writing is masterful, evocative, and calm--
A factory went by; an empty dock; a lone man with a paintbrush on the deck of a tug, who looked up for a moment from his work and waved; then summer-dusty trees, massed and entangled on a shore of powdery sand. Rising fish left circles on the water here, and the current squeezed them into narrow ovals, before they faded into the scratched wax polish of the top of the river. It was lovely to be afloat at last, part of the drift of things.
But when he gets into the eddys and boils of the river below Wisconsin, his struggles with the river fill me with sick fear and a desire to never, ever venture out on a boat in a river. We camped by the Red River in Louisiana once, and the list of warnings on the "Boaters Take Caution" sign was shudder-worthy.
Mr. Raban took his journey down the Mississippi in the late 70s, a time when the strident excitement of the hippie era was being replaced with the dull "me first/make money" era of the eighties. Many of the people he met were existing without ambition in a meaningless, foggy swamp of sameness. Not the river, though--it was a monster and a bully and had places to go for sure. And along he went, respectful of its moods and patient to learn all it could teach him. Strange guy.
I liked him but I didn't love him, if you know what I mean. I enjoyed going along on his journey, very much, but I didn't feel he had anything to teach me. He didn't seem to have any interest in natural history and he seldom described the many animals or birds he must have encountered. Strange.
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