Riverman An American Odyssey by Ben McGrath

This tale took me by surprise. It’s a non-fiction modern mystery about an unconventional traveler who’s lasting impact on those he meets along his way becomes poignantly clear.

Dick Conant had paddled his canoe thousands of miles along American waterways until by providence, on Labor Day 2014 he skirted past author Ben McGrath’s Hudson River home in Piermont, New York.

McGrath, like dozens he would come to meet, found something about Dick Conant and his self-directed quest to be unforgettable. They met a few times before Conant continued on his latest endeavor; to canoe from Canada to Naples, Florida.

The book includes a map of the many waterways Dick Conant navigated throughout his life, as well as photos of the man and his own journals. During his exploits, he took on the famous and the lesser known bodies of water and didn’t limit himself to just rivers. He traveled The Ohio, The Allegheny, The Mississippi, The Yellowstone, The Missouri, The Snake, The Holston River, The Timberidge River, The Mobile River, Lake Pontchartrain, The Gulf InterCoastal Waterway, Matagorda Bay, and ultimately The Hudson and Chesapeake Bay.

There is a quiet power to the story and I’m able to imagine the same was true of Dick Conant.

 

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

After reading ‘On the Road’, I definitely caught the breeze of a free-wheeling, music-loving lifestyle wherein the characters feel deeply and live wildly.

I had difficulty choosing excerpts from Kerouac’s gorgeous, hopeful, yet at the same time, dingy prose. My words don’t measure up to the seamless stream of the author’s pen. So in the place of my weak attempt at conveying why I found enjoyment in this American odyssey, I rely on these passages. Read the book and see if the words and characters don’t roll into your head as the wheels roll across the continent.

“And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up.”

“Great beautiful clouds floated overhead, valley clouds that made you feel the vastness of old tumbledown holy America from mouth to mouth and tip to tip.”

And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; …We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, MOVE.”

“Then we started down. Dean cut off the gas, threw in the clutch, and negotiated every hairpin turn and passed cars and did everything in the books without the benefit of accelerator.” …”In this was we floated and flapped down to the San Joaquin Valley. It lay spread a mile below, virtually the floor of California, green and wondrous from our aerial shelf. We made thirty miles without using gas.”

“Dean’s California-wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.”

And I now see how Natalie Merchant’s rambling musical poetry of ‘Hey Jack Kerouac’ gave me glimpses of the exploits of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty long before I eventually found author Jack Kerouac for myself.

Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother
And the tears she cried, they were cried for none other…

…Hey Jack, now for the tricky part,
When you were the brightest star, who were the shadows?…

…You chose your words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood.
Cool junk booting madmen, street minded girls
In Harlem, howling at night.
What a tear stained shock of the world,
You’ve gone away without saying goodbye.

Natalie Merchant / Robert Buck
Hey Jack Kerouac lyrics © Christian Burial Music

10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribe 1987

‘Dissolution’ The First in the Matthew Shardlake Series

‘Dissolution’ is author C.J. Sanson’s debut novel featuring Master Matthew Shardlake, an attorney who serves the infamous reformer Lord Thomas Cromwell in the year 1536. I confess to not knowing very much about the Reformation period other than what I learned on Masterpiece Theater and films like ‘Anne of A Thousand Days.’ My Catholic grammar school history classes were, not surprisingly, willing to skip those significant chapters in church history.

The Reformation period is arguably just as much of a central character as Shardlake, his protege Mark Poer, and the cast of monks and servants at the struggling monastery at Scarnsea where the story unfolds. The historical backdrop is that of King Henry VIII and Cromwell’s relatively swift process of dismantling and closing the giant machine of monasteries that dominated England’s economy.

Tasked with investigating the gruesome murder of one of Cromwell’s commissioners at Scarnsea, Shardlake’s loyalty to The Reformation and belief that the enormous wealth of the monastery system will be equitably divided becomes as murky as the dangerous surrounding marshlands used by smugglers and a cast of nefarious suspects.

Matthew Shardlake is haunted by personal losses, his own physical deformity and he often admits to being confused, exhausted and fearful. It’s a refreshing portrayal of how hard it has always been to be a hero in times of corruption and conflict. Some things never change.

Looking for more? There are seven titles in the Shardlake series; Dissolution, Dark Fire, Sovereign, Revelation, Heartstone, Lamentation, Tombland.

 

Rivers and Travel Highs Converge at Harper’s Ferry WV

Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia was a highlight of a spring roadtrip – a place with the perfect blend of history and scenery at the  confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers.  It offers a unique 2-for-1 deal in that the town and Harper’s Ferry National Park are actually indistinguishable. 

At the base of ‘The Lower Town” sits ‘The Point’ where the mingled waters of the two mountain rivers flow along the boundaries of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.  Driving in this entire area is a dizzying game of automobile pinball as you bounce across state line to state line in a crazy game of geographic boundaries.  Harper’s Ferry is actually a quaintly* compact place, tightly hugging the hills and yet, the stocky B&O Railroad tunnel gawks right out of the mountain above and bringing the Amtrak line straight from Washington D.C.  Abolitionist John Brown’s Fort is also a sturdy thing to behold, hunkered proudly at the confluence point in the Lower Town, as if to dare the rivers and hills to make it budge after all of these years.

*”Quaintness” should only be expected during “low” seasons. Due to the narrow, steep streets and lack of space for parking, the place has to be an over-crowded trap during spring break, summer and fall color season!   Hence the Park’s need for the “official” National Park center above the town. It’s only there to shuttle crowds down the hill to John Brown’s Fort and the other historic sites. Or, take the train from Pittsburgh or DC.  A final tip, dining options were limited.

A natural spring runs through The Rabbit Hole Gastropub.

One of the few open restaurants in early springtime, The Rabbit Hole offered scenic  dining on the deck overlooking town & railway station.  It’s almost “as old as the hills” when you realize that there is a visible mountain spring running through the main dining room.

Another kind of confluence is the Appalachian Trail Conservancy Headquarters & Visitor Center just above town. Spend a little time in the office and you’ll hear the stories of through-hikers, day-hikers and meet people from all over the world.  We hiked straight out of the trail office towards the rivers and alongside places where Thomas Jefferson walked.

ATC Headquarters, Harpers Ferry WV

A short walk up those same hills brought us to our suite in a beautifully restored house across the road from the ATC headquarters. Perfect homebase for your visit.  https://www.potomacadventure.com/

Happy Trails!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Boys In the Boat by Daniel James Brown

image from the bibliophage.com

A non-fiction story that could have been penned by script writers from back in the day. Let’s see, first we’ll set the scene during the start of the Great Depression. Add in a bunch of mostly working class/downright poor heroes to compete for college degrees and championships in a wildly popular upper class gentleman’s sport and oh, yes add an epic showdown with Adolph Hilter!

The University of Washington Rowing Team’s pride and ongoing rivalry with University of California Berkeley is just the beginning of the athletic triumphs the author Daniel James Brown brings to life. I had no idea of the immense popularity of rowing in those days. Throngs of folks lined shorelines, boarded boats and even rode trains that traveled back and forth along the race course to watch their teams compete. And the fervor seemed to be more intense the farther east you went – all the way to Poughkeepsie NY and back to Oxford and Cambridge for what they simply refer to as “The Boat Race.”

There is plenty of time taken to describe the craftsmanship that went into making the racing shells, the hardships many of the men endured, and the intense competition to be one of the nine chosen for the Varsity boat. All done while the reader more and more anxiously waits for the next race to begin!

No spoilers here, however as each race takes place the intensity and pressure to succeed increases. The author quietly fills us in on the enormous efforts taking place in Germany as the Third Reich wakes up to the idea that the Berlin Olympic Games could serve as the perfect backdrop to fool the world for just a little longer. The boys in the University of Washington boat certainly have something to prove to the Nazis, to the rest of the world, and mostly to themselves.

 

 

 

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

This book was published in 1998 as a memoir of author Bill Bryson’s decision to hike the Appalachian Trail. He subtitles the story, ‘Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail’, and he manages to interject a fair amount of information about the US Forest Service history, geologic and mining history and lamentations on environmental destruction due to mining and acid rain.

The characters Bryson interacts with are all overshadowed by his colorful hiking buddy, Steven Katz. ‘Katz’, with his health issues, and overall approach to life feature prominently and Bryson has traveled and written about his adventures with Katz before in ‘Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe. Theirs is a weirdly symbiotic relationship on which Bryson burnishes the rough edges to softly here. Note: I strongly recommend against watching the movie version with Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. It misfires again and again and I’m sorry Mr. Redford, but I’d like those two hours of my life back!

The book recounts Bryson’s quest from purchasing gear, to reading up on the many deadly dangers that hikers can, and have, encountered. Bears, and how to avoid being mauled to death, is a topic that comes up quite a few times. The book would have been richer if Bryson had included a better time frame from chapter to chapter, giving the reader an appreciation of the demands of the trail, section by section. The map at the beginning of the book is helpful, but no surprise, I would have liked to see more detailed maps and routes! Another of Bryson’s justified complaints is the lack of good maps for the hiker back in 1998. Access to a good map is always one of the keys to a good travel experience, whether on foot, wheels or from your armchair. Here’s an interactive example of how far we’ve come in 22 years courtesy of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) and National Park Service using ESRI’s Arc GIS Online mapping technology, and a big disclaimer: While useful, this map is for general reference purposes only and not intended to replace the more comprehensive and accurate A.T. printed hiking maps, available from the Ultimate Appalachian Trail Store.

If you are interested in the history of the AT, Bryson does a good job introducing the reader to the two men primarily responsible for bringing the trail into being. He introduces Benton MacKaye, a regional planner who first proposed the trail’s concept in 1920, to Myron Avery who worked to complete the project. Once again, The Appalachian Trail Conservancy is a good place to learn a lot more.

Only one in four who attempt to through-hike the trail succeed the 2190+ mile endeavor. It’s a hike I don’t have on my bucket list, but one that inspires me just the same.

Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufman

A sixteen year old boy from Kansas takes his fascination for birds to the highest level in his quest to locate and identify birds in the US and Mexico in the early 1970s. As Kaufman clarifies in the early pages of his memoir, he can’t accept what he does as ‘birdwatching’ because that has a passive connotation. Rather, his story describes the passionate, and in his case, relentless act of ‘birding’. Kaufman decides to attempt what is known as “A Big Year”, a competition to tally a staggering 600+ bird species in a single calendar year.

Think for a moment about the pre-cellphone, pre-Google maps era as people traveled great distances to follow the enigmatic patterns of migratory birds over the course of a year. Now, imagine being broke, no income, no car and no permanent place to call home and you begin to envision the determination this quest required. Aside from coordinated meetings with fellow birders at seasonal events and specific locations, Kaufman hitchhiked across the nation, and astoundingly even up into the farthest reaches of Alaska, to find and tally “his” birds. The weather alone proved challenging, not to mention finding reliable, safe rides. He spent countless hours standing on the roads of America watching cars and trucks pass him by.

With wonderfully descriptive chapter titles like; Finding the Road, California Influence, Strategy and Hard Weather, To the Promised Landfill, Dry Tortugas, A Thousand Miles of Gravel, The Edge of the World, Exhausting the Possibilities, and Border Patrol, the reader comes to appreciate the many decisive points along the journey. The inclusion of a map showing the route described in each chapter is invaluable as the saga unfolds. Of course, there are good illustrations of a handful of birds which are credited to Kenn Kaufman himself. Kaufman is also the author of the Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, a bible in the hands of those who know a little or a lot about birding.

Does the young guy achieve the highest tally of the year? No spoiler here, but as the quest wears him out, and still exhilarates him, the author learns a lifetime’s worth of sacrifice and reward.

 

The Hare with Amber Eyes A Family’s Century of Art & Loss

Edmund De Waal

This true account of the author’s ancestors between 1871 and 2009 moves along slowly, almost serenely, and I believe with good reason. His focus from the beginning of this archival labor of love is an inherited 264 piece collection of Japanese netsuke.

Don’t know what those are? Neither did I, and I realize that while the author includes photos of people and places, maps and a family tree, I wish he would have included a photo or illustration of these treasures. I found this article in The Guardian which highlights just a few.

ne·tsu·ke/ˈnetso͝oˌkē,ˈnets(ə)ˌkā/

  1. a small carved ornament, especially of ivory or wood, worn as part of Japanese traditional dress as a toggle by which an article may be attached to the sash of a kimono.

The Ephrussi family banking empire began in Odessa, and their wealth and prestige grew as they ultimately lived in Paris, Switzerland and Austria. The author takes his time describing the family members. They were art collectors, businessmen, ladies of society, lawyers, engineers, and they also happened to be Jewish at a dangerous time in history.

Anti-semitism compelled them to leave Paris, but nothing could help them avoid the night of March 11, 1938 when their slowly unraveling freedoms and peace came to a cataclysmic end in the Anchluss.

The netsuke collection’s amazing journey and survival give De Waal a rope to pull the story from letters, archives and interviews. It’s a testament to holding on to things and letting go as well. Perhaps they are simply too precious to him to share a photo with us, the readers of his story.