At this point in River-Horse we're in the Rockies, boating or canoeing down mountain streams. It's a difficult way, since the water is unpredictable, and what's underneath the water even more so. But they're slowly heading toward the Continental Divide, where they will finally be going downstream, after weeks of traveling upstream on the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers.
The writer is an interesting fellow; his voice is quite distinctive. He characterizes his crew and others he meets along the way as highly skeptical of his venture, and critical of him for trying it. It seems in every chapter he needs to make it clear to the reader and his crew that he's the one true believer in their ability to make it to the Pacific. Every day, it seems, he must convince them to stick with it. He keeps going despite the odds because to him it's a quest--they're just along for the ride. I wonder if his crew would characterize it the same way. It'd be interesting to see if their comments have been published anywhere.
Heat-Moon does seem an egotist, but he also seems very concerned about the environment and how industry and government are wrecking it. He acknowledges the changes that are slowly taking place, though, in how waterways are treated and used. (He gives a begrudging nod to the Corps of Engineers now and again.) Sometimes he even seems conflicted about what is better--the improved waterway or the wild river. The wild river is more scenic, more natural, but not very easy to navigate, and in those places where it has been made into a channel or a reservoir, Heat-Moon seems at times relieved to have a break from the natural river with all its twists and turns, variable depths, and unexpected hazards. One can imagine that's how people in the 19th and early 20th centuries felt when the improvements were first made.
I'm still enjoying the book and the author's rich descriptions of each place with its flora and fauna and its bipedal inhabitants and their structures. I think, though, that I too am going to be happy when we're on the downhill side of the journey, at the tail of the Snake, as it were. The fact that I feel that way is a masterful stroke on the author's part, I think. He is not just chronicling the journey; he's making the reader feel it as much as possible the way he felt it. When we come to the end we will be as jubilant as he, I think.
There's an interesting part of the book that points to that effect in a way. When he's traveling through the flat landscape of the Dakotas, instead of narrating the highlights day by day, as he has done throughout the book, he reproduces his journal entries covering several days at once. In this way he shows us that it is so tedious, so unchanging from one day to the next, that summary is the best way to convey it. What was most interesting to me, though, is realizing that he had been narrating one day at a time (a day per chapter)--he had purposely been going that slowly.
I hope to have River-Horse finished by next week. I'm going to feel a little like Lewis and Clark, I think, by the time I reach the Pacific: "Ocean in view! O! the joy."
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