River-Horse

This was a chance find in a secondhand bookshop: I didn't know anything about the author, but the idea of travelling across the USA by boat sounded daft enough to make an interesting book, so I thought I'd give it a try. It turns out that William Least Heat Moon is a Great American Individualist in everything including his prose style. He specialises in recycling old words that have lain forgotten in lexicographers’ junk bins since the last time a Victorian poet needed them to make a line scan or an eighteenth-century geographer lost for an English term copied them from a French gazetteer. And he has a very particular way of getting syntax into a state where it always looks subtly wrong, but you can never quite put your finger on why. show more Apparently he is or was an English professor, which probably explains a lot.

The odd thing is that his strange way of writing, so irritating when you first encounter it, seems to grow on you: after the first three or four chapters, I was really enjoying it. Technically it's terrible, but it has such warmth and energy and personality that, whilst you wouldn't want to play Scrabble with him, you do rather get to like the author, groaning bad-pun-style whenever he comes up with a ridiculously obscure way of saying something very simple.

The boat-trip is quite fun too, and WLHM’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the geography and history of the USA combines very well with his sharp eye for the damage that people have done to its “wilderness” environments. show less

The author goes by the dignified name of William Least Heat-Moon, and the front cover of his book shows a tiny speck of a boat puttering serenely on a river that meanders through the green hills. I don’t think I can be entirely faulted for anticipating a read that was more sedate, less angry, and less cynical than this one turned out to be.

Some miscellaneous comments:

1) There’s no denying that the author is a very talented writer.
2) I got tired of his profanity pretty quickly.
3) The book’s dedication makes it sound like the copilot was a composite of seven different people. If so, they all had pretty much the same personality.
4) “The Photographer” is one of the main figures, but very few photographs of any worth made it into show more the book.
5) The author despises the partying frat boys he encounters along his way, but he and his friends sometimes act like superannuated frat boys themselves.
6) The author is angry about the environmental state of the country, and he’s not shy about sniping at those he feels are to blame. I doubt that he turned very many of his readers Green. I think he would have been more successful if he had either molded his anger into a cogent argument or had very clearly led by example. What was the environmental cost of his journey? How would he possibly have made this journey if engineers had left the wilderness alone? That last question is actually posed to him by someone he meets on his voyage. His response was weak, I thought. show less

The last book in Heat-Moon's travel trilogy, read in a buddy read with my dad. Perhaps my least favorite of the three, though while it is poorer in the charming glimpses into the lives of the strangers that Blue Highways has, at least it carries less of Heat-Moons women baggage.

The conceit of this book is that it is the record of Heat-Moon's attempt to travel across the U.S., from Atlantic to Pacific, in a single season, traveling as many miles by river as humanly possible. (Some stretches, particularly at the continental divide, are simply not passable by boat.) This trip, being by water rather than road, affords rather fewer chances for Heat-Moon to run into and get stories out of strangers, particularly as most American cities have show more turned their backs on their rivers (both literally and figuratively), pluse the conditions of traveling by river are certainly more variable than traveling by road. So this has a much higher travel:people stories ratio. Of course, while there are riveting and hair-raising stretches, so mcuh of traveling by river is monotonous. And for long portions of the trip, Heat-Moon's only company is Pilotis, a character we never really fully get a grasp on, and who has a kind of shorthand with Heat-Moon which is sometimes very clever, but often brusque.

Plus, there is the fact that a cross-country road trip sounds romantic. I spent much of Blue Highways wishing that I could justify going on a similar trip. But for this book? While there were isolated locations I would love to go see, I don't know who would POSSIBLY read this book and think that a coast-to-coast river trip sounded like a good idea. Especially not in a single season.

But there are things I have come to expect from Heat-Moon: unexpected vocabulary (orzizzazz?), unique reflections, some really beautiful passages of prose, enough run-ins with truly extraordinary people to make one suspect that perhaps everyone is extraordinary, and reason to believe that after finishing another of his books, that one is left knowing America immeasurably better.

These books are a gift. show less

I liked the idea of the book, and the author is a good storyteller, but I have to admit, two thirds of the way through I was suffering from river-story fatigue. The chapter-a-day thing eventually started wearing me down, and indeed the author admits as much when he condenses two longer runs into little more than slightly cooked notes which are much less engaging than the rest of the story. One more quibble, the author seems to have a love of obscure words--I don't remember ever having to look up so many in a non-technical book. The ending is, to put it mildly, anticlimactic. It may just be that I found the story too long and too repetitive. I stuck with it stubbornly to the end, as did the author, and I certainly learned a lot about show more American rivers. Have a book of his shorter pieces,"Here,There,Elsewhere," which I will give a try. Haven't read the book he's famous for but it's on my list too. show less

Great book about an epic river trip across America in the late 1990's. Learned a lot of local history and that Mr. Trigdon is a great wordsmith. He was also able to expound on the sublimity of nature while not going into a tailspin when mentioning darker moments in our history, Makes me want to go to NW Oregon.

Pretty good travel story...but it dragged a bit in spots. The best parts were the descriptions of the 'characters' they met along the way. All things considered, I like BLUE HIGHWAYS a bit more!.

I have lived within 25 miles of the Missouri River most of my life -- from Montana to Missouri to North Dakota. Much of the author's water voyage was spent on the Missouri in places that are familiar to me. This is a great read by a writer with a marvelous vocabularly. Keep a dictionary at hand -- chances are you will need it! A great book for word lovers.