Hmmm, I enjoyed both River Horse, mostly because of the C Dory thread. But then when I picked up Blue Highways, I enjoyed it for the descriptions and out of the way places. Certainly River Horse did give C Dory a good plug, even though at times his "seamanship" might be a bit suspect....I wouldn't be surprised if some of the owners were introduced to the C Dory through this book. It is certainly a cheap read--since there are over 250 copies used on the internet for one cents, plus $3.99 shipping and handling.
One reviewer says: "I got in here because i just finished River Horse, which i bought at Powells while on a visit. It just shone out on a shelf and said, "Read Me." One of the most verbiant, richly delivered and honest books i hve ever read. He uses words i did not know. We are colleagues from Mizzou, one of the finest educational institutions in the world, and he is bringing me back to the craft and the passion that i learned there."
A portion of the Bookreview.com: "In our minds we're all adventurers, and narratives that extol the virtues of finding one's own way can either make our own dreams more vivid and accessible or come off as self-satisfied and smarmy mirrors of ugly ego.
Enter William Least Heat-Moon, whose travels on the blue highways of America almost two decades ago made the aimless journey a spiritual and communal necessity. Now, he's taken on the "web of faint azure lines, a varicose scribing of my atlas" --- the rivers and waterways that extend nearly nonstop from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Northwest.
The result, once again, is both spectacular and inspirational.
The four-month voyage, undertaken in a 22-foot motor boat equipped with two Honda engines, a kayak, and a canoe, springs from the depths of the soul, the journey motivated by the maps that Heat-Moon has taken as his Bible, their meanderings and interconnections his gospel. The outset is understated and oddly grandiose, the effect of a traveler truly passionate enough about his pursuit to become simultaneously (and paradoxically) arrogant and small. His copilot, Pilotis (one of seven people who accompanied the author throughout the trip and whom Heat-Moon grouped under the one name), records the occasion and the author responds:
"'And that's how it begins,' said my friend, a blue-water sailor, one whom I shall call Pilotis (rhymes with 'my lotus'). It wasn't, of course, the beginning, for who can say where voyage starts --- not the actual passage but the dream of a journey and its urge to find a way? For this trip I can speak of a possible inception: I am a reader of maps, not usually nautical charts but road maps. I read them as others do holy writ, the same text again and again in quest of discoveries, and the books I've written each began with my gaze wandering over maps of American terrain."
At better than 500 pages, one wonders why the author chooses "to skip details of how, during those two decades [of road travel], I discovered inch by inch a theoretical route a small vessel might, at the proper time of the year, pursue westward from the Atlantic an interior course of five thousand miles, equivalent to a fifth of the way around the world, ideally with no more than seventy-five miles of portage, to reach the Pacific in a single season." He skips very few other details of the journey, and that's a good thing. The observations and the historical asides accrete nicely to form the bigger picture."
Big and unusual words aside, I believe that it is a very worthwhile narrative about both the C Dory and Americana. I would recommend River Horse for the person who is considering buying one, since it does point out some of the limits and weaknesses of the breed.
