William Least Heat-Moon’s four-month odyssey across the U.S. in a two-person dory may have produced a fresh new angle from which to view America and American life. However, it will do little to revive small watercraft as a legitimate alternative for personal transportation.
In 1995, Heat-Moon accomplished a rare and perhaps novel feat: completing a water-borne trip across the continental U.S. in one season with only some 100 miles by portage.
In his recently released book “River-Horse, A Voyage Across America,” the renowned travel writer recounts the trip as alternately monotonous and stressful, even dangerous–and never fast.
Heat-Moon acknowledged that a strong hiker could have beaten him from New York to Oregon by several weeks. And often on his torturous trips through rivers, lakes and canals, Heat-Moon’s sturdy dory was passed by bicyclists.
Of course it would be easier to helicopter to the top of Mt. Everest than to climb it. And likewise Heat-Moon was able to see a river view of the country and store up another catalog of interesting people and places as he did in “Blue Highways,” the 1983 travel book about the back roads of America on which much of his reputation rests.
By traveling, slowly, by water, Heat-Moon and his succession of co-pilots gained a more intimate connection with his country.
“I think we all came to feel we belonged to the country in a different way than on a highway. Rivers are a living entity and when you spend days and days and months on the river ways, it’s hard not to feel you are traveling on something with a real personality,” Heat-Moon said in an interview.
A short, wiry man with an immaculate helmet of gray hair, Heat-Moon remains the spitting image of the author-adventurer. He has longed been obsessed with geography.
Since childhood, Heat-Moon has been keeping track of every American county he has set foot in and says he has only 300 out of about 5,000 to go. He also keeps a geographic diary of every major location he has spent more than a few minutes in.
“I just get a real sense of pleasure out of being able to say I’ve been there, of knowing a place,” Heat-Moon explained.
So it is not surprising that for more than 20 years, he has been planning a boat trip across the continental United States. For much of that time he was frustrated, not being able to find the right route or the right boat.
The route was difficult because Heat-Moon imposed a ban on border waters, such as the St. Lawrence Seaway or the Gulf of Mexico. He hit on a wandering route using all the different water bodies imaginable, the Erie Canal, smaller rivers such as the Hudson and the Ohio; the giants Missouri and Mississippi; reservoirs, lakes and streams.
With his trademark loquacious writing style, Heat-Moon conveys the ever changing river ways as he moves across America. A good deal of his path echoed three of the great early explorers of North America, Lewis and Clark and Henry Hudson.
Until a few months before the trip was supposed to begin in April 1995, Heat-Moon could not find a suitable boat. He needed something that was rugged and stable yet with a very shallow draft and a long cruising range. Shortly before the trip, he came across an advertisement in a marine magazine from C-Dory, a boatmaker in Kent, Wash.
In the C-Dory Cruiser, Heat-Moon found everything he needed. Of part Osage Indian ancestry, Heat-Moon (originally William Trogdon) gave his boat the name Nikawa, an Osage name that translates as “River-Horse.”
Perhaps “Work-Horse” would have been as appropriate.
At a stubby 22-feet long, the C-Dory is about as sexy looking as the S.S. Minnow, but the castaways would have wished for something as tough and reliable as the dory.
The C-Dory stands 7 1/2-feet tall and weighs about 2,500 pounds with the gas tanks full. Its hull has a composite core sheathed in hand-laid fiberglass that can take heavy waves or being dragged onto an icy Alaskan shore.
Mark Toland, the co-owner of C-Dory, said the boat was built in 1979 for Eskimos and others along the southeastern coast of Alaksa. He said the C-Dory is prized for its economical cruising range and ability to handle heavier seas and shallow waters alike.
“Its original design was as a sort of Jeep for working people. It was affordable, could handle heavy loads and heavy seas, but also take on shallow inland waters,” Toland said.
The first design was very similar to the bent-plank boats 17th Century fisherman used on the East Coast. Toland said that since a full redesign 1986, the C-Dory still has many of the looks and handling of a classic dory, but is now built much differently and not quite as ruler-line flat.
“Our old design, the bottom was so flat you could lick them and stick them on a wall, just like any of the old-time dories,” he said.
Dories, by definition, are flat-bottomed, and for Heat-Moon the most important statistic was the fact that the C-Dory needs only seven inches of water in which to float.
That shallow draft was critical, particularly in the shallow rivers and streams northwest of the Missouri River. Even so, the tension of the book is Heat-Moon’s battle against floodwaters, bent props and river way bureaucracy to reach the Northwest in summertime while snowmelt still made the upper Missouri navigable.
For Heat-Moon the geographic is personal. His favorite river was the one he grew up near: the Missouri. He argues that the Missouri is at least as important (historically, aesthetically and environmentally) as the Mississippi.
“The problem is Mark Twain is such a damn wonderful writer, that he’s sort of prejudiced every one in favor of the Mississippi.”
Except Heat-Moon.
“It (the Mississippi) has become one long condo,” Heat-Moon said. Though he loved the Missouri because of its ever-changing nature, it was also the site of his near-failure. Floodwaters forced him to take two days off the river. Halfway through the voyage, he was anxious to make the Northwest before the streams ebbed, but in addition to the floods, he also had beatup props and empty gas tanks to confront.
“It was the darkest moment. I was so depressed I couldn’t get out of bed. I was asking myself why am I doing this?” Heat-Moon said. “Maybe because it’s where I grew up, I started thinking about my father, who had died pretty recently. And I thought this is it. You’re done.”
“But just like that things started to come together. The props were fixed. We got gas. We started moving again.”
Also critical is the C-Dory was designed for power by two Honda four-stroke 45-horsepower engines.
They rarely achieved a speed of much more than 15 knots (17.25 m.p.h.), but provided a range of as many as 200 miles, important on waters such as the Mississippi or Lake Erie, where fueling was never easy to find. His options were largely limited to harbors and boatyards.
The C-Dory Cruiser is not a luxury model, and Heat-Moon stripped his craft down a little more. The cabin fit two, and not spaciously. One of the taller versions of Pilotis had to travel in a sort of standing curl position to avoid bumping his head on the top of the 6-foot, 2-inch cabin. (“Pilotis” is the Greek-derivative name that Heat-Moon applied to his seven co-pilots as a rhetorical device in the book.)
The C-Dory was equipped with just the basic gauges, compass, depth finder, tachometers and gas tank gauges. The author used an Apeclo pocket model for his marine radio.
To lighten the craft, and avoid unnecessary stops, even the chemical toilet was left behind. The windshield was cleared with a single, hand-cranked wiper.
Unlike the other model, the C-Dory Angler, the Cruiser had an extra 22 inches length to accommodate a small galley and a small dinette that converts to a berth.
The most underrated portion of Heat-Moon’s River-Horse was its inherent stability, particularly on Lake Erie, which gave the dory and its two-member crew a good beating when the wind picked up.
“Pilotis said the name of my book should be “One God-Damned Scare a Day,” Heat-Moon recalled.
Stuck for days on the flooded Missouri River and running out of time, Heat-Moon almost gave up his journey or felt he would have to wait a year. But he perservered, eventually pouring a bottle of water he had collected from the Atlantic into the Pacific.
“For most people when they enter a city, they see franchises, chain restaurants, billboards, transmissions shops, all that sort of thing,” Heat-Moon said. “On the water route, I saw maybe two billboards my entire trip. This really is an amazing country, especially from the view from which I saw it.”
