3 for the River: Structure

This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their structure.

All three of these books are structured chronologically. Patterson’s Dangerous River consists of two narratives: the solo 1927 trip, and the 1928-29 trip with Gordon Matthews. The first trip is chronicled in the first three chapters (“The Legend,” “South Nahanni River,” and “The Trail South”). The second one is covered in the remaining four chapters (“Deadman’s Valley,” “Fall of the Leaf,” “Winter Trails,” and “Awakening of the River”). Both narratives flow through time and space in classic sequential fashion – one day after another: “Next morning it was cold and misty ...”; “The next morning I was up at four ...”; “The following morning, just to make tracking difficult, there was a northwest wind ...”; “I woke at four to a lovely morning ...”; “As I poled up the river next morning ...”; “Mist hid the Flat River that last morning at Faille’s cabin ...”; “The following afternoon we came to the foot of the Falls ...”; “There was one more day’s work to be done on the cabin, so we were up at five ...”; “Next morning I cached some heavy stuff back in the bush....” There are no flashbacks or flashforwards. The book unfolds like a magnificent journal. It is a magnificent journal, with passages from Patterson’s actual diary embedded within it. For example,

I wrote up my diary that night by the light of the fire, in camp about thirteen miles above Fort Liard: “A day of amazing beauty, utterly clear. Long reaches of quiet water with much gabbling of wildfowl. Fresh mountains coming into view, snow capped; a sky of bronze with clouds like goose feathers and a ring around the sun – a winter sky and yet warm and soft.” As I wrote a great harvest moon climbed up over the mountains, lighting up the distant snow and throwing into relief the eddying swirls of the river. Moths came fluttering out of the darkness in to the firelight, and the twin scents of autumn lay heavy on the camp – wood smoke and dead leaves.

Raban’s Old Glory moves day by day down the Mississippi, starting in Minneapolis, September 3, 1979, and ending three-and-a-half months later in the river delta near Morgan City, Louisiana. The book is divided into eleven chapters. The first chapter (“The River”) describes Raban’s obsession with the Mississippi, sourced in his reading of Huckleberry Finn, when he was seven. The remaining ten chapters each describe a leg of the journey. For example, Chapter 2 (“Casting Off”) runs from the slip at Minneapolis to the lock at the Falls of St. Anthony. It contains this vivid passage:

The lock had seemed huge when I’d stood above it four days ago. Inside the chamber, it felt twice as big. I clung to my pair of ropes. The water began to bubble and boil as the lock emptied. The boat edged down the slimy wall, and the faces above my head grew smaller and vaguer. As I dropped to thirty, then forty, then fifty feet down, it was like entering a new element in which the air was dank and cellarlike; I was far out of earshot of the people I had left back up there in the city daylight, their voices lost in the gurgling and sluicing of Mississippi water. The boat tugged and swung on the ropes, and even in a sweater I was shivering. Looking up at the pale pink blotches of Herb, the King and the lockmaster, I felt that this descent was a kind of symbolic induction, a rite of passage into my new state as a river traveler.

Two of Old Glory’s chapters chronicle Raban’s extended visits in St. Louis and Memphis. In Chapter 7 (“Marriage à la Mode”), he moves in with a St. Louis woman named Sally. In Chapter 9 (“A Sleep Too Long”), he gets involved in the Memphis mayoral election campaign of Reverend Judge Otis Higgs. These chapters are absorbing. But I was happy when Raban returned to the river and his journey downstream. That’s where his heart is. That’s where his descriptive power is strongest.

Tim Butcher’s Blood River is a chronological account of his three-thousand-kilometer journey through the Congo in 2004, following the historic route of journalist-explorer Henry Morton Stanley. It’s structured in twelve chapters, plus Preface and Epilogue. Like the other two books, each chapter recounts a stage of the journey. For instance, Chapter 5 (“Walked to Death”) describes Butcher’s harrowing five-hundred-kilometer motorbike ride through the jungle from Kalemie to Kasongo. Here’s a sample:

For tens of kilometres we saw no villages or signs of life, slowing only when the track crossed a stream or river. These crossings became the curse of the journey because no sooner had we picked up speed than we had to slow, stop and pick our route over the waterway. There were scores of them. In some places branches had been felled to form a primitive bridge, but each crossing was hazardous, and countless times I had to jump off the back and help drag the two bikes across. I saw why any bike bigger than 100cc would be too cumbersome and heavy to manhandle through the eastern Congo. 

Butcher’s account of his trip moves in the most natural way, day by day, logging his thoughts and impressions as he goes. I relish this journal-like form of writing.

All three of these books contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.