This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favourite 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 try to sum up my reading experience.
I can sum it up in one word: pleasure. I enjoyed reading these books immensely. I enjoyed being out on the rivers – the Nahanni, the Mississippi, and the Congo. I enjoyed the company of the authors. I enjoyed the adventure. Most of all, I enjoyed the writing. So much so, I can’t stop quoting it. Here is Patterson describing the arrival of a Chinook:
On December 7 there was a ring round the sun and the copper color of a Chinook in the sky, but on the eighth it was still cold, and I crossed the Nahanni to the Prairie Creek bar to lift some frozen traps and to make one or two lynx sets. I built a fire at midday over towards the sheep lick and made tea there, and, as I sat and ate my lunch in the low sunlight, all of a sudden the Chinook broke, “a roaring warm wind – almost it might have been the hot breeze of June. I went through the Prairie Creek Gap on the frozen river – an awe-inspiring place with its overhanging cliffs and its floor of clear, green ice.” Down through feet of ice, the movement of the rushing water beneath would be indicated, once in a while, by the passage of a leaf or twig, and once the shadowy outline of a fish appeared from the depths below.
Here is Raban describing the interior of a Mississippi lock chamber:
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.
And here is Butcher evoking the feel of a pirogue’s hull:
I ran my wet fingers across the coarse hull of the pirogue, tracing gouges left by the boatmakers’s adze. They felt like a rough-hewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed and cursed by this great natural phenomenon.
The writing in these books is excellent – clear, fresh, specific, vivid. It has the breath of life.
Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three great books. I picture it like this:
A 1927 map of the Northwest Territories of Canada, showing the South Nahanni River; a 16-foot Chestnut Prospector canoe; a moose; northern lights; a Dall sheep ram with massive, curling horns; a campfire; Patterson’s photo of the Falls of the South Nahanni; a black bear; a stone arrowhead; Patterson’s photo of the cabin in Deadman’s Valley; a pair of snowshoes; a .375 Mannlicher carbine; four dogs harnessed to a toboggan; a 1979 map of the Mississippi River from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Morgan City, Louisianna; a 16-foot Mirrocraft motorboat; a turtle; a pool table; Kaber’s Supper Club in Prairie du Chien; a water moccasin; the towboat Jimmie L.; the Redstone cocktail lounge in Dubuque; a butterfly; the Book of Mormon; the derelict Mark Twain Hotel in Hannibal; the Community Baptist Church in Andalusia; a fishing rod; the American Legion in Wabasha; a catfish; a 2004 map of the Democratic Republic of Congo, showing the Congo River; a Yamaha 100cc motorbike; a pirogue; a crocodile; a kingfisher; a cockroach; a bottle of Primus beer; water hyacinth; a pangolin. Overlap these maps and images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and randomly across the surface paint three stripes representing the three rivers – one blue (Nahanni) and two tan (Mississippi and Congo). I call my collage “Rabutchson.”
