3 for the River: Conclusion

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; an abandoned paddle-steamer; a cockroach; a bottle of Primus beer; water hyacinth; Stanley Falls; 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.”

3 for the River: Details

This is the eleventh 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 focus on their amazing use of detail.

These three great books abound with inspired details: the shaving lather on Patterson’s rifle after he shoots a moose (“I was sitting on a log having my weekly shave when I heard a stone rattle. I looked up, and there was a bull moose by the water’s edge a couple of hundred yards up the Flat. Very quietly I put down my shaving brush and picked up my rifle and fired. Down came the moose, and I wiped the lather off the stock of the rifle and set the weapon back against the log”); the sinister wing dam that Raban momentarily glimpses while fishing for walleye on Lake Pepin (“The wake of a big downstream tow pulled the water away from the wing dam; just for a second it lay exposed, a serrated line of rocks like a jawbone of blackened teeth”); in Butcher’s Blood River, the coil of ivy that the palm-oil trader carries with him on his bicycle to use as a tire patch (“He smiled when I asked him what the loop of ivy was for. ‘That is from a rubber tree. If I have a flat, I break the ivy and a glue comes out that will mend the puncture. It is the repair kit of the forest’ ”).  

Patterson is a superb describer of method, of how he does things – makes a campsite, builds a log cabin, sews a pair of fur mitts. His art is in his precise details. Here’s an excerpt from a brilliant two-and-a-half-page description of how he manages to make a snug campsite in a blizzard: 

It was a dirty night. The roar of the wind could be heard out on the open river: inside the trees one could feel it a little and occasionally there would come the whirring thud of snow dislodged by the gentle movement of the branches. I chose two spruce about ten feet apart, more or less in line with the wind, and with an open space in front of them. I snowshoed quickly around the campsite, sharply striking each overhanging tree twice with the back of the little axe; that fetched down any loose snow that would otherwise fall into camp or on to the fire when the heat from the flames rose among the branches. Then I trimmed the two chosen spruce up to a height of about six feet, laying the small dead branches in a pile to serve as kindling. Next, off came the snowshoes, and one of them was used as a shovel to dig down to ground level, banking the snow up all around, but especially behind the fireplace where it would act as a reflector. Then I laid the kindling in the fireplace, together with a twist of birch bark from my pocket. A match was applied and the little pile burst into flame. I nursed it carefully, adding bigger twigs and then branches and then a log or two – anything I could reach till it became a fire. I got the tea pail and filled it with snow, rammed in and pressed down, for this dry snow is nothing but frost crystals; it has nothing in common with the snow of southern lands, and there is very little water in it. I pushed back the blazing logs and set the tea pail on the ashes, right against the hottest part of the fire – it was safe there and could not overturn. Next, I cut down a tall, dead spruce, about fifteen inches through, that was standing handy. I felled it behind the fire and moved alongside it on snowshoes, trimming the branches and flinging an armful on the fire to get more light to work by; then I cut through the tree and moved forward first one end and then the other of the big log till it lay resting on the snow wall at each end, just above and just back of the fire – between the fire and the big reflector wall of snow. The flames promptly curled around it and soon it would be a glowing, radiant mass of charcoal on the surface, giving out heat all night and ready to burst into flame again at breakfast time.

That “together with a twist of birch bark from my pocket” is wonderful – a real woodsman’s detail.

Raban’s forte is river description. Detail after detail gleams in his depiction of the Mississippi: “I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak”; “I was afloat over a stump field submerged under just a few inches of water. As a roller sucked the river away, it exposed the bed of black-buttery peat, the sawed-off boles like bad teeth, and the boat grounded with a groan and a bang, the motor stalling as it hit a root”; “The current grabbed hold of the boat, flipped it around, and sent it skittering southward out of the city like a puck on an ice rink. I hardly had time to get the motor going before I was swept past the floating depot where the tows refueled and was into the humping, broken water below the highway bridges.”

I could go on quoting forever. Raban’s details are often in his adjectives – not just “peat,” but “black-buttery peat”; not just “boles,” but “sawed-off boles”; not just “water,” but “humping, broken water.” 

My favorite details in Tim Butcher’s Blood River describe his experience traveling down the Congo in a pirogue: “The low wicker seat was smaller than my backside, but it was surprisingly comfortable and as the paddlers began to find their rhythm, I let my fingertips trail in the river water. It was as warm and soothing as a bath.” “I ran my wet fingers across the coarse hull of the pirogue, tracing gouges left by the boatmaker’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.” Regarding his guides’ paddles, he writes,

The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled wooden paddles. About three metres long, they were shape of spades from a deck of cards, only stretched out to mansize, with shafts that were thin and shiny, polished by years of being slid through calloused hands. The leaf-shaped blade spread broad and fat before tapering gracefully to a point. It was no surprise when later on the journey I saw them being used both as trays for food and as weapons for fighting.

He describes the paddlers’ way of drinking from the river: “To drink they would squat down while we were out in midstream, lower their faces over the edge of the pirogue until their lips were suspended maybe ten centimetres above the river and literally throw the water into their mouths with their hands.” 

Butcher even describes what happens on a pirogue when you have to urinate:

They peed over the edge of the boat and were as sure-footed as if they were standing on terra firma. I was more ungainly, so when I tried, the effort of standing up and keeping my balance made me way too tense. Only after hours of discomfort could I build up the pressure required to overcome my nerves, and then only if I kneeled on my rucksack. Standing on the wobbly pirogue was much too nerve-racking ever to enable me to pee. 

Butcher’s immersive details put us squarely there, in the pirogue with him and his paddlers, as they make their way down the mighty Congo. It’s an unforgettable ride.  

In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books.

3 for the River: Figuration

This is the tenth 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 focus on their many vivid figures of speech.

In Dangerous River, Patterson writes, “After an hour or two’s travel a dirty, yellowish-looking ball climbed up out of the trees on the right bank and hung suspended in the sky, glowing feebly like a badly cleaned lantern.” He says of the wind, “The raving wind was whipping the tall spruce around like fishing rods.” Of wind and snow: “In the small hours of December 2, the wind rose to a gale and swung into the northwest, and from there it blew all day long, a searing blast of cold out of a cloudless sky, drifting the snow down the river with a hissing, scratching sound like that of driven sand.” He compares the canoeing prowess of his friend Albert Faille to that of a “fine swordsman”: 

The Nahanni has probably never seen a finer canoeman, and to watch Faille search out the weak spot in a riffle and plant his canoe’s nose exactly there, and neither to the right nor to the left by even a hand’s breadth, is like watching a fine swordsman seeking for an opening, feeling out his adversary. 

And in one of his most lyrical lines, Patterson writes, “The seed heads of the long, dry grass shone like silver against the low October sun: the meadows were wind rippled and from them came a new sound – a sound that is never heard in the dark forests of the North – the song of the west wind in the wild standing hay.”

Raban’s Old Glory brims with figuration:

The afternoon was rank and sweaty, and the Mississippi here drifted in a listless sweep between two bridges, a mile north of the end of commercial navigation. It looked as tame as a fishpond in a civic park. 

Rising fish left circles on the water here, and the current squeezed them into narrow ovals, before they faded into the scratched wax polish of the top of the river. 

The tow went by, dragging the river in creases behind it like a trailed skirt. 

Big tows lounged on the current, thrashing the water around their tails, their engines farting loudly as they turned. They maneuvered lugubriously around each other, honking and grumbling, heaving their ridiculous bulk about like hippopotami at a water hole. 

Once, when I seesawed ineptly over a breaker, the propeller was lifted clear of the water and the engine made a vile sound like the squeal of a stuck pig. 

In front of the boat, the water had the gleaming consistency of molasse; behind, it lay smashed and buckled by my wake. 

Just beside my boat, a fish jumped. It was a big carp, and as it turned in the air and walloped back, it looked as if someone had chucked a block of gold bullion into the lake.

Still and brown, gleaming faintly in the thin, diffuse light, the lake had the vacant gaze of an enormous animal’s eye. 

As I reeled them in from under the boat, they changed from one metal color to another, coming up, struggling, through the peaty water: first an indeterminate flash of dull pewter, then a powerful glow of polished brass, finally a brilliant threshing of pure silver as they came wallowing to the net.  

The water felt as hard and fibrous as muscle tissue, and the whole structure of the boat throbbed as it hit each successive wave.  

The river stayed wide – four thousand yards from bank to bank – but the islands thickened until they lay as dense as the pieces of a disturbed jigsaw puzzle.

All I needed to watch was the scratched-glass surface ahead of the bow and the sun as it began to settle in the sky behind me. 

Wharves, cranes and smokestacks were going by in a blur of black type. 

At least I could see a reason for these eddies and learn to predict them before they swallowed me, but I couldn’t explain the boils. They came sprouting up from the river bottom, often in mid-channel, miles from any tongue of sand or rock. Their mushroom tops gleamed nastily, like patent leather. 

The junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a confluence of thick machine oil and rosewater. 

It was like riding a long slide on a children’s playground. The boat streamed with the current. 

By nine, the sky had gone blue, the wave points glittered, and I could feel the wind on my cheeks, coming in long warm gusts like the breath of a panting dog. 

I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak. 

Tim Butcher’s Blood River contains at least a dozen evocative figures of speech. He says of his guide Benoit Bangana, “He was wearing a bright-yellow plastic raincoat, with heavy gloves, kneepads, goggles and black shiny wellington boots. He looked like a ninja North Sea trawlerman.” A wreck of an old boat has “panels eaten away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass.” The coarse hull of a pirogue feels like “a rough-hewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed and cursed by this great natural phenomenon.” The limbs of his sleeping river guides are “all folded together for warmth like the blades on a Swiss Army knife.” Their wooden paddles are “shape of spades from a deck of cards.” Rainforest trees have trunks “pleated into great sinews that plunged into the earth, as massive and solid as flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral.” And this wonderful sentence: “As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my trousers I brushed them off like soot.” To evoke the Congo, Butcher borrows an image from Joseph Conrad: “And there was the river. Conrad’s uncoiling serpent grew fatter and fatter each day that we descended.”

Figuration is one tool these three great writers use to describe their travels. Another is detail. That will be the subject of my next post in this series. 

3 for the River: Nature

This is the ninth 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 focus on their abundant nature content.

These three great books are in constant contact with first nature. That’s one of the of the many things I like about them. Dangerous River teems with wildlife: moose, black bears, grizzlies, eagles, wolves, beaver, caribou, Dall sheep, wild geese, lynx, mallards, whisky-jacks, blue grouse, marten, partridge, wolverine.

Here, in one of the book’s most memorable scenes, is Patterson’s encounter with a cow moose and her calf:

As I bailed I heard a grunting noise from upstream: a cow moose and her calf were swimming the river; the calf was having a rough time of it in the fast water, and the cow was talking to it and encouraging it. She probably intended to land where I had beached the canoe, but she saw me and headed straight for the bank, landing about a hundred yards upstream. The calf, however, had been doing its utmost and had nothing in reserve: it was swept down river and into the eddy, from which it splashed ashore about fifteen yards below camp. 

I was in the classic situation – in between mother and child; and mother weighed about eight hundred pounds, and a decidedly querulous note was creeping into her grunts. The calf let out a feeble bleat and the cow came a little closer, grunting angrily. I waded ashore and gently took down the rifle from the tree close to the canoe where it was hanging. Then I waded into the river to see if I could get around the calf and chase it back upstream to its mother: out of the corner of one eye I could see that the soup was boiling over; the tea pail also had a fine head of steam up, and no doubt the rice was burning – and I silently cursed the whole tribe of moose right back to its remote beginnings. Anything but a prehistoric-looking beast like that would have had sense enough to stay out of camp!

I was in the water now as deep as I could get, the rifle held high in one hand and the other busily engaged in unknotting the red silk scarf that was round my neck. The calf was watching me: heaven send the little fool wouldn’t lose his head and take off down the canyon and get himself drowned; if he did the cow would blame it all on me and come charging through camp and wreck everything – and stop a bullet, when all I wanted was peace. But the calf never moved, and I came dripping out of the river below him and walked up the bank. He seemed to be petrified: not so the cow, however. She was working herself into a fine frenzy and pawing at the sand – a bad sign. It was high time to get that calf on the move.

I came right up behind him, flapped the red scarf suddenly and let out one devil of a yell. I had intended to fire a shot over him as well, just to speed him on his way, but there was no need for that – he was already going faster than any mortal moose calf had ever gone before. And how perfectly it was all working out! He would pass between my bedroll and the fire; no damage would be done and there would still be time to salvage something of my supper from the ruins of what might have been ... 

But how completely the picture changed, all in a fraction of a second! Just as the calf drew level with it a little breeze from the west flapped the shirt that was drying on the tree: he gave a blat of terror and shied sideways, stumbling over the long logs of the fire. Over went everything, but particularly the mulligan pot, which he sent flying ahead with his front feet. He then bucked over the fire and landed with one hind foot through the stout bail handle of the mulligan pot, which somehow stayed with him for about three jumps and then, as he freed himself from it with a vicious kick, sailed into the river, from which I rescued it. That was the end of the party, and judging by the row that came up from the beach, the guests were leaving in a hurry. Supper was a wreck, the partridge mulligan had gone down the river and the calf had pretty nearly squared the pot for me; I spent half the night hammering it round again with the back of an axe. 

That was the end of the party – Patterson’s irony makes me smile. The partridge mulligan had gone down the river – his word combinations are inspired. And note that “red silk scarf.” Patterson was a Nahanni dandy. 

There’s wildlife in Raban’s Old Glory, too: turtles, butterflies, carp, snakes. But nature is most present in his vivid descriptions of Mississippi water:

Here the water was a deep olive green, mottled all over with leaf shadows. 

Until the river straightened out, I didn’t realize the strength of the south wind. It was blowing dead against the current, and the water was crumpling into it, ridged with lines of whitecaps running so close together that the boat just rattled across the top of this bumpy, corrugated river. 

By time it reached me, it had accumulated a frightening height and weight: lines of chocolate combers ran straight up and down the channel. They took hold of the boat and rocked it over on its gunwales. 

I had entered an absolutely seamless world. Everything in it tended to one color. Its browns and greens and blues had been mixed until they’d gone to the translucent gray of dirty gauze. I couldn’t tell what was shore, sky or river. The current, exhausted by the sheer space of Lake Pepin, had stopped altogether. In front of the boat, the water had the gleaming consistency of molasses; behind, it lay smashed and buckled by my wake. I slowed right down until the propeller left only a little string of corkscrew whorls, and even they were the marks of a vandal on an otherwise immaculate landscape. 

I went through Lock 6 at Trempealeau and the river changed again, into another crazy terra-cotta of islands, lakes and creeks, with the buoyed channel running close under the bluff on the Minnesota shore. Here the water, sheltered from the wind, was as dark as boot polish. 

Then the smooth humps of the boils began again, and the lurching, slithery motion of the boat as the motor did its best to keep a grip on the cross-currents of these greasy swirls of spinning water. 

Wharves, cranes and smokestacks were going past in a blur of black type. I caught a momentary glimpse of the Gateway Arch, its scaly steel turning to gold in the sunset, but it was an irrelevance beside the whirling surface of the river. The water here was thicker and darker than I’d seen it before; all muscle, clenching and unclenching, taking logs as big as trees and roiling them around just for the hell of the thing. 

There were sharp rips and creases in the current now, as if the Mississippi were trying to tear itself apart; but the most scary change was the succession of great waxy boils. I could see them coming from a long way off. Most of the river was lightly puckered by the wind, but there were patches of what looked like dead-calm water: circular in shape, a hundred yards or so across. I took them for quiet millponds, good places to light a pipe or unscrew the cap of a thermos flask. Delighted to find that the Mississippi now afforded such convenient picnic spots, I drove straight for one. I hit its edge, the boat slewed sideways and I was caught on the rim of a spinning centrifuge. I had mistaken it for calm water because its motion was so violent that no wind could disturb it. I could see the cap of the boil far away in the middle, a clear eighteen inches higher than the rest of the river. From this raised point, the water was spilling around and down the convex face, disappearing deep into the crack in which my boat was caught. Running the engine at full speed, I yanked myself out easily enough, but I had felt the river trying to suck me under, boat and all, and I was tense with fright. 

The junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a confluence of thick machine oil and rosewater. 

The Mississippi was just making waves for the hell of it; give it the temptation of a shoal and it would run in dark, serrated combers, three and four feet high, showing off its muscles. 

As dawn came up, the river went to a dim, gauzy gray. We were leaving a trail of ragged creases in the water behind us. Both shores were unbroken cypress swamps. We passed between sandbars as cold and bare as bits of Mongolian desert. 

I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak. 

I crept into it as slowly and as quietly as I could, trying to let the boat do no more than stroke the water as it went. It was strange water, too. Ahead, lit my misty sunshine, it was milky, streaky green like polished soapstone. There was no wind and no current. It looked so stable an element that one might have carved ashtrays and telephone stands out of it. Behind the boat, though, where the motor was stirring it, it was thick and peaty like black syrup. 

Raban is a virtuoso water-describer: see also his brilliant Passage to Juneau (1999), reviewed in my series “3 for the Sea.”

In Tim Butcher’s Blood River, nature is sticky equatorial heat, heavy bush, glutinous mud, high-canopy trees. It’s river and rainforest. It’s ants, mosquitoes, and cockroaches. And on the river, it’s the ubiquitous “lilac blooms of the water hyacinth on their mattresses of matted tuber and leaf.” 

Here’s Butcher’s description of trees:

Within moments of leaving Ubundu we entered full rainforest. There were trees so high I could not make out any detail of the leaf canopy tens of metres over my head. Some of the trunks were pleated into great sinews that plunged into the earth, as massive and solid as flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral. And high above my head, but beneath the gloomy leaf canopy, I could make out boughs as square and broad as steel girders.

Ants:

At one point an obstacle made us stop in a thicket of giant bamboo. Canes as thick as my leg sprouted close together before splaying out as they grew longer and thinner. I spotted a long, thin black line that looked like a gunpowder trail from a western movie. Walking closer, I saw the line begin to move. At first it shifted as one, but as I got nearer it separated into millions of component parts – a column of ants.

“Get away, get away,” Michel shouted at me. I had heard stories of Congolese ant columns descending on villages and eating everything in their path. Infants, the elderly and the infirm will perish if left to be consumed by the column. A hunter told me that he would prepare the trophy from an antelope hunt by deliberately finding one of those ant columns and then throwing the dead animal’s skull into its path. When he came back the next day, the bone would be spotless, stripped of every last piece of flesh and gristle, tendon and tissue.

Stupidly ignoring Michel, I approached to what I took to be a safe distance and started taking photographs. Within seconds I had a bite on my knee, and then one on my thigh, then another on my back. As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my trousers I brushed them off like soot. It took ten minutes to undress and rid every last ant from the creases in my clothes. The worst of the bites stung for days. 

That “As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my trousers I brushed them off like soot” is wonderfully vivid. 

Butcher is excellent at conveying the intensity of Congo heat:

The climate gets crueler and crueler with the descent. As altitude is lost, with it goes any hope of a cooling breeze. I found by late morning, even on a hazy day, the steel panels on the decks would be throbbing with heat. They were studded with rice-grain-sized bulges for grip, and through the soles of my sandals I could feel each one radiating warmth.

Notice, in the above quotations, the beautiful figures of speech: “Wharves, cranes and smokestacks were going past in a blur of black type”; “The junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a confluence of thick machine oil and rosewater”; “I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak.” Patterson, Raban, and Butcher create vivid figuration. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

3 for the River: First Person

This is the eighth 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 focus on their use of the first person.

More than vivid action, more than pungent detail, more than memorable imagery, what I seek in literature is authenticity of personal experience. These three brilliant books brim with it. They are wonderful personal journals – living, breathing accounts of what their authors saw, did, felt, and thought as they made their way down (or, in the case of Dangerous River, up) the mighty rivers that are their great subject. What makes them personal is the author’s “I,” which is present on almost every page – never intrusively, never out of egotism, but only for the purpose of indicating that what’s being told really happened. The “I” authenticates the experience being described. Patterson writes, “I passed through the Gate of the Nahanni, where the walls close in and the quiet green river glides silently between tawny precipices that climb a thousand feet sheer into the sky,” and I believe him. I believe he was there. Raban writes, “I went through Lock 6 at Trempealeau and the river changed again, into another crazy terra-cotta of islands, lakes and creeks, with the buoyed channel running close under the bluff on the Minnesota shore,” and I believe him; I believe he was there. Butcher writes, “The first evidence I had that we had reached Ubundu was the sound of the rapids. For hundreds of kilometres the Congo River had ben mute and yet suddenly, as we rounded a headland, I could make out the sound of rushing water. It was terrifying.” Again, I believe him. I believe he was there. Actually, it’s not a matter of belief; it’s a matter of proof – credible evidence adduced by invaluable eye witnesses.     

Would it be different if these sentences were written in the third person? For me – absolutely. The third person is dry and impersonal. It’s detached from the reality it’s reporting. Patterson, Raban, and Butcher are not detached from their rivers. Quite the opposite: they are intimately attached. Their use of the first person powerfully conveys their attachment. 

Are these books self-portraits? Yes, totally. Raban, in Old Glory, encounters a resident of Muscatine, Brad Funk, who questions his motives for making the trip. “I’m worried that you’re going to condescend to us,” Funk says. Raban replies, “I’m just passing through, trying to watch what happens to me.” Funk says, “But you’re going to write a book.” Raban replies, “Yes, but it won’t be an ‘objective’ book. It’s not going to be the inside story on America. It might be the inside story on me, but that’s rather different.”

It might be the inside story on me. Right there, I think, Raban shows awareness of the double aspect of his project – both window and mirror. The same goes for Dangerous River and Blood River. They’re subjective to the bone. That’s what I love about them. They reflect the singular, idiosyncratic personalities of their authors. For example, here is Patterson, in Dangerous River, battling mosquitoes:

It had been a devil of a day. The night before had been hot, for there was hardly any darkness and no time for the earth to cool. The early morning was dead still and hot: it was the worst morning for mosquitoes that I ever saw. As the sun rose, the hum outside my net rose to a savage humming note: I counted the brutes on a certain area of the net, and then I multiplied that out and made a very conservative estimate of the number in the air. Why, dammit, there were two thousand of the maddening insects waiting out there, shouting for my blood! It wasn’t even worth fighting with them over breakfast; I would go straight on, and stop and breakfast when the breeze got up. So I reached out from under the net, grabbed a pot of cold rice and raisins and got it inside with me and had some of that. Then I dressed myself and oiled my face and hands with citronella and put on my bit of head protection – a square yard of mosquito netting, folded cornerways into a triangle of double thickness. I put this over my head like a shawl, crossed the ends under my chin, put them round the back of my neck and fetched them to the front again and tied them there, tucking them down into my shirt which I buttoned up tightly. Then I crammed a hat on my head over the netting, crawled out, tore camp to pieces, threw it into the canoe and grabbed the pole and went on.

That detailed procedural description of how he fashioned a mosquito head net for himself is pure Patterson. He’s lively, practical, resourceful. 

Raban, in Old Glory, learns the intricacies of the Mississippi as he goes. Sometimes he makes mistakes. For example, on the first day of his trip, he enters a lock prematurely. Here’s what happens:

I wasn’t even supposed to be here. In my newly won assurance I hadn’t troubled to notice the red light at the entrance, and as my boat slopped and skidded in the lock I got cursed for a blind sonafabitch shit who should’ve waited for the fuckin’ green light, you asshole. Were they going to drown me in cold blood in order to teach me a lesson? The lockman allowed me my rope only after he’d run through such a lexicon of expletives that the torrent of excrement being tipped on me from the lock wall was roughly equal to the volume of turbulent water on which I was just managing to keep afloat. I was torn between fright, fury and bleating apology. As I sank into the emptying chamber, I heard my own whinnying voice collapse into a stutter of f’s. F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f, I went, my own attempt at obscenity turning as seemly as a line of asterisks in a Victorian novel.

My own whinnying voice – Raban’s self-portrait is often unflattering. He’s as hard on himself as he is on other people. 

All three writers candidly express their emotions – joy, anger, anxiety, frustration, fear. Butcher, in Blood River, makes his fear palpable. It’s in his legs:

My legs ached with fear, but I tried to stride up the river bank with confidence, approaching a group of men sitting silently on the ground next to a quiver of beached pirogues. 

It’s in his eyes:

I knew my bravado to be a fragile thing with an unreliably short half-life. I also knew it would not be long before the Congolese gunman worked this out. Stomping off purposefully through the undergrowth, I was desperate to maintain the illusion of control.

All three writers are at once humanly fallible and thrillingly adventurous. They’re wonderful company. I admire them immensely. 

Postscript: Another aspect of these great books that I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.

3 for the River: People

This is the seventh 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 focus on their sense of people.

There aren’t many people in Patterson’s Dangerous River. The Nahanni River, when he went up it, in 1927, and again in 1928-29, was remote, wild territory, pretty much empty of humans, except for Indians. On his first trip, he encounters a man named Albert Faille, who is traveling up the Nahanni as far as Flat River. He makes friends with Faille. They camp together. He helps Faille build a log cabin on the Flat. He says of Faille, 

The Nahanni has probably never seen a finer canoeman, and to watch Faille search out the weak spot in a riffle and plant his canoe’s nose exactly there, and neither to the right nor the left by even a hand’s breadth, is like watching a fine swordsman seeking for an opening, feeling out his adversary.

Other people met by Patterson on that first trip are Arthur George, a fur trapper who has a cabin on the Liard River, where Patterson stays overnight on his way back out; Father Gouet, an old priest in Fort Liard; Archie Gardiner, a Fort Nelson guide; Corporal Barber, of the British Columbia Police, stationed in Fort Nelson; and Harry Weaver, captain of the freighter that takes Patterson down the Peace River.  

On his second trip up the Nahanni, Patterson is accompanied by his friend Gordon Matthews. They make a good team – capable, practical, adventurous. Substantial chunks of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are written in the “we”:

We left la Flair’s post next morning at 5:30 and thrummed up the quiet reaches of the river, almost to the foot of the Splits, without incident. 

In the morning we redistributed the heavy load between the two canoes and poled on into the Canyon.

We started early up the two big riffles. 

We dried the outfit and patched and mended the old freight canoe.

Two or three days later we were poling up a quiet, dreamy snye of the right bank, somewhere above the mouth of the Meilleur River.

There was no sense in going further – and so we made a camp and cooked supper and sat on the soft cushion of the dryas, eating and watching the red light of the sunset on the on the face of the Second Canyon Mountains.

And there was game: in the first hour, as we unloaded the canoes, we saw five moose either swimming or coming down to drink, and in the afternoon, two more. 

A week’s work followed, during which we cleared and levelled a site for a cabin, cut spruce for building timber, taking the trees from the south to let in the sunlight, and painted the canoes.

Two days later we roasted a haunch of that bear, spinning it suspended on a wire from an overhanging branch above a slow fire.

We got the sheep meat down to the canoe in one load, carrying all we could manage ourselves and packing the dogs with the rest; and very disgusted they looked, staggering along each with a heavy load of meat in his little canvas panniers.

They take turns hunting and exploring. One goes out for two or three days, sometimes a week or more; the other stays behind, tending camp. Patterson says of these periods of separation,

I don’t think that either Gordon or myself ever felt lonely in the generally accepted sense of the word, though we were often alone and far apart: there was so much to see and do in this strange new country that we were always far too much occupied and interested to have time for any mawkish feelings of loneliness. Neither of us had any brothers or sisters and that may have had something to do with it – we had never been accustomed to rely on the support of others. But there was also this, that we both took a certain pride in our ability to travel alone into places where most men would hesitate to go in couples.

That “there was so much to see and do in this strange new country” could be this great book’s tagline. There’s activity on every page – climbing mountains, hauling canoes up rapids, portaging, hunting, backpacking in the bush, packing meat into camp, building a log cabin. Patterson evokes Matthews’ vigorous character by describing his action. For example:

Gordon had been busy. The walls of the cabin were partly up and the rest of the logs were cut and lying in the bush; any trees that threatened the safety of the cache and cabin had been cut down, and all the tops and useless timber had been sawed up and split and now made the foundation of our winter wood pile. The clearing was a more open and orderly place than when I had last seen it – and, in addition to this, a lot of trapline had been cut out.

Other people encountered by Patterson on his second trip: Jack la Flair, who runs a trading post at the foot of Nahanni Butte; Albert Faille, who camps with Patterson and Matthews for a few days; Starke and Stevens, who are trying to drive a power scow up the Nahanni; Greathouse, Southard, and Quinlan, who have a cabin on the Nahanni; Ole Lindberg and his wife, who have a cabin on the Liard River; Joseph Marie Cote, who has a cabin on the Liard; Carolus, the young Indian man who guides Patterson through fierce wind and snow on the trail to Fort Simpson; the group of nine Indians who visit Patterson at his cabin, drink a bucket of tea, and give him a present of moose meat. 

Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory teems with people – people in bars; people on the street; people on the river; people in restaurants and hotels; churchgoers; people at a Knights of Columbus picnic; taxi drivers; squirrel hunters; people at the Falling Rocks Walleye Club Annual Pig Roast; people in poolrooms; students at Bellevue’s Lincoln Junior High School; raccoon hunters; workers on strike at the Oscar Mayer Packing Company in Davenport; a gang of Hell’s Angels at a bar in Buffalo; people attending Sunday morning service at the Community Baptist Church in Andalusia; people at a housewarming party in Muscatine; duck hunters; lockmasters; tour guides; waitresses; radio station receptionists; towboat captains; bootleggers; bartenders; on and on.

Some folks are identified, some aren’t. Among the identified are: Herb Heichert, owner of the Minneapolis boatyard where Raban buys his boat; Jim Curdue, who takes Raban fishing for walleyes on Lake Pepin; John Dunlevy, owner of Lansing’s local newspaper, the Allamakee News; Rex Kaber, owner of Kaber’s Supper Club, in Prairie du Chien; Jerry Eiben, Dubuque taxidermist; R. C. Wahlert, owner of the Dubuque Packing Company; Harvey Schwartz, worker at the Oscar Mayer Packing Company, Davenport, who takes Raban with him on a coffee run; Ross Frick, owner of Frick’s bar, in Davenport; Brad Funk, public relations officer at the Grain Processing Corporation, Muscatine, who takes Raban on a tour of the plant; Wayne Oakman, Dallas City fisherman, who lets Raban sleep overnight in his trailer home; Betty Asquith, formerly of England, now living in Hannibal; Rush Limbaugh, “oldest practicing attorney” in Cape Girardeau; P. T. Ferry, who drives Raban into Tiptonville; Reverend Judge Otis Higgs, candidate for mayor of Memphis; Shouphie Habeeb, president of the First Federal Savings & Loan Bank, in Vicksburg; Willy Jefferson, owner of Jefferson Funeral Home, Vicksburg; Bob “Boom-Boom” Kelley, captain of the towboat Jimmie L. that takes Raban from Natchez to New Orleans.

Raban sizes everyone up, sometimes not too charitably. Of the occupants of a St. Paul bar, he says, “My fellow drinkers looked as if they had been purchased in bulk along with the plastic library walls.” Of a woman he meets in Winona: “She looked like a retired lady wrestler. Slack-jawed, her eyes hidden behind the thick lenses of her glasses, she filled her outsize stretch pants to the last stitch.” Of the guys in a club bar in Moline: “These aging jocks with their acrimonious divorces, their giant powerboats and their glowering paranoia.”  

The people he likes best are river people. Of Wayne Oakman, a commercial fisherman and junk collector, he says,

I had never yet met anyone whose obsession with the river so far exceeded mine. Wayne Oakman was an enslaved courtier of the Mississippi. The front of his spruce frame house was a long window, so that the water seemed to fill the rooms and color the walls. You could hear it lapping on the beach under our feet. Wayne’s old basket chair was placed next to the glass so that he could watch the current uncoiling downstream on another westward dogleg. He was inseparable from the water.

In Tim Butcher’s Blood River, people are key to the success of his journey across the Congo. They include: Tom Nyamwaya, the International Care worker who provides Butcher with motorbikes through Katanga; Benoit Bangana and Odimba – the two International Care workers who drive the motorbikes; Georges Mbuya, the pygmy rights advocate, who accompanies Butcher part way to Kasongo; Masimango Katanda, the Anglican archbishop who puts Butcher up while he’s in Kindu; Lieutenant Commander Jorge Wilson, head of MONUC’s Kindu unit, who allows Butcher to hitch a ride on a UN river patrol boat down the Congo as far as the village of Lowa; Malike Bade, leader of the crew of pirogue paddlers that take Butcher down the Congo from Lowa to Ubundu; Adalbert Mwehu Nzuzi, the priest who puts Butcher up while he’s in Ubundu; Michel Kombozi, driver of the motorbike that Butcher rides to Kisangani; Oggi Saidi, Wagenia fisherman who helps Butcher search for a river boat heading downstream from Kisangani; Robert Powell, UN transport boss for Kasangani, who authorizes Butcher’s passage aboard the UN pusher Nganing that takes him to Mbandaka; Mohammed Yusoff Sazali, senior MONUC officer on board the Nganing; Jean Paul Mbuta Monshengo, captain of the Nganing; Pascal Manday Mbueta, the Nganing’s Congolese bowman; Maurice, the Kinshasa representative of Butcher’s cobalt-mining contact, who arranges for Butcher’s stay in Kinshasa and his two-day drive to Boma.

In addition, Butcher meets many interesting people along the way – old Belgian colonists, bicycle haulers, village chiefs, missionaries, priests, river pilots, pirogue paddlers, local historians. Butcher talks to them all, weaving a vivid narrative of the Congo’s human suffering. 

One of Blood River’s most memorable scenes is Butcher’s farewell to his Kisangani contact Oggi Saidi. Butcher is leaving Kisangani. He meets with Oggi to say goodbye. They’re in the bar of the Palm Beach Hotel. After a few beers, Oggi makes a heartbreaking request. Here’s the scene:

Oggi’s fluent English was entirely self-taught. He was tough – he had lost count of the malaria episodes he had survived. And he was resourceful – somehow he fed his family and kept them clothed without any meaningful income. But just like Georges, Benoit and many other Congolese I had met, all his energies, skills and talents were spent on the daily struggle to survive. The failure of the Congo is so complete that its silent majority – tens of millions of people with no connections to the gangster government or the corrupt state machinery – are trapped in a fight to stay where they are and not become worse off. Thoughts of development, advancement or improvement are irrelevant when the fabric of your country is slipping backwards around you.

After enough Primus to make his eyes rheumy, Oggi found the inner strength he had been looking for. He put his hand on my forearm, leaned forward and made the most wretched of pleas.“Please, Mr. Tim. I have a huge favour to ask. My son, my fourteen-year-old, has no future here. There is nothing for him in Kisangani. I know way this city is going. Please will you take him with you to South Africa and give him a new life.”

There was no way I could smuggle a child onto the UN boat with me. I felt wretched having to turn Oggi down. But I felt more wretched that he had to resort to asking me, someone he had known for only a few days, to save his child from the Congo.

People in these three great books can be divided into flat or round. All the people I’ve mentioned so far are flat. They’re quickly sketched, sometimes in a mere sentence or two. To call them “flat” is not meant to be pejorative. They’re flat like photos. Rarely does the travel writer stop long enough to get to know anyone in depth. But each of these books contains at least one "round" person, namely, the writer himself. Everything is processed through his consciousness. His “I” is on almost every page. Are these books self-portraits? That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

3 for the River: Place

This is the sixth 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 focus on their sense of place.

These books are about rivers, with a deep immersion in everything that defines a river – currents, rapids, boils, channels, banks, islands, sand bars, fish, animals, insects, woods, rocks, sounds, smells, weather, cities, towns, wharves, bridges, boats, pollution, on and on. Here, for example, is one of Dangerous River’s first descriptions of the Nahanni:

Patches of blue sky were appearing. Then the sun broke through, the mist rolled away from the river and at noon we started. The canoes were hitched together as before, since the first eight miles of the Nahanni, where it winds like a serpent in two tremendous oxbows at the foot of the Butte, is all quiet water. A couple of hours later, the first swirl of fast water hit us, and Faille pulled into a shelving bank of gravel. As we unhitched we looked at the prospect ahead: the wooded banks and quiet, sheltered water had given place to a wide-open flood-plain strewn with sand bars, shingle islands, wooded islands, huge driftpiles and queer, dead-looking forests of snags where uprooted trees had lodged and settled on the river bottom and now, swept clean by ice and floods of all their branches, projected bleakly from the water, their broken tops pointing downriver. Through this desolation rushed the Nahanni in, perhaps, two main channels and a maze of smaller ones. From a wooded bank nearby came the thudding lash of “sweepers” – trees that have been undercut by the floods into the river, but which still cling with their roots to the bank, lashing and beating at the water that drives through their branches. From all sides in this wasteland of the river came the noise of rushing water – it was the foot of the Splits.

Note the specificity – “two tremendous oxbows,” “at the foot of the Butte,” “quiet water,” “fast water,” “shelving bank of gravel,” “flood-plain,” “sand bars,” “shingle islands,” “wooded islands,” “huge driftpiles,” “queer, dead-looking forests of snags,” “the thudding lash of ‘sweepers,’ ” “the noise of rushing water,” “it was the foot of the Splits.” Line after line of sensory detail and precise notation – this is how Patterson evokes the Nahanni.

Another example – this from Raban’s Old Glory:

Here the river really did mean business. The St. Paul shore was solidly blocked in with cranes, derricks, huge steel drums, gantries, chutes, silos and brick warehouses. I tried counting cargoes ... scrap iron, salt, molasses, coal, phosphates, sand and gravel, grain. This was harvest time, and there was so much grain that it colored the river itself. Near the elevators, the surface of the water was dusted a pale ochre by the husks of soya, barley, wheat and corn. Closed chutes like elephant trunks fed the moored barges in a continuous stream: twelve or fifteen hundred tons to one barge ... nine to fifteen barges to a tow ... and still there were whole fleets of empty barges, tied up off the channel, waiting to be filled. 

That “Near the elevators, the surface of the water was dusted a pale ochre by the husks of soya, barley, wheat and corn” is excellent. Raban is a superb, subtle describer. 

And here, from Butcher’s Blood River, is a wonderful evocation of the color and temperature of the Congo:

The daylight hours passed very slowly on my pirogue. The paddlers chatted and sung in Swahili. The sun was as strong as I have ever known. We were just a short distance from the Equator and the storm had washed the sky clean of any screening clouds. While the crew were impervious to the sun’s force, it had me cringing in a puddle of shade under my wide-brimmed hat, pathetically splashing my face and arms with river water the same colour and warmth as tea, praying for the evening shadows to reach us. 

How do you evoke place? Be specific. Generic doesn’t cut it. Deal in particulars. That’s one lesson these three great travelogues teach. Another is that a river is not only about landscape. It’s also about people. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

3 for the River: Action

This is the fifth 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 action.

These books are never static. Their protagonists (the authors) are always going somewhere, doing something. Sometimes you hear of stories being described as essayistic. These books aren’t essayistic. They’re thrilling action-adventures. But not in the mindless Hollywood “superhero” sense. The action-adventures here are real, involving real people in real existential situations, e.g., canoeing dangerous Nahanni rapids, avoiding collision with massive Mississippi barge tows, descending the Congo River by pirogue. 

Patterson puts us squarely there with him and his companion, Gordon Matthews, in the Cache Rapid, when their canoe upsets:

As the canoe drove out of the eddy at the head of the rapid it hit the current with a plunge, and a boiling surge of water foamed up along the gunwale. The frightened dogs all shifted to the downside and the canoe lurched and almost filled with water. I managed to swing it back to the shore we had just left, and Gordon jumped with the line. But he was pulled into the river, as Stevens had been, and down we went. The canoe slid backwards over a rock that was just awash: the tail went clean under water while the nose hung in midair with the river driving past on both sides. I could just see Gordon: he had fetched up against a rock with a smack that almost stove his chest in, and there he stayed hanging on to the line very stoutly with both hands. His arms must have been pretty nearly wrenched out of their sockets.

That’s the kind of action I’m talking about. Dangerous River brims with it. Here’s another taste. This time Patterson is alone, attempting to canoe Hell’s Gate Rapid:

I tried that rapid three times, but the current in the canyon was stronger than I had thought, and I was not able to get speed enough on the canoe to drive it up on the crest of the riffle that barred the way. Twice the canoe climbed the ridge, close under the big waves, only to be flung across the river and driven down the canyon, almost touching the cliff on the portage side. At the third and last attempt the eddies worked in my favour: the canoe was climbing the hill of racing water with speed enough (I thought) to take it on and over, when suddenly a gust of wind blew down the river, the nose swung off course and the canoe slid down into the lower whirlpool. It started to spin and then was lifted on the upsurge of a huge boil from below. It was like the heave of one’s cabin bunk at night in some great Atlantic storm. Then the water fell away from beneath the canoe, and I caught a glimpse of the white waves of the rapid, a long way above, it seemed. The canoe rose once more and spun again, and then at last the paddle bit into solid water and drove the outfit out of the whirlpool and down the canyon for the last time, taking a sideways slap, in passing, from a stray eddy and shipping it green as a parting souvenir of a memorable visit. 

There’s action aplenty in Old Glory, too, much of it on the Mississippi River, as Raban tries to navigate its tricky currents and avoid being run down by barge tows. Here’s a sample: 

When I was signaled into the chamber, the moon was up, silvering the slime on the lock wall. I was lowered into the black. The sluices rumbled in their underground tunnels. When the gates opened, they framed a puzzling abstract of mat India ink spotted with scraps of tinsel. 

My eyes weren’t accustomed. I nosed out gingerly, feeling my way through the water that I couldn’t see. The lights on my boat were supposed to make it visible to other people and were no help in making the river visible to me. I went ahead, giving the motor little, nervous dribbles of gas. A flat-topped black buoy, heeling over in the current, went by so close I could’ve leaned out and touched it. I could just make out the irregular bump of Otter Island and steered to the left of it. For a few minutes I congratulated myself on beginning, at least, to get the hang of this business of night navigation. Then I saw the pointed top of another buoy five yards ahead of my bow. A red. I hadn’t been going downstream at all: I’d just crossed the channel at right angles.

The carbide searchlight of a tow (was it across or down from I was?) raked the river. I headed for what I hoped was the shore, and the tow disappeared over my head at terrifying speed. It left no wake behind, and it was only when I saw another, racing by at the same altitude, that I realized that the tows were trucks on a highway. I edged on. Another beam swiveling idly on the water suddenly picked out my boat and held me, half-blinded. The long, growling blast of the siren was as queerly, then scarily, intimate as the cough of a stranger in one’s bedroom. Panicking, I swung the head of the boat and drove it at full tilt. Any direction would do – just not, please not, into the tow. It went past thirty, thirty yards off, a lone towboat without its barges. Its balconied side and back were lit up like a Christmas tree, but from the front it had been as black as the surrounding river. Its high wake caught me broadside; I had miscalculated the direction it would come from; and as I hung in the trough, the boat rolled and the left-hand gunwale began to gouge cleanly into the side of the wave. I was shin deep in water before I could swing the front of the boat around and ride out the swell. 

I found myself blubbering with shock. Had the towboat been pushing a barge fleet, I would be dead now, or drowning, unconscious, under its screws. I had lost all sense of the shape of the river. I didn’t know where the shore was. I didn’t know up from down. The tow’s lights had left the river even darker than it had before. I saw one faint glimmer, and what looked like the distant outline of a tree, but I was frightened that it would turn into another tow, its leading barges a black wedge waiting to suck me under. I drove away from it, then around it, then cautiously approached it. It was an electric light on a pole. Under it, a johnboat, piled with hoop nets was drawn up on the sand.

Action in Tim Butcher’s Blood River takes place on both land and water. Butcher moves through the Congo jungle on a motorbike, dodging rebel soldiers: 

The next 200-kilometre-long stretch was grim. It began well enough with a relatively fast track out of Kabambarre along a well-forested ridge. This was the main access road into the town and I spotted a group of soldiers guarding the entrance to the town. They were gathered around a cooking fire in the ruins of a building, but Benoit repeated his old trick of speeding up, and though the soldiers jumped up, grabbed their weapons and shouted after us, we had already slipped by. 

At the village of Lowa, on the Upper Congo, he shifts to travel by pirogue. This is my favorite part of the journey. It puts Butcher in direct contact with the river (“I let my fingers trail in the river water. It was as warm and soothing as a bath”). As his crew paddles him downriver, Butcher relaxes. He falls asleep. He’s woken by a clap of thunder. A storm approaches. The crew races to get to shore. Butcher’s description of the action is excellent:

“We must find shelter, or the rain will fill the pirogue and we will capsize,” shouted Malike, struggling to make himself heard above the noise of the wind and waves. I thought of the crocodile I had seen the day before. Capsizing would not be good.

As the paddlers made for shore, we raced a curtain of rain that I could hear, but not see, approaching from behind. We lost the race by only a short distance but it was still enough to see me soaked through, struggling to keep my camera bag clear of the water welling in the bottom of the boat. I had felt sorry for the paddlers when I saw how little they brought with them, but now I was the one with the problem of having to deal with wet equipment.

The paddlers had spotted a break in the riverside forest and some tied-up pirogues being clattered by the waves, so I knew we were near a village. Slithering up a muddy bank, we found ourselves at a thatched hut shuddering in the wind. There was nobody to ask permission from, so we just bundled in through the small door and collapsed on the floor. By the time I had retrieved my soggy head torch and cast a light around the room, my four companions were asleep, their limbs all folded together for warmth like the blades on a Swiss Army knife. I turned off the torch and settled myself on the ground, watching as every so often the mud-hut walls glowed to the flicker of lightning outside. 

Action is a prime feature of all three of these great books. Another is acute sense of place. That’ll be the focus of my next post in this series.

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. 

3 for the River: Tim Butcher's "Blood River"

This is the third 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 review Blood River.  

In this great book, Tim Butcher chronicles his harrowing forty-four-day, three-thousand-kilometer journey through the Congo in 2004 – “great” because it’s vivid, detailed, and unforgettable; “harrowing” because of the many dangers he faces. 

His trip follows the historic route of journalist-explorer Henry Morton Stanley, when he mapped the Congo River, 1874-1877. It unfolds in eight stages: (1) Kalemie to Kasongo by motorbike (500 km); (2) Kasongo to Kindu by motorbike (200 km); (3) Kindu to Lowa by UN patrol boat (150 km); (4) Lowa to Ubundu by pirogue (200 km); (5) Ubundu to Kisangani by motorbike and pirogue (150 km); (6) Kisangani to Mbandaka by UN push-boat and barge (1000 km); (7) Mbandaka to Kinshasa by UN helicopter (600 km); (8) Kinshasa to Boma by jeep (400 km). 

1. Kalemie to Kasongo

This is the riskiest leg of Butcher’s journey. He says, “I knew the river descent would be hard, but the thing that worried me most was this overland section.” The terrain is impenetrable jungle, and the trail is narrow and overgrown. To make matters worse, rebel soldiers roam the bush. Butcher recruits a man from an aid group called Care International. His name is Benoit Bangana. Benoit has a colleague named Odimba. They have two Yamaha 0ff-road bikes. Benoit advises that “Motorbikes are the only way to travel” from Kalemie to Kasongo. The plan is that Butcher would ride with Odimba on one bike, and Benoit would ride on the other one with all their luggage. But then another man, Georges Mbuyu, a member of a pygmy rights group called La Voix des Minoritiés, agrees to join the expedition. Georges travels regularly in the bush. However, he doesn’t have a motorcycle. If Georges is to accompany them, they need a third bike. They find one owned by a man named Fiston Kasongo. For a price, Fiston agrees to go with them and drive Butcher on his bike. 

And so, one morning in August, 2004, the journey begins. Butcher writes,

I love starting a journey very early in the day. It offers the comforting sense that if something goes wrong, there is still the whole day to sort it out. As we left Kalemie before dawn that August morning, I felt a strong sense of well-being. The track was overhung with dew-drenched branches and twigs, and within a few minutes my wet clothes showed why Benoit and Odimba were wearing waterproofs. But the fact that I was soaked did not dim my spirits. After all the planning and worry, I was finally on the track of Stanley in the Congo, picking my way from Lake Tanganyka across the ridges and valleys that he had traversed in 1876. I can remember feeling excitement. And I can remember just how the euphoria began to ebb a few kilometres down the track when we had our first flat tire.

That first flat is on Odimba’s bike. Odimba fixes it expertly. The next three flats are on Fiston’s bike. His rear inner tube is a disaster, patches on patches. It’s decided that Fiston can’t go on. After fixing his tire one more time, he and Georges leave the group and head back to Kalemie. Butcher, Benoit and Odimba continue toward Kasongo on the Yamahas. They overnight in a bush settlement called Mukumbo. Butcher describes his lodgings:

Benoit returned to lead me to the hut that the chief had had prepared for me. It had walls of dried mud on wattle, a roof of heavy thatch and a door panel made of reeds woven across a wooden frame. Without a hinge, it worked by being heaved across the doorway, which I soon found had been cut for people quite a bit shorter than me. There was nothing modern in the room whatsoever. On the beaten-earth floor stood a bed – a frame of branches, still in their bark, lashed together with some sort of vine. The springs of the bed were made of lengths of split bamboo anchored at only one point halfway along the bed, so that when I put my hand down on them they bent horribly and appeared close to collapse. But the design was ingenious because when my weight was spread across the entire structure, the bamboo screen supported it easily, giving and moving with the contour of my shoulders and hip. It was a Fred Flintstone orthopaedic bed and I found it amazingly comfortable.

The next day, rising at 3:00 AM, the trio continue their travel. Butcher suffers from dehydration (“The bottles I had drunk the day before were simply not enough, and I had not had a drop of water overnight, leaving me with a whopping headache and a pain behind my eyes”). He also has a sore ass (“My backside had stopped being numb and had moved into a painful phase, each buttock screaming to be relieved of the pressure of being squashed against the plastic of Odimba’s motorbike seat. I learned to lean on one side and then the other to alleviate the pressure, but it was agony”). Whenever they encounter soldiers, they speed up, and though the soldiers jump up, grab their weapons and shout at them, they’re too late; the bikers are already by them, disappearing down the trail into the bush.

Finally they reach Kasongo. Butcher writes,

I remember little about the arrival, apart from the vast jug of filtered water that I gulped down and the smell of the previous night’s hut on my mosquito net, in which I wrapped myself before collapsing.

2. Kasongo to Kindu

Benoit stays in Kasongo. Butcher and Odimba continue on by motorcycle to Kindu, on the upper Congo River. Butcher describes his first sighting of the great river:

We simply turned a corner and there, unheralded, in front of me, lay one of the natural wonders of the world. The object of so much mystery for generations of outsiders, and the thing that had fired my imagination through years of research, oozed lazily downstream between two thickly forested banks almost a kilometre apart. The midday sun was directly overhead, my least favourite time of day in the Congo when all the colours of the trees are washed out and the heat is at its most suffocating. In the flat light, the river appeared viscous and still.

Butcher, Odimba, and their loaded motorbike cross the Congo River in a pirogue:

Eventually its bow slid onto our bank with the lightest of kisses. The dreadnought was heavy and the river too inert to make it swing downstream, so it just sat there like a compass needle pointing in the direction I needed to go, straight across the Congo River. A dozen or so passengers disembarked, carrying bundles of fruit wrapped in banana leaves trussed up with cords made from vines. One man had with him a type of home-made bicycle where part of the frame, the front forks, were made of rough branches of wood still in their bark. There was brief moment of negotiation between Odimba and the oldest paddler, before a tariff was agreed and our motorbike, still laden with luggage, was picked up bodily by four men and dropped into the canoe. The hull was deep enough for one of the paddlers to sit on the bike and freewheel it down to the lowest and most stable point.

It takes Butcher and Odimba another two days of hard biking to reach the port of Kindu.

3. Kindu to Lowa

In squalid Kindu, Butcher struggles to find a way downriver. Eventually, after five frustrating, uncomfortable days, he hitches a ride on a UN river patrol boat. The region is in its dry season; the river is low. The helmsmen drive the boat slowly, nosing it through sand banks, searching for a navigable channel. The slow pace affords Butcher the opportunity to look around and study his surroundings in detail. Here, for example, is his description of some of the rusting wrecks of old boats that used to ply this stretch of river, but which now line the left bank for well over a kilometre:

One ship had been completely overrun by a reed bank and its old smokestack could just be seen poking from the vegetation with ivy, not smoke, spewing out of the top. Another hulk was lying on its side clear out of the water, the panels eaten away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass. But my favourite was an old stern-paddler, a rust-red X-ray image of the Mississippi steamboats of my imagination. The panels were all gone, but the superstructure remained in skeletal form. At the stern was the octagonal tubular frame on which the wooden blades of the paddle once stood.

The boat takes him 150 kilometres downriver, at which point its patrol in that direction ends. Butcher decides to go it alone from there. He’s deposited on shore near the village of Lowa.

4. Lowa to Ubundu

This is my favorite section of the journey. In Lowa, Butcher hires a pirogue and four paddlers to take him to Ubundu. This move brings him just about as close to the Congo River as he can get without swimming in it. You can tell from the beauty of his descriptions that he relishes the experience. For example:

The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled wooden paddles. About three metres long, they were shape of spades from a deck of cards, only stretched out to mansize, with shafts that were thin and shiny, polished by years of being slid through calloused hands.

But no pleasure lasts for long in the Congo. As Butcher nears Ubundu, his sense of unease begins to build. What’s his next step? The river is navigable only as far as Ubundu, at which point he will have to continue overland for 100 kilometres around a series of rapids and cataracts known as Stanley Falls, until he reaches Kisangani, the large port city built at the bottom of the seventh and final set of rapids. Butcher writes, “All in all, I knew Ubundu was always going to be one of the major troublespots on my journey.” 

5. Ubundu to Kisangani

But it turns out Unbundu isn’t that bad. Butcher finds lodging in the church of St. Joseph’s. And three motorbike drivers from the aid group International Rescue Committee volunteer to take him to Kisangani. His description of the trip is superb. Here’s a sample:

There was absolutely no work taking place on the road. The advancing jungle had choked it to a single-track footpath, snaking around mature trees growing up from the centre of the old carriageway and past vast mudslides and dramatic rockfalls. Bridges had been washed away, making us pick our way down to the bottom of water courses and then charge up the other side. Recent rains made the whole exercise a dirty and dangerous one as the bikes slithered in the glutinous mud time and again, often pitching me onto the deck. One fallen tree caused a twenty-minute delay as the only route for our convoy of three bikes was up and over the top. This meant unloading everything, carting it over to the other side and then heaving the bikes over the fallen trunk, all the time sliding in mud that stood no chance of drying out because the dense leaf cover kept out any direct sunlight. The sticky heat felt as if we were toiling inside a hothouse.

6. Kisangani to Mbandaka

This section contains one of the book’s most memorable lines. Butcher is aboard a UN pusher traveling 1000 kilometres downriver to Mbandaka. He says, “To pass the time I would drag out my daily ablutions, taking perverse pleasure in the slow process of boiling water for a meticulous, slow shave, before taking one of the world’s most dangerous showers.” He explains that the water for the shower comes straight from the river. He says,

Against the creamy ceramic of an old shower cubicle, the water ran brown like tea. It reminded me of Scottish hill water tainted with peat, only it was much warmer and the chemicals that leached brown into the Congo River were more terrifying than those found in Highland soil. Somewhere to our north ran the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but a name that is associated with a horrific medical condition. It was near this river that a virus was first discovered that caused its victims to die in a spectacularly horrible way, bleeding to death from every orifice. Several of the world’s other spectacularly horrible haemorrhagic fevers were first discovered in the Congo. I kept my mouth shut whenever I showered.

Nevertheless, whether it’s from the shower or some other source, Butcher becomes sick. By the time he gets to Mbandaka, it’s all he can do to climb off the boat and back onto terra firma.

7. Mbandaka to Kinshasa

In Mbandaka, feeling too ill to face another delay of unknown duration, Butcher decides to travel the 600 kilometres to Kinshasa by UN helicopter. He says, “The shame I felt at temporarily abandoning Stanley’s route was more than outweighed by a growing sense of relief that my ordeal was nearing its end.”

8. Kinshasa to Boma

In Kinshasa, Butcher enters the world of the Congo super-elite. He stays at the headquarters of a cobalt-mining company, “a brand-new, luxury villa built on a prime piece of city-centre real estate fronting directly onto the Congo River.”  It’s only after two days of “sleeping in a bed with laundered sheets, drinking clean water, eating healthy food and dosing myself with antibiotics” that he feels strong enough to undertake the final leg of his journey. Using a jeep loaned to him by the mining company, he and two others drive the 400 kilometres to Boma, on the Congo River estuary. 

As he rides in the jeep, Butcher reflects on his 3000-kilometre Congo journey. He says, “In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.”

Blood River is one of my favorite books. The above outline doesn’t come close to doing it justice. Maybe in future posts I can do better, explore it more deeply. My next post in this series will be on structure.