Dipping Your Hands into the River

by

Nicki Leone

When I was around twelve or thirteen, I took a canoe trip with my Girl Scout troop along a section of the Erie Canal. We spent five days on the water, putting in just outside of Buffalo and putting out . . . I’m not exactly sure where. Someplace not very far, I don’t think. There is only so much paddling a gaggle of preteen girls can manage, even if they are Girl Scouts. We made it past Lockport, I’m sure, because one of my most vivid memories of the trip is reaching out to touch the slick, rust-red sides of the first lock we went through, our canoes all crowded to starboard while another barge took up most of the rest of the space. I remember the feel of the muck under my fingers as the water level in the lock slowly sank, bringing us down, down, down, and then the rush of water as the heavy gates on the far side of the lock opened, letting us glide onward into the countryside ahead of us.

When our parents came to meet us at the pick-up point we were all sweaty and tanned, mosquito-bit, stuffed full of trail mix, s’mores and hot dogs (the universal diet of children on a camping trip) and extremely proud of ourselves. Along the way our troop leader and guides had given us the standard water safety lectures, the history lessons of the canal, the nature lessons about the birds we saw and the trees we passed. But the overwhelming feeling I took away from that trip was the exultant feeling of “I did it!”

People go on river trips for different reasons. I went on my little jaunt largely because it was summertime and I think my mom wanted me out of the house for awhile. Mark Twain signed on to a Mississippi river boat because he needed a job and a pilot earned a whopping $250 per month. Henry David Thoreau took a two week cruise up and down the Concord and the Merrimack rivers because he wanted—what else?—time to think. Teddy Roosevelt took a trip down the Amazon for the same reason that some people try to climb the Matterhorn (because they are insane).  Janisse Ray recently took a kayak trip down the Altamaha river to reconnect with a beloved place and to promote an environmental cause. Her grandfather took a trip down the same river, without a boat, to escape a mental institution.

And Mike Freeman decided to canoe the length of the Hudson River because apparently he was in the grip of the granddaddy of all mid-life crises.

Freeman’s account of his two-week canoe trip from the headwaters of the Hudson high in the Adirondack Mountains to the sludgy, sulfur-scented, concrete-lined shores where it pours into the New York Bay is aptly-named: Drifting: Two Weeks on the Hudson. As river-trip stories go his is idiosyncratic and eccentric, lacking either the focus of the explorer or the drive of the conqueror. “I didn’t plan the trip,” Freeman announces at the start of his journey, “at least, not thoroughly.” Instead, he seems to have determined on his trip down the Hudson for several reasons, the most prevalent of which was that he had spent the last five months as a stay-at-home-dad to his newborn daughter, and was finding the transition from assistant for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (sighting down, if not shooting, bears in his rifle) to house-husband in a New York suburb a bit drastic. He was unemployed. He was at loose ends—or as loose as a parent with a newborn can be. His girlfriend-not-wife had a good job. He had . . . restlessness.

So Freeman decided on the river trip as a sort of last-gasp before fatherhood claimed him completely, thinly veiling his decision as a chance to write a couple of (paying) articles for magazines about the experience and disregarding much of anything else in the way of preparation. When I went on my canal canoe trip, my mother had a long list of necessary stuff I had to pack. When Janisse Ray took her trip down the Altamaha, she wrote down list after list of things to take, things to eat, things to notice, things to watch for. “In terms of logistics,” Freeman writes, “there wasn’t much.” He didn’t even have a map—assuming (with good reason, one admits) that the river would go where the river would go. His biggest effort seems to have been to call a friend to confirm that you could actually get through the Hudson River Gorge in a boat. You’ll go swimming, said the friend, but it can be done.

To be fair, Freeman had spent the last ten years trekking about the wilds of the Yakutat district in Alaska, counting salmon. So he was used to a bit of wilderness self-sufficiency. Plus, he was possessed of a kick-ass canoe made of some kind of high-tech material that was so indestructible one wonders why it isn’t being used for the Mars Rover missions. But on the whole, one can’t escape the feeling that Freeman decided to go on the trip just to go—everything else, everything he ended up wanting to write about, came after.

As a result, Freeman’s journey is a relatively simple one—head downstream—but his narrative ranges far and wide, sometimes bordering on stream-of-consciousness. In other words, his canoe doesn’t drift but his thoughts often do. The author writes that to understand a country you need to understand its land, and rivers—moving long and lazy through the hills and valleys—are the slow-motion history lesson of a peoples’ relationship to that land. And he doesn’t reign himself in, contemplating everything from the birth and death of the logging industry to the symbolism of Snickers commercials within the space of a few pages, sometimes a few paragraphs.

What does it all mean? This is a question that seems to circle round and round in Freeman’s head as he travels down the river and through his own life. And while he is not so arrogant as to make one a metaphor for the other, questions of cultural identity frequently rub up against questions of personal identity in his head. Thus a discourse on the history of the lumber industry becomes an extended speculation on the nature of “manliness”—a sometimes wistful paean to the sheer physicality required to ride logs down a river, break them apart in a jam, and not lose a leg in the process. “Primitive voices yearn for something else,” Freeman writes as he drifts by stands of uncut forest, “when you could walk into this timber with a cant hood and ax, and nothing to say you couldn’t swath every mountain.”

But the author, if sometimes nostalgic, is never simplistic. Even in an apparently untouched wilderness he sees the complexities of man’s dance with nature. The need for the wild contends with the drive to tame, the desire to just look is at odds with the desire to conquer, the instinct to preserve beauty balances, often badly, against the simple need for enough money to buy food and shelter. “Contrary to popular belief,” he notes, “hippies didn’t conjure up environmentalism in a hookah.” And Freeman acknowledges, without even attempting to resolve the conflict, that while the environmentalist in him agrees that endangered species should be protected, the fisheries assistant holding the rifle wouldn’t hesitate to shoot if the bear he was looking at turned around to attack. Sure he’d like the bear to survive. But he wants to survive to see it.

This seesawing back-and-forth between lamenting what was and embracing what is along the banks of the Hudson grows even more complicated as Freeman travels further south into more populated areas. Touchingly honest with himself as he drifts through lakes and locks and feed canals, he sneers at the vacationers on the jet skis and then acknowledges his kinship—don’t we all just want to play on the water? He peers into pools and bays of absolutely pristine water—pristine because it is so toxic nothing, not even algae, can grow in it—and delivers a furious account of the damage wreaked by GE, aided and abetted by governmental regulatory agencies that regulated not a paper clip until PCB levels were so bad even they couldn’t ignore it. But then, quietly honest, he adds that he likes his cheap refrigerator, his oven, his washer and dryer. Thank you GE, you bring good things to life, at a cost of a certain amount of PCBs in our livers that we as consumers have been only too willing to pay.

The skittering path of Freeman’s thoughts as he wheels from one subject to another—only stopping now and then to check the landscape and see how far along he has come—might be disorienting for the reader, if it weren’t for the fact that the man did have to sleep. Whatever tangent he finds himself on—in his head or on the river—at some point he does have to pull into shore and find a place to camp for the night. And those moments—when he describes tying off, laying out and dropping off with the stars over head—are poetically, beautifully, told. Simple statements about swaying cattails and small frogs hopping out of the way, of an eagle coasting above, still high enough for his feathers to catch the last light of the setting sun. All is silent.

It is in these moments—the only times when the author betrays the fact that he really does know much more about the wild than he has been letting on—that Drifting most resembles the kind of travel narrative one might have originally expected from a guy who spent the previous decade knocking around an Alaskan wildlife preserve. Not a naturalist per se, but he knows the names of the trees and the birds, he can read deer tracks and moose tracks and makes a good case for why there probably aren’t any mountain lions in western New York State. He curses deer flies in a way that anyone who has ever walked in the woods can empathize with, and makes a good case for their Satanic origins. And when he sees a mink following along his path he stops paddling to watch even though he is losing daylight, “because there is always time for mink.”

And oddly enough for a guy who has spent a significant amount of time talking about why the movie Caddyshack encapsulates the male American experience the theme Freeman returns to most often, when he isn’t thinking of family, is one of stillness, quiet. He seeks it the way surfers seek the perfect wave, and no matter where he is on the river, no matter what he is doing, or what he is avoiding, he always marks out the places of quietness along his journey, painting them for the reader in a few perfectly chosen phrases that make one want to close the book and go stare at Thomas Cole paintings, or at least go out into the back yard and listen to the soft sounds of the night.

As Freeman ruminates on the past, present and probable future as he drifts down river, he also continually returns to his own new family, his own past, present, probable future. As much as he tries to stay in the moment, on the river, they tend to break into his thoughts. “A boat only holds so much water,” he announces as he gets ready to make his run through the Hudson Gorge. Two paragraphs later he is frantically bailing and thinking about his girlfriend’s addiction to Bed Bath and Beyond. As he desperately tries to keep the canoe from filling up in the whitewater, his mind is running in deeper waters: “Do people really love? What does that mean? Such a feeling in the beginning, but where does it go on a Tuesday night, baby crying in your arms?”  Freeman’s friend was right, he ended up swimming.

So Freeman navigates—the Hudson River, its problematic history, its politically fraught environmental preservation (or rescue), his own life, his foray into fatherhood. As he travels further and further south, his girl and his daughter break into his thoughts more and more often. He starts to wonder if Shannon has taken her first steps yet. He thinks he needs to be there for that moment. He feels the conflicting pull of the river and the woman and child on the shore. “As much as I wanted to get back to Shannon and Karen,” he writes as he paddles past Tappan Zee, “most of me would have rather met them on the bank, tossed them in the boat, and kept going, forever.”

He doesn’t, of course. He paddles into the New York Harbor, “beaches” his canoe on a concrete ramp at Inwood Park at the tip of Manhattan, and waits for his brother-in-law, who has come to meet him, to stop talking on his smart phone and help him hoist the canoe onto the top of the minivan. And he goes home to his daughter, unsure about what his 350-mile journey down the Hudson actually meant, but certain that it was not a wasted trip. “...like any waterway, [The Hudson’s] banks are littered with rune,” he writes. “Put your hands on them. Listen.”

Books mentioned in this column:
Drifting Into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River by Janisse Ray (University of Georgia Press, 2011)
Drifting: Two Weeks on the Hudson by Mike Freeman (State University of New York Press, 2011)
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (Signet Classics, 2009)
River Horse: Across America by Boat by William Least Heat Moon (Penguin, 2001)
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard (Broadway Books, 2006)
A Week Along the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau (Dover, 2001)  

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this with the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.