Rinker Buck, in his new book Life on the Mississippi, takes his readers with him as he builds a flatboat modeled after those from the early 1800s. It takes a year, combining care for his aging mother with work on the boat, to build it before he sails the flatboat two thousand miles down the Mississippi to New Orleans. His account of the trip on his boat that he named Patience reminded me of a well-seasoned stew with all the parts that combined to make the whole.
First there are the advice-givers in every place his boat rests that repeat the warning of how dangerous the next phase of his trip will be. The constant prediction is that the Patience is going to be sucked under by whirlpools so strong that all the clothes of its passengers will be torn off. He is warned that the travelers themselves need to be prepared to die and that they need to advise their families of the awaiting doom since they will be identifying the passengers’ unclothed bodies. Everybody had a story of a shipwreck or someone lost on the river.
Other helpers and fellow travelers come and go as Rinker makes his way down the river. His characterizations of his fellow travelers make them characters in his story along with the locals that he meets along the way. His daring shipmates often take charge leaving him time to explore the books that feed his background for his trip and the history of the land as they move along.
The history of the river, its cities and rural areas, and its people are woven in geographically as the flatboat winds its way down the river, spliced in with whatever current challenge is happening with the Patience. In a spoiler alert, there were some broken ribs but the Patience made it all the way to New Orleans without being sucked under and none of the travelers died.
It would be hard to read this book without thinking of Mark Twain. I found it a very good way to take my mind off the coronavirus that had me laid up while I read it.