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Sports & Recreations. Travel. Nonfiction. HTML:The author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a spartan sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing. In the course of his voyage, Raban records the mercurial caprices of the river and the astonishingly varied lives of the people who live along its banks. Whether he is fishing for walleye or hunting coon, discussing theology in Prairie Du Chien or race relations in Memphis, he is an expert observer of the heartyland's estrangement from America's capitals ot power and culture, and its helpless nostalgia for its lost past. Witty, elegaic, and magnificently erudite, Old Glory is as filled with strong currents as the Mississippi itself.… (more)
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Like the river, I found this book
There is the tranquility of quiet water just before dawn and the turbulence of the wide, straight stretches against a strong wind blowing against the current. He meets fishermen in their johnboats and barges three wide and eight deep that throw out wakes powerful enough to swamp his little craft. The changing faces and attitudes of the people along the way are interwoven with the descriptions of the places he visits and the joys and hazards of his travel.
Although the voyage took place at the end of the Carter presidency, it is still a wonderful travel book.
It's obviously no coincidence that Raban gives the young woman he lives with for a few weeks in St Louis the name "Sally" - this
The river itself is a major character throughout the book - it's striking how much, here as in his other travel books, Raban has to say about water. There are paragraphs and paragraphs of description of how the water looks and sounds, and how it moves under different conditions. Eddies, swirls, risers, chutes, confluences, washes, waves, reflections, bubbles - you name it, he finds something to say about it. Oddly enough, most authors of books on rivers and the sea only tend to make rather fleeting references to the element they are travelling on, but in Raban it is always present. Even when he's on land and merely catches a glimpse of the river in the distance, he takes the trouble to tell us something about what the water is doing.
When he's not writing about the water, he also has some pretty interesting things to say about the towns and cities he stops in, and the people he meets there. Speech and its quirks apparently matter a lot - he takes a lot of trouble capturing the eccentricities in the way people talk to him and using them to make his characters come alive. This sometimes comes over as a little bit too Mark-Twainish, but he's usually careful to avoid sounding like a patronising Englishman making fun of simple Americans (except when he catches himself acting just like the patronising Englishman and indulges in a bit of self-mockery). He perhaps isn't quite sufficiently aware of how much he succumbs to the Huck Finn temptation to search out the oddest characters in every place he visits, but as this is one of the most entertaining aspects of the book, we needn't complain about that too much.
There's a lot of America going on in the margins of the story - it's the autumn of 1979 and many of those he talks to are busy with the Iran hostage crisis and the run-up to the Reagan-Carter election. The apparently irreversible decline of the inner city, the parallel loss of the economic relevance of riverside small towns, and the growth of fake history tarted up for the benefit of short-term tourists are all recurrent topics. There's a nice irony in his finding the most vapid example of the last of these in Hannibal, where a local businessman points out to him that the whole tacky Mark Twain souvenir business is irrelevant to the economy of the town, which really depends on a massive grain-processing plant. In Memphis, he spends some time with the campaign team of a black mayoral candidate (Judge Otis Higgs), trying to make sense of relations between races in the modern South. Needless to say, he doesn't find any easy answers to that question, but what he does have to say sounds sensible.
That terrifying experience achieved, the next few days are quite relaxed while cruising downstream. After a days boating, he pulls into the bank to find the nearest hotel or motel and to find some of the locals to talk to. It is a dangerous trip and he has a few near misses. Thankfully he follows the advice that he was given earlier to get off the river when the sky looks strange and just misses a horrendous storm. Apart from these moments, it is a relaxed trip, he enjoys smoking a pipe while watching drifting down the river, only resorting to the whisky when he has been scared witless. One lock keeper advises him to travel at night, but it nearly gets him killed by a barge, so he decides against that.
Where this book comes alive though is his interaction with the people that he meets. He talks to anyone and everyone, from politicians to widows, rednecks and the transient men who work the river. In Memphis, he joins the black reverend judge, Otis Higgs, campaign to overturn the incumbent mayor and sees the endemic racism that was bubbling under the surface of society, something that is worryingly prevalent once again. Every day the river teaches him something new, sometimes it is about the places he passes and other times it is about himself.
This is the second of his books that I have read. The intention is to read them in the order that he published them. Really enjoyed Arabia, but this is another level up again. He is a keen observer of people and places and his writing is spectacular, probing and lyrical. He can sketch a place or a person in a scant number of words, making you feel that you are bobbing along in the boat or sitting alongside him at a bar. Fantastic book. Looking forward to the next, Coasting.