Drifting

Mike Freeman

Description

This candid account of the author's two-week canoe trip down the Hudson River offers an introspective and humorous look at both the river and Recession-Era America. New to fatherhood and fresh from ten years in an Alaskan village, Mike Freeman sets out to relearn his country, and realizes it's in a far greater midlife crisis than he could ever be. With an eye on the Hudson's past, he addresses America's present anxieties—from race, gender, and marriage to energy, labor, and warfare—with empathy and honesty, acknowledging the difficulties surrounding each issue without succumbing to pessimism or ideology.

From the river's headwaters in the Adirondacks, Freeman follows the Hudson south through America's first industrial ghost towns, where ruin begs for rebirth. Next is the Hudson Valley and the river's 153-mile estuary, with its once-teeming fisheries. Here, agriculture is redefining itself, while at West Point, officer candidates train for America's murky modern wars. The Hudson Highlands, too, are prominent, the place where Americans first wed God to nature, and where the mountains remain a potent place to mull that bond. From there it's on to Manhattan, with its skyline that symbolizes the world's financial might as well as its startling fragility.

As controversial as it is comforting, Freeman's narrative makes us think in hard ways about America as the country itself drifts toward an uncertain future. But throughout, of course, is the magnificent Hudson, whose resilient beauty speaks well both to nature's toughness and America's greatest strength—the ability to redirect and change course when necessary.
Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Prologue

Rivers and the River

Dimensions

PART I. MOUNTAINS AND WILD

My Land, Your Land

The Maturity of Idols

Tenting Tonight

Quiet Is the Word

Where the Wild Things Were

The Country Behind

Portals

PART II. COGS AND WHEELS

Pink Flamingos

The Gospel of Dean Wormer

Borders

The Gravity of Greeks

The Shadow

Still, Still Water

PART III. O HUDSON

Red/Blue

Imaginarium

Into the Wild Frontier

Conjugal

Purging Strangelove

The Wolf

Suck High Zest

The Wide Water

Loomings

Notes
Suggested Reading

Sujets

• Travel writing
• Region
• Regional

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438439464
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 15 Mo

Extrait

Drifting
Two Weeks on the Hudson
Mike Freeman

Cover photo courtesy of Dustin Kincaid
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Excelsior Editions is an imprint of State University of New York Press
Production by Diane Ganeles
Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Freeman, Mike, 1968–
Drifting : two weeks on the Hudson / Mike Freeman.
      p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3945-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Hudson River (N.Y. and N.J.)—Description and travel. 2. Hudson River Valley (N.Y. and N.J.)—Description and travel. 3. Freeman, Mike, 1968—Travel—Hudson River (N.Y. and N.J.) I. Title.
F127.H8F64 2011
974.7'3—dc22
2011006577
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Butch : Kid, there's something I think I ought to tell you. I never shot anyone.
Sundance : One hell of a time to tell me. Well, just aim for the center. That way if you miss a little you'll at least hit something.
—From “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”

Acknowledgments

In addition to the many people who appear in the book, I'm grateful to the following: Professor David Schuyler of Franklin and Marshall College, Jill lepore of Harvard, Kathy Hattala of the Hudson River Estuary Program, family members near and far, everyone at the SUNY Press, Jeff Simms of the Open Space Institute, Chris Pryslopski of the Hudson River Valley Institute, the staff of Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, NY, Maine's Old Town Canoe Company, and Kate Taylor, Ken Able, Rich Guthrie, David Secor, and Mike Burger, all of whom work for various conservation organizations and agencies. Jerold Pepper of the Adirondack Museum and Helen Vendler of Harvard were both kind and of great help as well.

I am grateful for permission to reprint the following material.
For The Adventures of Augie March
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow
Penguin Group
New York, NY
1999
For “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
Vintage Books
Random House, Inc.
New York, NY
1995
For “Sunday Morning”
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Vintage Books
Random House, Inc.
New York, NY
1990
For “Fern Hill” (International)
The Poems
Dylan Thomas
Orion Publishing Group, Ltd.
London
1991
For “Fern Hill” (US)
By Dylan Thomas, from THE POEMS OF DYLAN THOMAS, copyright ©1945 by The Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Sunday Morning Comin' Down
Words and Music by Kris Kristofferson
© 1969 (Renewed 1997) TEMI COMBINE INC.
All Rights Controlled by COMBINE MUSIC CORP. and Administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC.
All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured Used by Permission
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation
Well All Right
Words and Music by Norman Petty, Buddy Holly, Jerry Allison and Joe Mauldin
© 1958 (Renewed 1986) MPL MUSIC PUBLISHING, INC. and WREN MUSIC CO.
All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation
INTRODUCTION
Prologue
To understand a country it's best to understand its land, to move through it long and slow. Rivers bore through terrain long and slow, and as such a people's relation to their moving water may define them better than anything. Yet as the old Greek reminds us, we never step in the same river twice, and since cultures course through history in similar fashion to flowing water, a float along each may not provide clear definition. Very well. We seek to word the questions in life as much as the answers, for the questions are all we really have.
By 2009, America—a place rigidly defined by many—had become a brew of simmering qualm and wayward identity. Racially, economically, socially, politically, ecologically—the past was aloft. Our wars, moreover, were troublesome, extensions of Vietnam's quick-triggered folly it seemed, though even their frothiest detractors couldn't say why, exactly, they weren't necessary. Yet they had come, and necessary or not, we only knew that a handful of be-turbaned, heavily bearded men had guided us into alien territory, where both hawks and doves defended their positions with more doubt than conviction, knocking our sense of self further askance.
By August of this same year, I was adrift myself, at a time when I should have been firmly grounded. A confluence of rapid events placed me there. I was forty-one and male, tumbling into midlife all in the middle of a greater shift, where twenty-first-century manhood scrambles to redefine itself. In keeping with this, I'd become a father in much the way New Orleans became a lake. One day all was well—sunny, happy, and fine—and then the levies broke, and when the levies break, Robert Plant tells us, you've got to move, and move I did. Not only did I become a father, but a stay-at-home father—a homemaker. I'd been living in Alaska, where I'd worked for ten years gathering field data for fish and wildlife biologists. Like many Northeasterners, I'd abandoned the New England woods of my youth for what the West has always promised—space, time, liberty. I found it in partial portions in Wyoming and California before coming to the remote wilderness I craved in Southeast Alaska. Ensconced, then, in this childhood dream, I met a woman on a visit back home—beautiful, fearsome, Irish, the best and worst kind—with whom I agreed to try and conceive. Four-thousand miles apart, both of us forty, we thought it would take time. Not so. A week after returning to Yakutat, Alaska, I received the news, and back I went, to a place I no longer considered home, a month before Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008.
The job market was dismal enough, but needing employment more than ever, and that to exceed the salary of my highly qualified, career-engineered, but-now-pregnant partner, would be a trick. I'd had two jobs since college, Invisible Fence installer and Fish and Wildlife technician, meaning I'd buried wire, shocked dogs, and counted fish, nothing compatible with Manhattan's cubicle warrens. Résumés vanished in cyberspace, friends smiled and wished me well. I temped. I contract edited. I day labored, even had a couple magazine articles published. No matter. As the birth approached, both Karen and I recognized that sheaves of diaper changing filled my future, and when the baby came, it was so. I—who had spent a decade running frigid rivers by jet boat, working daily amid brown bears, often alone—was now at home with a baby girl while my partner earned our bread. We only pretend we don't care what people think. I was supposed to be working, and wasn't.
This is America, though, where we make our own way, or so goes the thought. I'd been in Alaska ten years, where they call the lower forty-eight “America.” I'd moved back East, the region I'd thought I'd left for good, scarcely feeling connected. I'd published a few essays, and had logged reams of canoe time over the last decade. Having repatriated to the Northeast, I wanted to learn it anew. No better format for that than floating down a river. Dumb luck, moreover, made 2009 the four-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson's trip up his “River of Mountains,” so the Hudson it would be.
With childcare arranged, I stuffed a couple dry bags with minimal gear, bought the only thing in the world worth owning—an Old Town canoe—and set off for Henderson Lake. Two weeks later, sun-baked and restored, I pulled out in Manhattan. Wind, weather, and tides favored me the whole way, and I cheated a bit. Lake Tear of the Clouds, a pond on Mount Marcy, is the Hudson's highest source, and I skirted several urban portages in Glens Falls by way of the Champlain Feeder Canal, part of New York's spectacular man-dug waterways. In addition, I pulled out in northern Manhattan, not the Battery, saving my brother-in-law a post-twilight pick-up. So be it. My goal was simply to relearn my country. I don't know what I found, but the trip was worth every stroke.
Rivers and the River
America the Beautiful. It's one of the few national bromides I've never dismissed. When Europeans probed the New World, God knows what they actually saw. They must have been stunned. Great chunks of Eurasia had been cultivated for so long that vestal landscapes were likely unknown. Adriaen van der Donck, a Dutchman in mid-seventeenth-century New Netherland, lacked the Puritanical wilderness jitters terrorizing English settlers to his east. Reflecting upon what was then the North River, now the Hudson, he admitted his incompetency “to describe the beauties, the grand and sub