River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

“Traveling by boat is the best way to travel, unless one can stay at home.”

I admire the logic of putting in opposite corners of the state, like boxers in a ring, Drinker and Dry Tavern, or keeping Virginville well away from Hooker.

Pilotis took the binoculars to scan the ridge above the Duquesne Incline and managed to spot the Photographer and his signal flag waving goodbye before he pulled the trailer west to meet us—we trusted—in a few weeks and two thousand miles away in Sioux City, Iowa, below the first dam on the Missouri River.

The sea is the wind made visible, but a river is the land turned liquid.

The largest conical earthen mound in the New World is at Moundsville, West Virginia. Called Mammoth, or Grave Creek Mound, it is at least two thousand years old and once held the remains of Indians wearing copper bracelets, bone and shell beads, a gorget or two; but its most famous artifact was a sandstone tablet inscribed with a couple of dozen characters

When I asked how her name came about, she corrected me: “It isn’t Enamel—it’s Enna-mell. My grandmother, who couldn’t read too good, saw the word on a fancy brooch in a jewelry store and thought it was classy, maybe like Tiffany. It’s a good name because I can tell if people know me or not. One gal was claiming to be my friend but making up tales about me, but everyone knew she was lying because she called me Enamel like I came out of a paint can.

The Anderson River, a name my mate thought one of the least interesting in the country, entered at Troy, Indiana, about where seventeen-year-old Abe Lincoln built a small scow to take travelers out to midstream to board passing paddlewheelers. A Kentucky boatman hailed the boy into court for operating a ferry without a license, but Abe argued his scow didn’t cross the river, so it wasn’t actually a ferry and therefore needed no license; the judge agreed, a decision less important than the suit itself, which introduced Lincoln to the law.

Pilotis called, “Do you know where we are?” and he answered, “I know where I am,” and went inside.

swampsucking orzizzazz—his

Three weeks later a tornado hit New Haven, just as one had done after the last flood. When we heard that news, I said to the Reporter, We shouldn’t have accepted the town clover.

What’s the booze do? “It keeps you from caring you’re biting a bug’s ass.”

“These things were invented in California,” Parker said, “but I hear they’re illegal there now.” Pilotis: “That’s right. The Association of Los Angeles Grocers got them outlawed when a masked man held up a produce stand with a large russet.”

the radio crackled and cleared its throat and said, “Nikawa, this is the Pacific.”