Payne Hollow: Life on the Fringe of Society by Harlan Hubbard (review)

Book Reviews PAYNE HOLLOW: LIFE ON THE FRINGE OF SOCIETY BY HARLAN HUBBARD (New York: The Eakins Press, 1974. 167 pages, $5.95). "We landed at Payne Hollow with great expectations. How good it was to have a sandy beach, and solitude!" Thus Harlan Hubbard wrote prophetically in Shantyboat (Dodd, Mead; 1953) of his arrival twenty-eight years ago at the secluded notch in die rugged Kentucky shoreline of the Ohio River which now gives its name to his new book. That first book, unfortunately long since out of print, was the one-of-a-kind chronicle of Harlan and Anna Hubbard's seven years of shantyboat living in the 1940's—the building and readying of their boat at Brent, Kentucky, just up the river from Cincinnati, followed by dieir years of leisurely drifting down die Ohio and Mississippi (including one full summer at Payne Hollow) and their eventual arrival at New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou country. I know of nothing else quite like Shantyboat in our literature. The closest analogue would probably be Mark Twain's personal recollections of mid-nineteenth century river lore and commerce in Life on the Mississippi. But even that comparison is misleading, for, as Hubbard pointed out in 1953, when the peculiar breed and the kind of river life he wrote about was already dying out: The true shantyboater has a purer love for the river than had his drifting flatboat predecessors. They were concerned with trade or new land. To him the river is more than a means of livelihood. It is a way of life, the only one he knows which answers his innate longing to be untrammeled and independent, to live on the fringe of society, almost beyond the law, beyond taxes and ownership of property. His drifting downstream is as natural to him as his growing old in the stream of time. Away from the river he languishes, as if taken from his natural element. Clearly there is more of Huck Finn than of Mr. Bixby, the wizard river pilot, in such an oudook—more of Sam Clemens, so to speak, than of Mark Twain. 178BOOK REVIEWS But there is a transcendental soul in Hubbard's shantyboater as well, and it sounds a note out of die American past which is even more suggestive of Henry Thoreau's flute floating out over the evening mists of Waiden Pond than of die whistles of Twain's aggressive streamboats reverberating along the fogbound shores of our nineteenth-century river byways. This suggestion of Thoreauvian echoes in the life and work of Harlan Hubbard is strengthened by the coincidence that Henry Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, written early and without the poetic intensity and philosophical consolidation he later brought to Waiden, was also structured, like Shantyboat, on the personal notes and recollections of a river adventure undertaken by two. Thoreau's companion had been his brother John. Hubbard's was his wife Anna. Each chronicled a leisurely voyage of observation and discovery in which the river set the pace while the weather, the natural elements, and the scenes along die banks provided the scenario and prescribed themoods. Many parallels between the two authors continue to develop in their more mature and considerable second books, and it is illuminating to read Payne Hollow—which carries the subtide "Life on the Fringe of Society"— as Harlan Hubbard's Waiden. For Payne Hollow is the place where Harlan and Anna Hubbard, who started out together as shantyboaters, returned to the fixed life of the shoreline to live off the land after their river odyssey and their transitional period of wandering on wheels was behind them. It is where they have built their snug functional house and for over twenty years have grown their own food and, independent of machines, electricity, and cities, have seen to their own needs, living the simple, separate, active-contemplative life of their own choosing. Yet, just as Mark Twain's steamboats and rafts are only partial analogues for the Hubbards' shantyboat, there are also important distinctions which temper the affinities between Thoreau's Waiden and Hubbard's Payne Hollow. For one thing...