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Chapter 4 the ConCept In retrospect the summer of 2008 was not the best time for a road trip across America. Gas was on its way up to five dollars a gallon; the country, on the eve of a contentious election fraught with racial and economic anxieties, seemed on the verge of a not-so-civil war; and driving long distance implicated you in global warming, pollution, warmongering, and the senseless murder of billions of insects. I fretted, sure, particularly about the expense, but I went anyway . Number one reason: it seemed an interesting time to travel the country, a historic time, if you will, when we were on the verge of a dramatic change in leadership. Number two: I wondered if this would be the end of an era, if crosscountry meanders might become cost prohibitive for anyone but the wealthy leisure class. Finally, I had a list of rivers that I hoped would lead me upstream to obscure quadrants of mystery and revelation. That summer I was systematic. I mapped out an itinerary that would cover twenty states and a sampling of twelve rivers in a geographic lasso around the continental United States. I consulted maps and made lists of rivers and campsites. I glanced at other travelers’ descriptions and photos to get ideas about what might loom in my windshield, what might come across my bow. Doing a little research—but not too much—before a trip like this is part of the fun. You realize and really hope that no matter how much you prepare, you’ll be surprised and challenged, that something or someone will force you to think in new ways about your journey without inflicting permanent psychological, physical, or vehicular damage. William Least Heat-Moon embarked on an epic loop around the perimeter of the United States in the late 1970s. In his van, which he called Ghost Dancing, he stayed off the interstates and explored the roads that maps 34 The Concept once designated with blue, those that meandered through places of enlightenment and unexpected beauty, away from the drudgery of consumerism and commerce to out-of-the-way places where gritty folks would reveal to him the details of their lives. It is a remarkable journey and an amazing book, Blue Highways. Unlike Heat-Moon, who was in his thirties when he made his trip and had just been fired from his teaching job and ejected from his marriage, I had just turned fifty, I was happily married, and I’d just attained the status of tenured professor. Healthy and more or less sane, I hadn’t anything to escape from, really, just an itch to take a long trip on the roads and rivers of America and to return to the West, a landscape I ached to see again, after a period of living there in the 1980s. My list of rivers spread across the continent from New England to the upper Midwest to the northern Rockies and beyond to California, returning to East Tennessee on a route that would take me through Nevada, southern Colorado, Texas, and Missouri. I chose rivers, first of all, with names that evoke something of significance, literary or historical: the Gauley in West Virginia, which I’d heard was the fiercest river in the East; the Connecticut River in Massachusetts, across which Puritan Mary Rowlandson, a captive of Wampanoag leader King Philip, waded on her way toward redemption/ransom (I teach Rowlandson’s narrative in my introduction to literature class); the Tippecanoe in Indiana, backed up by Lake Shafer, which features an amusement park at a place called Indiana Beach; the Cheyenne in North Dakota, which skirts a reservation and pours into the dammed Missouri River; the Columbia above the Grand Coulee Dam (which Woody Guthrie sang about) near the Canadian border; the King’s River near Yosemite National Park in California; the Dolores in southern Colorado, which cantankerous Edward Abbey had rafted before its damming and the formation of McPhee Reservoir; the Brazos in Texas, which John Graves canoed and wrote eloquently about in 1960 just before it was dammed; the James in Missouri, flowing into Table Rock Lake, which borders Mark Twain National Forest and an Ozark Mountain tourist town that goes by the name of Branson. Going alone—without a friend, canine or human—would give me maximum flexibility. I would be responsible only for myself, and I could complain only to myself if I got too hot or too tired...

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