On the Water: Discovering America in a Rowboat
By Nathaniel Stone
Broadway Books, 2002
Reviewed by Linda Beyus
Traveling by boat from New York to New Orleans, then northward to Maine might not sound like such a great feat, but once you learn that Nathaniel Stone did this two-legged journey in a rowboat, you stand up and take notice. Circumnavigating the eastern U.S. over 12 months, Stone rowed his sleek fiberglass scull up the Hudson, across the Erie Canal, then briefly onto Lake Erie, portaging to the Ohio River, then at last down the Mississippi. As if this were not enough, a few months later he sets out again from Natchez and ends his journey at Eastport, Maine.
Stone followed a route inspired by Howard Blackburn, an intrepid Gloucester fisherman who nearly completed a 1902 circumnavigation of the eastern U.S. and whose story captivated Stone for many landlocked years. Blackburn ended his journey by maneuvering a rowboat around Florida after his sailboat went aground one too many times. Finally, he had enough, and jumped a steamer back home.
Nat Stone made it further than Blackburn under his own steam, rowing thousands of strokes in his 18-foot sleek scull and, later, in a wider rowboat. A newspaperman and teacher who lives in New Mexico, Stone grew up in Marblehead. “The first boat I ever built swamped immediately,” he writes. “I built it out of a shipping pallet picked from the trash … scrap plywood from behind the garage, and, for flotation, stray Styrofoam I’d collected along the shore … I was eight years old.”
The first half of his inland voyage was in a slender, 18-foot fiberglass scull, well suited to rivers and bayous. He camped anywhere he could – boat launches, public parks (if undetected or given permission), backyards. On the second leg of his journey, from Mississippi via New York to Maine, he chose a rowboat big enough to sleep in while at anchor – 17 feet with a 45-inch beam.
Throughout his journey, Stone was asked what possessed him to make such a trip. He says it wasn’t simply an adventure. “In a culture of acquisition and enlargement, I felt an impulse to stop, step back, observe, and live by my wits and material minimums.” Or put in primal terms, “just to be on the water, alone in the natural world, from which, or within which, we’ve emerged.”
The lure of On the Water is its emphasis on Stone’s encounters with generous people all along his route and his respect for them. His skill as a writer highlights the simple kindness strangers show as they offer Stone canned goods, a place to tie up his boat or the use of their shower.
Once the author reaches his rhythm in his narration, as he does with his own rowing, the book moves along like a well-directed film. From sharing a lock with a huge tugboat to rowing his scull a safe distance from towboats and a mammoth raft of barges, Stone’s trip is a montage of American waterways at eye level. (Occasionally Stone overdoes it with too-wordy descriptions of his sculling strokes or the way water falls off his oars.)
Stone ends his book saying, “Once again I am reminded that mine has not been a solitary venture, as many imagine, but one guided by the kindness of those we call strangers, a term I dislike. Any one of the hundreds of people that I’ve met…might, by another twist of fate, have been my next-door neighbor growing up.” On the Water is an eloquent glimpse into America’s waterways and their inhabitants from a vessel powered by two arms and a desire to shed the unnecessary.