Ebook: Chronicles of the Area Man

The author chronicles his journey across America's waterways in his dory Nikawa (River Horse), encountering strange people, hostile cities, and hair-raising dangers.;The Hudson River -- A Celestial Call to Board -- Up Rivers Without Sources -- There Lurk the Skid Demon -- A Drowned River -- Where Mohicans Would Not Sleep -- Snowmelt and a Nameless Creek -- The Erie Canal -- The Pull of a Continent -- Released from the Necessity of Mundane Toil -- Like Jonah, We Enter the Leviathan -- Knoticals and Hangman's Rope -- We Sleep with a Bad-Tempered Woman Tossed by Fever -- The Lakes -- Hoisting the Blue Peter -- How the Sun Rose in the West to Set Me Straight -- The Allegheny River -- An Ammonia Cocktail and a Sharp Onion-Knife -- A Flight of Eagles, an Iron Bed, and So Forth -- Unlimited Sprawl Area -- Zing, Boom, Tararel! -- The Ohio River -- Proving the White Man a Liar -- The Day Begins with a Goonieburger -- Enamel Speaks -- Along the Track of the Glaciers -- From Humdrummery on down toward Tedium -- A History of the Ohio in Three Words -- A River Coughed Up from Hell -- A Necessity of Topography and Heart -- Nekked and Without No Posies -- Eyeless Fish with Eight Tails -- The Great Omphalos in Little Egypt -- The Mississippi River -- A Night Without Light on a River Without Exits -- The Ghost of the Mississippi -- Of Swampsuckers and Samaritans -- To the Tune of "Garry Owen" We Get Ready -- The Lower Missouri River -- We Start up the Great Missouri -- I Attach My Life to the Roots of a Cottonwood -- A Language with No Word for Flood -- Looking the River in the Eye -- Clustered Coincidences and Peach Pie -- Gone with the Windings -- Pilotis's Cosmic View Gets Bad News -- The Dream Lines of Thomas Jefferson -- A Water Snake across the Bow -- Sacred Hoops and a Wheel of Cheddar -- The Upper Missouri River -- We Find the Fourth Missouri -- The Phantom Ship of the Missouri Reeds -- How to Steal Indian Land -- A Conscientious Woman -- Flux, Fixes, and Flumdiddle -- Sitting Bull and the Broom of Heaven -- How to Be a Hell of a Riverman -- Yondering up the Broomsticks -- Chances of Aught to Naught -- We Walk under the Great River -- Why Odysseus Didn't Discover America -- Pilotis Concocts an Indian Name for God -- Trickles, Dribbles, and Gurglets -- My Life Becomes a Preposition -- Little Gods and Small Catechisms -- Eating Lightning -- Imprecating the Wind -- Into the Quincunx -- Planning for Anything Less than Everything -- Over the Ebullition -- Ex Aqua Lux et Vis -- Weaknesses in Mountains and Men -- A Nightmare Alley -- No Huzzahs in the Heart -- The Mountain Streams -- We Meet Mister Eleven -- Eating the Force that Drives Your Life -- An Ark from God or a Miracle of Shoshones -- A Shameless Festal Board -- The Salmon River -- Bungholes and Bodacious Bounces -- The Snake River -- My Hermaphroditic Quest -- Kissing a Triding Keepsake -- Messing About in Boats -- The Columbia River -- The Far Side of the River Cocytus -- Place of the Dead -- Theater of the Graveyard -- A Badger Called Plan A -- Robot of the River -- A Taproom Fit for Raggedy Ann -- Salt to Salt, Tide to Tide -- An Afterword of Appreciation -- If You Want to Help.