Awhile back I included in an emailed invitation to a friend to go paddling on the Columbus Lake near the lock and dam a quote from Kenneth Grahame’s classic “The Wind in the Willows.”
And you, you will come too, young brother; for the days pass, and never return, and the South still waits for you. Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! ‘Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new!
My friend never rose to the bait, but there were positive unintended consequences. I began reading the century-old classic (1908), ostensibly a children’s book, about the riverine exploits of a mole, rat, toad and a badger.
With all the rain in the earlier part of the year, many have had riverine exploits of their own locally. In spring the Waterway flooded, and owners of riverfront houses traversed unaccustomed places like the Riverwalk in motorboats to secure their property. Kayakers were seen crisscrossing the soccer park in Burns Bottom.
At the end of April a WCBI meteorologist told me Columbus in the previous six months had received almost 50 inches of rain. Our average rainfall for 12 months is 55 inches.
We could use a bit of that rain about now.
“The Wind in the Willows,” an extended fable about friendship, home and the joys of the natural world, is a delight and like many books disguised as children’s books, (e.g. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” “The Little Prince,” “Charlotte’s Web”) it contains larger truths.
The most oft quoted and beloved passage of the book comes when Mr. Toad tells Mole, “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
For the reader interested in books about messing around in boats, there is much to choose from.
Take the Mississippi River.
Hailed by many as the great American novel, Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” along with his “Life on the Mississippi” are both considered classics, books Twain defined as “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
Though I don’t know if Mr. Twain would approve, I recently revisited his two classics via a free audible download on my phone.
“It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened–Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many.”
— Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
An essential book about the Mississippi River is “Rising Tide,” John Barry’s all-encompassing account of the 1927 flood.
In putting that great flood in context of American history, Barry explores race relations in the Mississippi Delta as well as the nation; the pathetic father-son story of Leroy and William Alexander Percy of Greenville; the vain and self-serving moneyed class of New Orleans; the story of the brilliant James Buchannan Eads, who devised a way — using his own money — to make the Mississippi navigable for ocean-going vessels and the rise of Herbert Hoover, whose opportunistic grandstanding as head of relief efforts during the ’27 flood catapulted him into the White House.
Inspired by a childhood reading of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” British travel writer Jonathan Raban years later “sailed” down the Mississippi in an aluminum fishing boat powered by a 15-horsepower motor.
Raban describes — often critically — the towns and people he encountered along the way. I read “Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi” not long after it was published in 1981 and it set in me a longing to be on the river.
Though I can’t say if Raban’s book has aged well, the Mississippi — as are most rivers — continues to be a source of adventure, natural wonder and indescribable beauty, qualities we should hold dear in a world moving inexorably toward an online reality.
Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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