River float

The northwest corner of Arkansas was hazy with dust as August crept towards its end after a summer of one hundred and two degree days. We were visiting a friend who invited us to join her and her family on a river float, in the hope that the cool water and the lazy current would be an antidote to the dry and austere heat that enveloped that part of the Ozarks.  From Fayetteville we drove west on Route 62 to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, before taking a side road where a bend of the Illinois River shelters a cluster of businesses that sell access to the river: guided fishing trips, rental of inflatable tubes, rafts and canoes; the stores cluttered with displays of cheap sunglasses, floppy hats and sunscreen that everyone wishes they bought more of.  Northwest Arkansas in where Bentonville is located-- the seat of the world headquarters of Wal-Mart, the retailing giant -- and that corner of the state has a slight polish, the roads are in good condition and the housing stock mostly looks decent.  Driving from Arkansas into Oklahoma it becomes noticeable immediately after crossing the state line that things are a little more rundown -- ragged trailers and impromptu ranch houses with cheap siding and tin roofs line the roads, and in late August the hills are the color of burlap.

The other rafters were largely in groups: families, some couples, and crews of friends carting picnics in an assortment of coolers with cans of beer hidden in the ice -- there were signs everywhere warning the consequences of drinking while rafting, including the possibility of being banned from that stretch of the river.  Visitors park their cars in the gravel lot and then are driven in buses to an embarkation spot -- a flat and sloping bank created by the slow movement of the river’s course over time. The long open bend floods in the spring when the water is high and rushing with snow melt and runoff from the surrounding Ozarks but in the depths of August it is exposed as the diminished Illinois River gently winds its way southeast  -- across Oklahoma, through Arkansas and Tennessee, down through Mississippi and Louisiana, changing names along its wending path until it finally empties out into the Gulf of Mexico, after a wash through the delta that lays by New Orleans.

Guided by stars and currents

It is the first long story that I have attempted to write, the first novel, and I picked a story that takes place in a historical setting.  So far it has been rewarding but also a slow and challenging project that is difficult to fit within the contours of my life.

One of the characters is a navigator and needs to be able to speak authoritatively on the subject so I had to learn more about navigation.  One of the books that I read was “Early Man and the Ocean” by Thor Heyerdahl, a series of essays where Heyerdahl lays out his theories of navigation and ocean-going activities in the ancient world.  Heyerdahl was a Norwegian zoologist best known for the Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, when he and a group of hearty fellow-travelers constructed a balsa raft and drifted with the ocean currents to land in the Tuamotu Islands in Polynesia, a journey of 4,300 miles that took over 100 days.

In the book Heyerdahl makes an argument for early contact between Africa and the Americas, showing that ships woven out of reeds used by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians in the pre-Christian era could possibly sail across the Atlantic.  He mentions the Sea-People, a mysterious group of maritime traders described by ancient Egyptian and Greek sources; speculating that they sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar to trade along the West African coast, crossed the Atlantic by following the Westward current that begins off of the Canary Islands, and engaged in commerce with the peoples of the Americas.  Heyerdahl expands on his theory of the American origins of ancient Polynesia, mustering the supporting data and theories that he can within the small format of the book.  There was something about a central image that he used that I found hugely resonant: the idea of a small group of people, impelled by the boundless human capacity for exploration and adaptation to undertake a perilous voyage across thousands of miles of open ocean, living off of the sea, reading the stars and the ocean currents for signs, with no clear sense of destination or purpose.