How I came to write MY REACH

I set out to write a book about a river. I had a good plan. I would drop my kayak in the waters of the Hudson, then poke my way either north or south and report what I saw and learned. I would get to know cement plants and abandoned brickyards, beautiful mansions and herons on shore. I’d have a few adventures and some misadventures that I could recount with bravado. It would be a personal book—the river and I would be one-- but not too personal; the river would pull me out of myself and keep my gaze focused outward. It seemed a pretty straightforward, even winning, idea. That is and is not the book I have written.

There are a few reasons why I did not write that book. The Hudson—perhaps no river—is particularly straightforward. As it sloshes in and out with the tides it is hard to grasp. If I had to pick five words to describe the river I would choose playful, dangerous, solitary, complicated, and unknowable. It turns out that I love these qualities of the river, particularly that it is unknowable. That keeps me coming back, trying to figure it out. If the river’s unkowableness makes for intriguing kayak outings it also creates an impossible writing task.

I am not the first writer to struggle with getting to know the Hudson River.  The early twentieth century naturalist John Burroughs lived for a time on the banks of the Hudson. Though he wrote many essays about the Catskills and the Hudson Valley region, only one of his essays directly discusses the river. Clearly he found the Hudson an ungraspable subject and soon enough he moved inland to his house, Slabside, buried in the woods.

In that one essay, “A River View,” Burroughs writes, “The Hudson is a long arm of the sea, and it has something of the sea’s austerity and grandeur. I think one might spend a lifetime upon its banks without feeling any sense of ownership in it, or becoming at all intimate with it: it keeps one at arm’s length.” In a sense, Burroughs set the tone for Hudson River writing. The Hudson has kept writers at a distance and vice versa.

Few Hudson River books take a personal approach. What most writers focus on is the rich natural, environmental, political, social and economic history. There’s the role it played in the Revolutionary war, and in the birthing of our modern environmental movement. There are the wealthy families—Roosevelt, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller among many—who have made the banks their home. There are the range of fish that have been a source of livelihood and the subject of scientific study. All of this deep, often complicated, history adds to the difficulty of being intimate with the river.

I was able to find my way into this mass of history by entering the river. Stroke by stroke, I took in the smells and sights, and the creatures and history that appeared before me. Though I have paddled the length of the river, there is no way that the story I tell of the Hudson could be comprehensive. I limited my scope by claiming a section just off of the village of Tivoli. I called this section MY REACH. In this way I was able to develop some intimacy with the river.

The information on the Hudson in this book imitates my own experience in learning the river: it is a bit impressionistic. There’s natural history, some social and environmental history, a dash of local lore and, it turns out, a lot about me.

I did not intend to write about myself. But both kayaking and life conspired against me. Kayaking is walking on water, with a few extra skills thrown in. Walking or kayaking, I move about three miles an hour. That means that along with seeing eagle in flight or honeysuckle in bloom in my kayak I have plenty of time to think.

I thought about loss, about what I’d left in Arizona, an airy, colorful house, a long and complicated relationship, a life that I found lovely. I was naïve, imagining these to be the greatest losses. I moved about the river alone wondering what was the opposite of loss and hoping I might find it out there in an inlet or in the choppy waves left by a tug and its cargo.

As my thoughts ranged from the small to the large, I saw how the river highlighted certain aspects of my life: how I pursued fear and that, mid-age, I was very much alone. These thoughts took me by surprise because I did not head out in my kayak in search of myself. I thought, simply, that the river might be a great place to relax or to burn off a little energy. I might get to see some interesting wildlife and I might in poking about the river lay down my own roots, commit myself to a place.

Life, like a river, is not straightforward. I could not have anticipated the events in my life when I started to venture out and to write about those excursions. I could not have predicted how I would need the river to absorb loss, and to provide solace.

I set out to write a biography of the Hudson but have instead written a memoir set on the Hudson. MY REACH is a story of how I ended up on a kayak in the Hudson River and how I came to need and love the river in all of its playful, beautiful complexity.