BRUNSWICK, Maine — When Rinker Buck made up his mind to pilot a flatboat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, he knew right away he had a problem.
You don’t just swing by the local marina, pull out your checkbook, and tell the salesperson you’d like a slightly used River Titan model flatboat in a shade of wine-dark maroon with plush leather seats and a 64” TV with Sensurround.
Buck, a writer who used to live in Maine, grasped that he would need to have someone build the boat for him. His search for the right person led him to a farm in Tennessee.
“Over a period of three months, we built it out of green poplar,” he said. “I’d never built a boat before, but it wasn’t that difficult, and that’s the point.”
Flatboats were widely used on U.S. rivers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, in part because it didn’t take a lot of skill to construct them.
“If you could build a barn, if you could build a sluice mill,” he said, “You could build a flatboat. And that’s why it took off the way it did.”
Over four months, Buck and his crew traveled 2,000 miles down the Ohio and Mississippi, from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, re-creating the journey that millions of Americans took as the frontier moved west.
He tells the story in his new book, “Life on the Mississippi,” a title that gives an admiring nod to Mark Twain’s classic work of the same name.
Among the more remarkable aspects of Buck’s trip is that he did it all. These two mighty rivers are dominated by commercial boat traffic—picture 9,000-horsepower tugboats pushing 30 or 35 barges at once. As a result, recreational boating is practically nonexistent.
There were plenty of people on the rivers, but they were out there for work, not for fun and exploration like Buck.
“Going down the Mississippi, a thousand miles of the Mississippi,” he recalled, “I saw a total of four pleasure boats.”