Shantyboat: A River Way of Life

Harlan Hubbard tells a real-life story of living his dream of building a shantyboat and floating it from Northern Kentucky to New Orleans. An artist himself, he tells a facinating story with great flair. Fans of Walden need to read this book.

This is a terrific book that I return to over and over. While the writing itself is not dramatic, it is filled with his love of the river and shantyboating. To paraphrase Wendell Barry, Hubbard makes practical what Thoreau made theoretical. Read it with Payne Hollow.

Shantyboat chronicles the adventures of Harlan and Anna Hubbard, who in the early 1950's, built a wooden houseboat (or shantyboat) out of a demolished house and drifted down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. Spanning several years, the book describes winters spent drifting freely with the current and summers foraging for or growing what was needed. Much more than a travelogue, the journey is an experiment in living just outside the confines of a newly emerging technological civillization, but still in a fully "civillized" way. Their lives were hardly lived in seclusion. Instead they preferred the richness of friends, good meals gathered from abandoned or empty lands, and art: Harlan was a painter, Anna a concert pianist. The story of their days drifting is often filled with anecdotes about weather, fishing, or dogs, and slowly draws the reader in with a steady seasonal rhythm. Their time on the river represents the last days of the shantyboater, a breed of free spirit that quickly dissappeared after the second world war. Industrial growth along the waterways, large new dams, and toxic pollutants ensured the end of a tradition of free living. Today, our world continues to grapple with issues of technology and its impact on what makes us human. "Shantyboat" offers an alternative, or perhaps a perspective on what is really important.