ON THE WATER

In an impeccable piece of travel-writing, newcomer Stone travels by rowboat on a course that turns the eastern US into a big island that he transportingly circumnavigates.

“I had plain adventure in mind, to be sure,” he declares, “to live by my wits and material minimums.” The adventure is to row up the Hudson, through the Erie Canal, and on to the Allegheny (after the briefest of portages), then down the Ohio and Mississippi to the Gulf, around Florida and back up the coast to Eastport, Maine, at the Canadian border. Though he was raised around water and his father was a crack rower, Stone is no professional: he’d never even pulled the oars of his 17-foot scull until the morning he set off from Brooklyn, and it wasn’t until Pittsburgh that he got important tips on technique and equipment. But once afloat, he gradually settles into a comfortable rhythm that includes the nightly chore of finding a place to sleep, whether that means pitching his tent (to say the trip was done on a shoestring might be an overstatement) or accepting the generosity of people he meets. In recounting his voyage, Stone uses words freely yet with a poem’s compression, a coiled energy deftly released, as when he describes the mechanics of the rowing stroke or the correct pronunciation of Atchalafaya (“one easy breath, ‘Chuff-uh-lye’”). There are enough snafus and mistakes to keep him human, and while his encounters with people are mostly pleasant and frequently revealing about the place, there are a few ugly moments as well, including the time he was invited to join a picnic gathering and then, for no discernible reason, summarily evicted (“GET OFF THIS PROPERTY. NOW!”) by the patriarch of the group. Throughout, he keeps his sense of the journey’s importance in perspective with an engaging combination of innocence and opinion.

Stone rows his boat into a work of art.