Waterworks

Because it’s there.

That was reason enough for George Mallory. The mountaineer’s motive for challenging Everest was arresting and crystal clear. Although the mountain took his life 75 years ago, his words have roused dreamers ever since.

From our vagabond writers, we deserve at least as much. It seems obvious to suggest that the “why” of a journey is as essential as the gumption to take one. The more we understand of our movements, the more sure-footed our step. People who wander without reason are commonly thought of as lost, one way or another.

In his first book, William Trogdon, writing as William Least Heat-Moon, gave us a cogent explanation for exploring the backwaters of America in search of himself and a country that he had come to regard as alien: His job as a college English instructor was eliminated, he was at crossroads. “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go,” he wrote. The result, “Blue Highways,” was the kind of publishing surprise that did not just entertain but inspired. The title became a phrase in the language to suggest that there was more to America than its thoroughfares.

In this new journey, Least Heat-Moon sets across the country once again. Now he is in a speedboat. Why? Hard to say this time. In his introduction, he writes that he thought about the trip for 20 years. At first, he was curious to know if it could be done “without coming out of the water repeatedly and for many miles.” The answer: a qualified yes, depending on one’s definition of “repeatedly” and whether 200 miles of portages are fewer than “many miles.”

Then, he grew interested in what America would look like from rivers. “Surely,” he tells us, “a journey like that would open new country and broader notions.” Or maybe not, as it turns out. The “why” never blossoms, and neither does Least Heat-Moon’s “River Horse.”

Such a verdict comes only with regrets because America is in the mood to make sense of itself, and few are thought to be as capable of it as this rural wanderer whose blood mixes European immigrant with Osage native. From Least Heat-Moon we have come to expect something like foolproof balance between the romance and reality of America. But I am pretty certain he will not inspire many with this venture.

John Balzar is the author of the forthcoming “Yukon Alone: The World’s Toughest Adventure Race” and is a national correspondent for The Times.

In a twin-outboard 22-foot closed-cabin dory, he throttles his way from New York Harbor to Astoria, Oregon. En route: the Hudson River and Erie Canal, Lake Erie, the Allegheny, Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the Rocky Mountains (switching to motorized canoe and guided raft) and then the Snake and Columbia rivers. In total, 5,000-plus miles at 10 miles per page.

For one thing, it is an alarming trip, made worse by the fact that Least Heat-Moon lacks aplomb as a boatman. Whether it is bouncing on the swells outside a New Jersey marina, dodging snags on the flooded Missouri and so very much in between, the author resorts to more anxious exclamation points than any half-dozen good books about crossing the Atlantic or sailing around the world in similar size boats. Granted there is peril in such a trip. But the freeway commute can be harrowing, too, in a humdrum sort of way.

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The purpose of the journey blurs from the start. The prospect of inquiring into America is overshadowed by what seems to be the unwelcome adventure of navigating it. When rain sheets down the window of his shore-side lodgings in Cincinnati, he glumly decides, “There would be no rivering in that weather.” At a time when our adventure literature overflows with heroic struggles, Least Heat-Moon goes back to bed. At one point, he concedes that the elements were “forcing me to admit I was a man of wheels, not hulls, who was in over his head.”

In his favor, Least Heat-Moon is richly prepared for encounters with America’s heritage. From all the research, he skillfully delivers bon mots of our past that are endlessly interesting, if seldom connected, a kind of riverbank almanac that reminds us what the writer can do to paint detail in the background of a scene.

Bobbing through the heartland, where he is most at home, Least Heat-Moon latches on to the importance of waterways in America’s development. He reminds us that America’s central drainage system is one of the most astonishing in all the world although seldom regarded as a whole.

We do not linger, however. Least Heat-Moon seems to be in a hurry. Nature’s seasons and its rhythmic ebbs and flows are sources of dismay. He speaks of beauty but too seldom evokes it. Many of the encounters and people we meet are reminiscences from earlier highway travels. He declines to bring himself into the story except as log-keeper. He’s already written his inward-looking book, he told an interviewer along the way. So what we know of the voyager comes mostly from this earlier work. What we know of the voyage is that it ends off the great river bar where the Columbia dumps into the Pacific in a violent clash of wind, current and tide.

The writer signals his relief. It is a feeling the reader can share.