It is not difficult to understand the appeal of the idea embodied in the book Shantyboat: A River Way of Life. A couple in the prime of life construct their own shantyboat from salvaged materials in 1946. After fitting out the boat and provisioning it, they set themselves adrift on the Ohio River in the vicinity of Cincinnati and float down that river onto the Mississippi and then to New Orleans. They tie up on the riverbank here and there along the way for extended periods, making the acquaintance of charismatic river people, and finally complete their odyssey in 1950.

Harlan and Anna Hubbard were artists–the book is illustrated with Harlan’s own woodcuts, classical musicians, avid readers of great books, Renaissance people. Yet what was the real secret behind their mere ability to do what they did? That secret is something not directly addressed at all in the book itself. This empowering secret, however, revealed itself to me. Lean in close now. I will whisper this secret into your ear. Harlan and Anna Hubbard did not have any children at the time.

Freedom. A thing so often extolled yet so seldom truly experienced. Undoubtedly, the reason this book survives and continues in print since its first publication in 1953 is that it provides delightful detail for the daydreams of a certain narrow swath of people caught in the vapid grind of the existence endured by the much ballyhooed American Middle Class. It is the stuff that dreams are made of.

For me, however, the dream it amplified is different since I have already, after my own fashion, extricated myself from all of that. Harlan Hubbard spruced up my own daydream with detail, too, that of having a wife and partner of the strength and character, of the caliber of Anna Hubbard–not that I am in the midst of any great search at this stage of my game, mind you. What an extraordinary woman Anna Hubbard must have been! What an extraordinary woman she obviously was. Nowhere in the book, however, does Harlan Hubbard ever launch into a paean to his wife. He conveys this to us only by telling us what she said, what she did.

I commend to you the five-page Foreward to the University Press of Kentucky’s edition of this book by Wendell Berry, a writer of the southern ilk of whom I have become quite fond in other contexts recently. If you were to encounter this book in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore, you could sit down with it and digest this Foreward quickly to determine whether Harlan Hubbard’s account of their adventure might be a thing for you. Unfortunately, that Foreward is inexplicably truncated when you “look inside” the book on line at amazon.com.

While I have no wish to regurgitate Wendell Berry here, two of his points bear additional consideration. That this book is intimately related to Thoreau’s Walden and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is something that would have occurred to me without Mr. Berry’s help. Mr. Berry might also have named Moby Dick for that matter. Ponds, rivers, oceans. This book is right there in that flow of American literature. Mr. Berry does, however, make an ever so perceptive observation about the nature of that relationship, although he is careful to make clear that he is not contending that Harlan’s writing is superior to that of Henry David’s or Mark’s, né Samuel. This book completes those other books in a real way.

As for Harlan Hubbard’s style, here again I could not agree more with Mr. Berry. Obviously, the concept of two people adrift on a river is rife with metaphorical possibilities. Indeed, the temptation to metaphor is almost overwhelming. Harlan Hubbard, to his credit, successfully resists this temptation for the most part. On those rare occasions when he submits to the temptation á la Oscar Wilde, he does so in anything but a Wildean, reckless way. He deploys his rare metaphors light-handedly.

But upriver was as irretrievable to us drifters as time past.

Once they had drifted through a stretch of river on a boat with no power of its own, there was no going back to revisit that stretch. The fact of being adrift and their being only partly able to control the direction of that drift is central in the book. Yet, that quoted sentence is the only time that Harlan Hubbard inflates this simple fact into a metaphor, and he does it with such easy grace.

In contrast to Thoreau’s work, which by its nature is polemical, Harlan Hubbard was at no great pains to beat his readers over the head with the superiority of the lifestyle he and Anna chose over that of his readers, whatever that may be. Rather, he was a reporter, and an excellent one at that. While his prose may not be in the same league as that of Thoreau or Twain, as Mr. Berry notes, from my point of view it is a prose perfectly suited to its purpose. What more can one ask?

Harlan Hubbard’s reportage is full of interesting surprises. For example, during their voyage Harlan and Anna tied up during the summers and drifted during the winters. I would have expected the reverse. What one finds, however, is that by tying up during the summers, Harlan and Anna were able to garden on the banks of the river as well as gather wild vegetables, nuts, and fruit, then can and otherwise preserve this food against their travel in the winter.

As for what polemic there is in the book, again it is easily offered and easily accepted:

Surely refinement of living does not consist in gadgets and machinery, but in such elements as leisure, contentment, lack of confusion, small niceties . . . .

I do not mean that our way was better, and do not recommend it. To most, it would mean deprivation. To us it had an honorable simplicity and independence. We were living as we desired, and put out less than most, to get what we wanted.

It was precisely there, as a matter of fact, that Harlan Hubbard endeared himself to me now and forever. He did that with his choice of the word “contentment” over the word “happiness.” It is my theory that to discern the difference between contentment and happiness and then to act upon that discernment is the path to a rewarding existence. When I say that I am only 68.3% sure of the thing that I am most sure of–as I am often wont to say–that is the thing that I am most sure of. This couple, Harlan and Anna Hubbard, are now among my first ten exhibits offered in support of this proposition.

“He wanted to drift on the river not so much to see where it went as to be one with it, to go with it as virtually a part of it. He wished perhaps to live out a kind of parable.

‘I believe that whatever we need is at hand.’”

~ Wendell Berry

Quote Source: dhammanovice.  Wendell Berry from “Harlan Hubbard – Life and Work” via the beauty we love: He wanted to drift

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The painter Harlan Hubbard said
that he was painting Heaven when
the places he painted merely were
the Campbell or the Trimble County
banks of the Ohio, or farms
and hills where he had worked or roamed:
a house’s gable and roofline
rising from a fold in the hills,
trees bearing snow, two shanty boats
at dawn, immortal light upon
the flowing river in its bends.
And these were Heavenly because
he never saw them clear enough
to satisfy his love, his need
to see them all again, again.

Wendell Berry, Leavings

However, since this photo gallery appears in the **New York** Times, will the primary audience see anything *besides* rednecks and hillbillies? Won’t this gallery simply reinforce existing stereotypes of Kentucky among the East Coast elites? Will they have any insight at all as to how to interpret this quote from Adams that accompanies the gallery?

> When I was young, I couldn’t wait to leave Kentucky. Now, as I get older, I value every day when I return.

Many people know about Kentucky author and farmer **Wendell Berry**, but I wish more people knew about [Harlan Hubbard](http://www.harlanhubbard.com/), classically trained painter and musician, an essayist who inspired Berry and who, like Berry, chose to live off the land in rural Kentucky rather than among the cultural elite. Hubbard is someone who gets you a bit closer to the paradoxical land that is Kentucky.

Summer Landscape: The House on the Ridge

“The project is important to me because Harlan Hubbard was a very prolific, but underappreciated artist,” Meg explained. “He had a remarkable career as an artist and writer, living most of his life near the Ohio River. The life and landscape of the river is explored deeply in his art. His paintings are a revealing counterpart to the two books he authored, Shantyboat and Payne Hollow, and the four volumes of his journals that were published afterwards. Wendell Berry celebrated his life in a lecture series and a book, Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work. Yet his art never achieved the exposure that his writings did. He documented the scenes of Campbell County and Trimble County in a way that is more true to nature than a photograph, and produced paintings that express his love of the landscape there. The paintings that are now in the KOAR database were shown at the Hopewell Museum in 2008, in the exhibit, “Harlan Hubbard: A Life in the Landscape, 1900-1988″. They are from private collections. The Lucille Little Fine Arts Library has a digital image database of paintings by Harlan Hubbard from regional collections. For more information, go to http://libguides.uky.edu/HarlanHubbard“

Steep Road

You can see a few examples of Harlan Hubbard’s paintings on our Recent Additions webpage, or you can search the database directly for a look at more of his pre-1950 work by entering “Harlan Hubbard” in the Quick Search text box. We warmly welcome the Lucille Caudill Little Fine Arts Library as a new KOAR Partner and look forward to adding more of their images in future. We hope that you enjoy discovering the art of Harlan Hubbard, too.

Our stretch of the river started about a dozen miles below B.A. Steinhagen Lake, which means Paddling the Wild Neches, at left, leaves off just about where we started. Not that the lower river isn’t wild. It’s bounded on both banks by the Big Thicket National Preserve and the only bridges that cross the Neches for 42 river miles are at the put-in and the take-out. In two and a half days we saw two other humans, both in the same jonboat. We saw them going upstream on day two, and back downstream about 20 minutes later.

But the lower river isn’t completely isolated, and the jonboaters were probably headed to or from one of a dozen or so fishing shacks moored along the shores. Most of which seemed to be in pretty bad shape in the wake of hurricane Ike, which blew through here something fierce a couple of months ago.

A lot of people used this river and its bottoms for whatever the hell they wanted to for years before the federal government kicked them out in the 1970s. The fishing shacks were grandfathered in as a traditional use. Most of them are connected to land by some sort of gangplank, but they’re fully floating on foundations of oil drums and styrofoam block. I assume they’re built this way because it’s the only viable way to build in a bottomland flood zone where a rise of just a few feet would inundate thousands of acres. There just isn’t much high ground out there.

The camps reminded me of Harlan Hubbard, who spent a good amount of time living on hand-built houseboats he called “shantyboats” on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. His Shantyboats on the Bayous, which I’ve given away, is an account of that life, which seemed like the most romantic thing in the world to me at one time. But even Hubbard — a painter and musician and free spirit — eventually set up camp on dry land. Payne Hollow is his book about that life.

There are MORE NECHES PICTURES on my flickr page in the RIVER TRIPS set.