Description
Over the course of the five-week voyage, Trevathan rediscovered the people and places that made history on the Tennessee’s banks. He crossed the path of the explorer Meriwether Lewis along the Natchez Trace, noted the sites of Ulysses S. Grant’s Civil War battles, and passed Hiwassee Island, the spot where a teenaged runaway named Sam Houston lived with Cherokee Chief Jolly.
Trevathan also came to know the up to date river’s dwellers, including a towboat pilot, two couples who traded in their landlocked homes for life on the river, a campground owner, and a meteorologist for NASA. He placed his life in the hands of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lock operators as he and Jasper navigated the river’s nine dams.
Paddling the Tennessee River is a powerful shuttle narrative that captures the river’s wild, turbulent, and defiant past and confronts what it has transform—an overused and overdeveloped series of lakes. But in the beginning, the book is the story of a man and his dog, riding low enough to smell the water and to discover the promise of a slow river running through the southern heartland.
The Writer: Kim Trevathan, who earned his M.F.A. in creative writing on the University of Alabama, works as a new media creator and producer and writes a column for the Maryville Day-to-day Times. His essays and short stories have been published in The Distillery, New Millennium Writings, The Texas Review, New Delta Review, and Under the Sun. He lives in Rockford, Tennessee.