It was a massive privilege to both paddle the ‘Beautiful River’ and be a small part of Morgan Atkinson’s new documentary ‘This Is the Ohio,’ now appearing on PBS and Kentucky Educational Television. Congrats, Morgan!
“Once dubbed ‘the beautiful river,’ the Ohio River has since fallen on hard times, derided by some as the dirtiest river in America. Filmmaker Morgan Atkinson travels the 981-mile waterway from Pennsylvania to Illinois, discovering more hopeful perspectives that look at the river in new and provocative ways.”
Neal Moore traversed the country in his canoe named “Shannon.” (Courtesy of John Nolter)
Galvanized by a diagnosis of cancer, the disappearance of his friend and fellow canoeist Dick Conant, and the death of his mother, Neal Moore decided to do something meaningful with his life by embarking upon a canoe journey across America. His goal was to find points of connection, despite the division he sees present in our country.
Mr. Moore set out to explore not only how rivers and waterways connect, but also how we as Americans connect, as a microcosm of the world. The 7,500-mile journey lasted 675 days, from February 9, 2020, to December 14, 2021, starting in Astoria, Oregon, and ending at the Statue of Liberty in New York. Mr. Moore traversed 22 rivers through 22 states along the way.
“I was driven to do the journey to try to find a way to mend the division among people in our country that sprang up during the 2020 elections. I also wanted to be heavy on the immigrant experience,” he said. “All the people that I was documenting across the country were, for the most part, immigrants and people who came here from all over. The story of America is all of us, it’s the whole world; it’s not any one person or any one race, culture, or group.”
Pushing Past Boundaries
When Mr. Moore was 13 years old, his beloved older brother had a car accident and died from his injuries. This led him to a downward spiral of drugs and attempted suicide, exacerbated by his mother’s breast cancer diagnosis, her slow, painful decline, and her dying wish for him to become a missionary. This changed Mr. Moore’s life as he learned to walk freely among strangers, learn their stories, and live with his dark thoughts.
Mr. Moore believes that when you push yourself out of your comfort zone, extraordinary things can happen, and you learn and grow. He asked himself, “What if the greatest adventure of my life would be a return to my home country, almost like a child going into your own backyard to explore and to try to come to an understanding? And for me, what I saw was a disconnect, in the news, with the politics. I wanted to find the positive.”
Passing through Bismarck, N.D. (Courtesy of Byron Lannoye)
He chose an open canoe for his voyage, due to its physical connection to the water and nature. “The open canoe was one of the first modes of transport in North America,” he said. “And the rivers and waterways were the first thoroughfares, the first highways. The first roads built in America were alongside rivers, so you’ll have the first communities, the first cities, the first settlements, all along rivers.”
Mr. Moore said, “The journey was a perfect blend of nature and humanity, wildness and civilization.” He explained, “You go for weeks with nothing. There’s no communication, the phone doesn’t work. There are places where it’s wild, completely wild. Everyone talks about the physical aspect of the journey, but there’s also the mental, the emotional, which is so much harder. You have to wrestle with the demons inside of yourself, embrace the wildness inside yourself.”
Along the way, he faced multiple obstacles, as noted on his blog where he wrote dispatches from his journey: “I was dodging barges and container ships. Startling grizzlies. Being bumped hard by a bull shark. Being escorted by dolphins. Seeing curious alligators. And capsizing twice.” He said, “I had a near-death experience on a little tributary of the Clark Fork River called the St. Regis River. It’s a small, glacial river, so it’s freezing; even in the middle of summertime, you can get hypothermia. As I came around a turn, two big trees were blocking the whole river. I crashed into the side before I went under, scraping my way out, but I lost everything that was in the canoe. I thought I might die, but then I looked up and saw somebody there to save me. It was an amazing experience.”
Lockdown orders meant that many times he was unable to use the usual methods of frequenting small-town diners to collect the stories of those he met along the way. But he persevered, and through suggestions of kind strangers, Mr. Moore made memorable connections, such as when he was simply in the right place at the right time to join locally famous Jon Lee and his band Slimeline for a rousing performance of “Roll on Columbia” in Astoria, Oregon; when he fished with Bud Herrera of the Inter-Tribal Fish Commission on the Columbia River Gorge; and when he spent time with Brian Bensen, who lives in a 7-by-12-foot motorcycle hauler along the Snake River in Washington. He heard tales of perseverance over incredible obstacles, of people who had dealt with personal losses similar to his own.
Mr. Moore’s route began on the West Coast and ended in the New York harbor. (Courtesy of James R Peipert)
The End of a Journey
Mr. Moore said he “reckons that he’s the only person to canoe solo across the United States from west to east in a single go.” He made many friends along the way. About 50 people traveled to join him in New York. Some of them joined him to kayak around the Statue of Liberty at the end of his journey, he recalled.
“I’ve been on the water for two years; it’s my second to last day. I saw Lady Liberty’s torch. I started sobbing. … I realized I never considered that my journey had been one of illumination. The idea of trying to earn that view was crazy, because we don’t earn anything in this life is the first part. The second part was, I was a fool. Because that light, that fire had been with me the whole way. You don’t have to follow my footsteps and canoe to New York City to find that or to see that. You just have to learn to look within yourself to find it. We all are connected to the string that is the innate goodness of people.”
Mr. Moore’s most important goal was to inspire others to go on an adventure: “Unfurl a map, and work out where you want to start, and where you want to finish,” he said. “Make your own journey to find yourself; it could be across America or across town. It can be anything you want, from a hike to a long bicycle ride; the key is that it’s doable.”
Lone canoeist Neal Moore descended New York State’s Mohawk River, at the end of a journey that began 22 months and 7,456 miles ago, meeting people across 22 states and 22 rivers
His paddle has plied 21 bodies of water so far on his way across the continent. Downstream always means easier paddling, yet he knows that dangers abound—wedge up against a log or rock and the current will flip him and sink his earthly goods.
All the upstream slogs were worse, of course. His eyes would scan the river for the calm seams of flat water, and the points of land that subdued the stream and made the way less difficult. Lest he surrender hard-earned progress, he would dig and dig long past the burning of his shoulders in mid-morning and on into the long and stiflingly hot—or freezing and windblown—afternoon.
Neal Moore, seeing America low and slow on his cross-continent canoe trip for the 22 Rivers project. | Feature photo: John Noltner
Neal Moore spent most of the last two years on a canoe trip across America, the country where he was born and raised, and which he left at 18. In the three decades since he lived and adventured all over the world. He spent little time in the U.S., aside from his 2009 source-to-sea paddle on the Mississippi River, and also the months he spent in 2018 fighting high water on the Columbia River and its tributaries, all the way up and over the Continental Divide, only to call it quits in North Dakota.
The Harvard Travellers Club is an organization that has provided a venue for adventurous travelers to gather and socialize since 1902. An illustrious list of past speakers and members “include many legendary — as well as up-and-coming — explorers, scientists, mountaineers and adventurers.” Including: “the polar explorers Peary, Shackleton, Stefansson . . . the mountaineers Mallory, Smythe, Harrer . . . Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu . . . the great central Asian explorers Sir Francis Younghusband, Sven Hedin, Owen Lattimore and Roy Chapman Andrews . . . the Persian scholar Sir Percy Sykes . . . Bertram Thomas, the first European to cross the fabled Rub’ al-Khali . . . Alan Villiers, sailor and writer . . . Sir Harry Johnston, African explorer and writer . . . and President Theodore Roosevelt.”
Neal Moore Topps Allen & Ginter baseball card. (Photo by Neal Moore)
Standing next to his uncle amongst the roaring Jack Murphy Stadium crowd, a young Neal Moore watched the Cincinnati Reds’ Johnny Bench step into the batter’s box for one of his final career at-bats. Pausing to capture the moment, he felt forceful echoes of “We want Johnny! We Want Johnny!” rumble throughout the grounds. It was a moment, he said, that made him understand the significance of baseball.
“There were three pitches and there were three strikes. And it didn’t matter. In the nosebleeds [seats] with my uncle, I thought to myself, this isn’t about the Padres, and it’s not about the Reds. This is about baseball, America’s pastime. Right here and right now is something beautiful. There are moments that are magic,” he explained.
The man who traversed America along 22 of its connecting rivers from February 2020 to December 2021 told this story while reflecting on his journey. Surviving obstacles of all sizes, from flat tire portages with his canoe to curious bull sharks in the [Gulf of Mexico], he had hoped to intimately understand how America and its people are connected. Though baseball only represented part of Moore’s passage, having casually hiked to Cooperstown’s Baseball Hall of Fame from Little Falls while passing along the Erie Canal, he’s had a long-time fascination with the game. Now, he’s been recognized with one of its most distinctive badges—a Topps Allen & Ginter baseball card.
“About 30 minutes following the release of the “New York Times” article, [chronicling his canoe adventure] a Topps representative reached out to me,” said Moore.
Allen & Ginter cards have historically highlighted the country’s most interesting, successful and peculiar—for more than 100 years. Beginning in 1887 as cigarette trading cards, these collectables depicted oddities, spectacles and celebrities of all types. Resurrected in 2006 by Topps, annual collections have since continued the original tradition.
“There’s all these rarities,” said Moore of the sets. “You have the weird and the wild and everything in between. It’s just fun.”
Fresh off the plane from Nairobi. At Topps temporary HQ, New York City. Photo by Ryan Hickey.
Their latest issue features multiple Neal Moore cards, a small number of which bear his signature.
“About 300 of them are in blue ink, then there are red signatures, and there are 10 of those. The rarest of them are the [gold] ink, and I believe there are five of those,” said Moore.
Following his river adventures, Moore has returned to Taipei, Taiwan for the first time since the pandemic, having worked there and in Cape Town, South Africa as a teacher for years prior. He is also crafting a narrative account of his travels throughout the United States and giving speeches about his journey. He plans to visit Harvard’s Travelers Club next month, joining a historical list of speakers including Theodore Roosevelt and Edmund Hillary.
Though Moore will need time to plan, his next venture, he says, might involve another trans-continental trek—this time in the heart of South Asia. The Grand Trunk Road, or “the river of life” according to Rudyard Kipling, spans four capital cities of the region and has facilitated cultural diffusion for centuries. While such sights are reason enough to visit, Moore believes the greatest memories from his adventures have been with the people he encountered.
“The people and their way of life and what they have to tell us is valuable. To step into something great during your lifetime, be it the Grand Trunk Road or the Baseball Hall of Fame, it attaches you to a piece of history. It’s exciting to learn from people.”
Neal Moore is descending New York State’s Mohawk River by canoe, approaching the end of a journey that began 22 months and more than 7,000 miles ago. His paddle has plied 21 bodies of water so far on his way across the continent. Downstream always means easier paddling, yet dangers abound – wedge up against a log or rock, and the current will flip him and sink his earthly goods. All those upstream slogs were worse, of course. His eyes would scan the river for the calm seams of flat water, the points of land that subdued the stream and made the way less difficult. Lest he surrender hard-earned progress, he would dig and dig long past the burning of his shoulders in midmorning and on into the long and stifling – or freezing and windblown afternoon.
“Twenty-two rivers, 22 states, 22 months of journeying” has been his declared objective. “Stringing together rivers” and the people along them to see what still connects us as Americans in divided times.
At evening, sunset often beams upon a chosen spit of sand – the river showing him where to camp. He likes islands for their safety from animals but also from people. An hour before nightfall he unloads his gear, pitches his tent, fixes some supper, maybe cracks a beer. And then he dines in perfect solitude seated upon an overturned plastic bucket, watching the timeless mystery of day becoming night. Music of coyotes, crickets, frogs. The silent coming of fireflies from out across the water, piling into the willows above his head. He turns in early, marveling at the strength in his 49-year-old limbs, which increases by the day. He’ll will himself awake one hour before dawn, and in concert with the first hopeful rays of morning he will push off into the stream, leaving nothing behind but the notch in the coarse sand where his canoe has passed the sacred night.
Moore kept a journal detailing everywhere he went and everyone he met. Photo courtesy Birney Imes.
WHEN MOORE WAS a 13-year-old growing up in Los Angeles, his older brother, Tom, whom he adored, crashed his Mustang and died from his injuries. Devastated, Moore passed his teenage years in a spiraling funk – drugs, attempted suicide – made worse when his beloved mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and began a slow decline. His father was a fifth-generation Mormon whose pioneering ancestor had led a company of handcart-toting emigrants across the prairie to Utah. Now, with her health dwindling and her son hopelessly adrift, his mother stated her dying wish: for Moore to serve a two-year mission to spread the gospel, as is traditional for devout Mormons between high school and college.
Moore was anything but devout. But his mother wanted him to do something transformative. To do something pure. If she died while he was away, he was not to come home for the funeral. Surprising even himself, he went. His assignment was South Africa, 1991 to 1993. During his first month in the field, he got the phone call he’d been dreading – his mother had passed. Honoring her request, he stayed on.
The mission changed his life. In South Africa he learned to live outside his dark thoughts. To serve wholeheartedly. To walk freely among strangers and learn their stories. To shake hands African-style, thumb upward. To smile and mean it.
“When you push yourself out of your comfort zone,” he concluded, “this is when extraordinary things can happen. This is when you learn and grow.”
Over the next decades he lived as an expatriate, teaching English in Taiwan, selling antiques in South Africa, adventuring in Egypt, then heading into Ethiopia’s broiling heat. And back for a visit to his homeland in 2009 for a paddle down the length of the Mississippi River to see how the middle of America was faring during the Great Recession – this despite having never previously spent more than an afternoon in a canoe.
Cancer had taken his mother, and in 2012 it tried to take him too. He needed surgery, which left him unable to walk. Over the course of months, he crawled and then stood and then took a few shuffling paces and then got to where he could once again trek for miles.
Photo courtesy Norman Miller.
From overseas, after the 2016 election, he watched division and rancor infect his beloved country. He needed to rediscover America, to see what still held it together. His 50th birthday was approaching. Cancer would be back for him, he knew it. He’d love to plan an absolute banger of an excursion. Without a wife or children who’d miss him, he had the luxury of time. And he knew exactly how to use it – he’d traverse the continent by canoe.
The open canoe would not only honor the continent’s first inhabitants, it would put as little as possible between himself and the world. Rather than following the path of Lewis and Clark, he would reverse it and keep going, Pacific to Atlantic. The trip would need some kind of flourish at the end, and he knew just the thing — a victory lap around the Statue of Liberty, symbol of the American people, who were what this trip was about.
ON FEBRUARY 9, 2020, Moore sets out from Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River. He packs a tent, a sleeping bag, jugs of water, and a bucket of freeze-dried meals, then points his bright red 16-foot Old Town canoe upstream.
He starts pulling — 1,078 uphill miles to the Continental Divide in Montana (rivers: Columbia, Snake, St. Joe, Clark Fork). Portage over the divide. Then the eight-month, 3,600-mile downhill run to New Orleans (rivers: Missouri, Mississippi). Final leg, 2,890 miles and almost a year, east along the waters of the Gulf, then up through Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky, up to Lake Erie, across New York to Albany, then down to the Big Apple (rivers and waterways: Gulf of Mexico, Mobile, Tombigbee, Tenn-Tom, Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky, Kanawha, Allegheny, Chadakoin, Lake Erie, Erie Canal, Seneca, Oneida, Mohawk, Hudson).
Dodging barges and container ships. Startling grizzlies. Bumped hard by a bull shark. Escorted by dolphins. Curious alligators. Twice capsized. Days and days too windy to paddle. Sleet. Downpours. Floods. Spectacular, breathtaking scenery. And every day, that involuntary laugh of the free man reveling in his element.
The pandemic hits, things shut down, plans change, but Moore pushes on. He dines with the homeless and with mayors and with multimillionaires. Strangers shelter him for the night, buy him meals, show him the town, explain their histories. An Umatilla Indian in Oregon acknowledges with approval that he’s “going the wrong way,” west to east, reversing manifest destiny. In the Columbia River Gorge, a Klickitat chief shares his enduring love of the Columbia River and its salmon. Recreational fishermen insist on giving him all their food and beer. At dinner after a treacherous lake crossing in Montana, a rawboned cattle auctioneer tells him that he and his family were watching, ready to boat to the rescue. He attends concerts, pokes around museums, visits old friends, makes new ones. He goes out of his way to meet America.
In Bismarck, North Dakota, a farmer-turned-entrepreneur convinces him to get a tattoo. He chooses a memorial tattoo in honor of his brother, Tom, and listens to the life story of the artist, 42-year-old Lance Steven Paulk II, who has spent more of his life inside penitentiaries than out, who has been a prison gladiator, who has done solitary next to Charles Manson. That night when Moore opens his journal, he sees that it is July 13 – Tom’s birthday.
Taking it easy near Syracuse, New York. Photo courtesy Neal Moore
The beauty of a river is that it bears you along through seeming wilderness until it opens suddenly upon a town. This balance between nature and civilization appeals to the artist in Moore, who is at least as interested in people as he is in the land. At river towns as old as the country itself, he hauls his craft ashore. He’s often swarmed by curious locals: where did he say he’d come from? And he’s going all the way to where?
In St. Joseph, Missouri, he is hailed by an extended family partying along the river. He cautiously comes ashore and within minutes has become part of the group — they thrust a glass of moonshine into one of his hands and a grilled brat into another. Half an hour later, moonshine still in hand, he finds himself careening over the edge of the Missouri’s banks in a dune buggy, a giant grin on his face.
Photo courtesy Richard Sayer
In Oil City, Pennsylvania, an 82-year-old former pastor named Gale Boocks greets him on the banks of the Allegheny. Boocks had known Verlen Kruger, considered by many to be the greatest canoeist in history, and owns a paddle that had belonged to the legend. Boocks has read about Moore in the paper, and has come out looking for him so he could bequeath the paddle. Stunned, Moore accepts the gift on the understanding that he will merely be its temporary custodian until someday passing it on to another enthusiast.
It isn’t all rosy. At a bar in Montana, Moore slips up and reveals his politics, something he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do. The crowd turns on him and calls him — him, Neal Moore, descendant of pioneers, pilgrim on a voyage of love of his country – an enemy of the United States. The next morning the family that has been hosting him shows him the door.
But that is the only real stain on the trip. Any other time he expects danger or hatred, he finds their opposites. He tries to avoid places that attract meth addicts, so at a campsite up on the Snake that looks a little sketchy, he is apprehensive when approached by a fellow camper. But despite missing an eye and being what society deems “homeless,” the man, Brian Bensen, turns out to be anything but a threat. Over the years he has equipped himself with a pretty sweet outfit for surviving on the margins of society — a 7-by-12-foot trailer with solar-powered air conditioning and TV — and is eager to share whatever he can with anyone who needs it.
A new friend, Downtown Tat, in Memphis on election night 2020. Photo courtesy Neal Moore
“Push comes to shove, I can feed myself,” he tells Moore. “Feed as many weary travelers as I can.”
Another night in Idaho, camped behind a church, Moore hears two men outside his tent raving in a drug-addled fury. They menacingly approach his flimsy shelter, commanding him to reveal himself. Shaking, he laces up his running shoes and readies his bear spray and Buck knife. Eventually they leave him alone. Then, strangely, in the morning one of the men returns — and invites him to coffee. Moore sits and hears the man’s story of hardship and addiction, and they part friends.
In Memphis, on the day of the 2020 election, the political tension is palpable. Private security details patrol the streets. Moore takes a seat at BB King’s Blues Club on Beale Street to see how things will go. He hears a commotion — not trouble, but laughter. Outside, a man is running with a flag in his hand, on which is printed “BE KOOL MEMPHIS.” He is posing for pictures with tourists, lightening the mood. Moore gets up from his lunch to introduce himself to the man, who calls himself Downtown Tat.
“What’s the flag about?” Moore asks.
“It’s not just Memphis,” Tat says. “It’s the whole country. We just have to be cool. Be cool, baby!”
Americans, Moore decides, still don’t know how to reconcile their politics, but they’re quite capable of ignoring them. And when they do, the vast majority are happy to help. To share, to swap stories, and to form intense — however brief — connections. Whatever you might see on the news, Moore learns that out in America the people are still generous and curious, brave and resilient, still connected by the neighborly values he recalls from his youth.
Because of the pandemic, the authorities closed down navigation of part of the Erie Canal, so Moore paddles its first half (Buffalo to Syracuse), then walks the remaining 170 miles to Waterford and the Hudson River. (If you think a long-haul canoeist on a river is a curiosity, try one wheeling his loaded boat along the road.) The second December of his expedition is coming on, and he wants to make it to Manhattan before the lower Hudson’s notorious winter winds and choppy waves. He is right on schedule.
Photo courtesy James R. Peipert
On December 14, 2021, shortly after his 50th birthday, Moore makes his final approach to New York City. The press comes out to observe the eccentric in his moment of triumph, and a contingent of kayakers and canoeists put in to join his victory lap around Lady Liberty. But near the George Washington Bridge, the winds come up so strong that he ends up with his bow pointed north, and he can’t safely turn it south again. Hell, he thinks, this whole trip has been about going the wrong way anyway. So he paddles stern-first the rest of the way.
Hard to believe it is coming to an end. Tears well up, and not from the wind. Immense above his puny craft looms Liberty Enlightening the World, and crowding the harbor are bobbing boats filled with friends and journalists and gawkers marveling at the magnitude of his accomplishment: 7,500 miles. Twenty-two rivers, 22 states, 22 months, just as he’d said he would do.
His mother would be proud — he had done something transformative, something “pure.” But it’s over now, and he wishes he could just keep paddling.
Derek’s feature expedition interview is in the October 2022 print edition of Reader’s Digest, available everywhere magazines are sold.
At Chautauqua, New York, I recently had the pleasure to sit down with veteran Access Chautauqua television host John Viehe to discuss South Africa, East Asia and my journey across America.
A radio conversation with veteran journalist Dennis Webster, WJTN, myself, and the venerable Maggie, on the banks of Lake Chautauqua, Maple Springs, New York.
22 Rivers 