A MILESTONE IN THE LIFE of my family gave me plenty of time to study flatboats. One October afternoon about six months before I planned to leave for the South, my sister Bridget called from Maine with an unexpected request. My mother, then eighty-nine, had decided to sell the old clapboard house she had lovingly restored along the coast of Maine and move to a smaller, village apartment about fifteen miles away. She was essentially quite healthy but had suffered one mild stroke and the occasional falls typical for her age, and her ambition now was to remain independent as long as possible, to avoid, as she put it, “the purgatory of assisted living.” After a long struggle with her children, she had finally given up driving. My family in Maine needed one more sibling nearby to share the chores of taking her shopping, and chauffeuring her back and forth to her exercise classes, doctors’ visits, and book clubs.
I had spent the last decade frequently driving from my home in Connecticut to Maine, for long weekends or even weeklong stays, finishing the light carpentry, painting, and gardening chores on my mother’s to-do list. I loved the companionship with her and the home-away-from-home romance of knowing every hardware store shelf in mid-coast Maine. I wanted to complete this life’s work and welcomed the opportunity to put off my Mississippi trip and move to Maine.
With Bridget’s help, I found a quaint, simple log cabin to rent on the old summer camp of a chocolate candy tycoon, scenically perched on the high south banks of the Damariscotta River. The Damariscotta, which the Lincoln County old-timers call “the Scotty,” is a lovely stretch of fast tidal water with a unique set of reversing falls at the village itself. The river runs sixteen miles east to the Atlantic along the Boothbay peninsula, its high banks lined with pine forests and craggy cliffs. My cabin was only a five-minute drive from my mother’s new place in town. Closing down my house in Connecticut, I loaded the few things I needed into my pickup and enjoyed the familiar ride up through the lake country of New Hampshire, settling into the cabin late one afternoon just before Thanksgiving. As I carried my snowshoes and chain saws down the steep stone steps to the cabin, a sea breeze was whispering through fallen leaves and the setting sun lit the river below into a luminous needle pointing east.
Maine proved ideal for researching flatboats. In the mornings I reported to my mother’s apartment to take her food shopping or watch her lift weights at the senior center, and then we’d retire to S. Fernald’s Country Store and Deli at the bridge over the Scotty for her favorite meal of red flannel hash or vegetarian chili. I joined a volunteer group down on the Boothbay peninsula, the Woodchucks, that split and delivered firewood for needy families. By night, I immersed myself in the growing pile of books and PhD theses on the flatboat era that arrived by mail every few days. I stored my research materials in cardboard boxes labeled by subject matter—“Flatboat Construction,” “River Journeys,” “Natchez Trace”—on top of a shipping pallet I had liberated from a dumpster behind the Tractor Supply store in Brunswick. The snows that winter were dreamy and deep, and the wispy spirals blowing up from the drifts whistled and pinged against the windows and obscured my view outdoors. Immersed in my research, I was wonderfully shrouded from the world by the winter storms, isolation that seemed to enhance the romance of the distant age of rivers and boats.
The flatboat era, sandwiched between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, overlapped with the overland years of covered wagons crossing the plains, which began in the mid-1840s. This period is commonly identified by economic historians as the “first” American industrial revolution. The availability of abundant, rich croplands west of the Appalachians and the young country’s penchant for mechanical innovation combusted powerfully to create an ideal model for development. The invention of the automated flour mill in Delaware, the development of the water and then steam-powered spinning jennies and looms of New England, and the introduction of the cotton gin in the South flooded world markets with cheap American commodities and textiles that gradually overwhelmed the “factories of the world” in England and France, in much the same way that the clothing and electronics of China and its low-wage Asian neighbors have saturated the aisles of Walmart today. Swelled by immigration, especially after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe in 1815 and the Irish potato famine in the 1840s, the U.S. population would boom eightfold, from 4 million after the Revolution to 32 million by 1861. America’s apparently boundless growth, however, was stalled by a glaring weakness that would astonish foreign visitors for the next century.
The roads were abysmal. In the twenty years after the Revolution, the destitute farmers and Continental army veterans cascading west across Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and Virginia with packtrains of horses and unwieldy Conestoga wagons had no choice but to follow the remnants of narrow, ancient Indian traces or the swampy, overgrown tracks of military routes, like the Braddock and Forbes Roads, named for the British generals whose men cut the paths forty years earlier during the French and Indian War. Leaving settlement behind at the Alleghenies or the Cumberlands, the Appalachian ridges, considered so formidable that 18th-century maps labeled them “The Great Barrier,” travelers faced a thicket of hardwood trees and briars that extended nearly a thousand miles in every direction. The uphill climbs over shelves of rock were murderous for wheels and axles. The descents simply lowered the wagons onto streambeds that had occasionally been improved with “corduroys” of logs, which, after a year or two, were pounded by the traffic and the weather into a gumbo of bark, mud, and gravel. These grim sloughs were congested with a maze of cursing teamsters, rearing horses, and bulky Conestoga wagons submerged to their wheel hubs. One of the most important occupations on the emigrant roads was the job of the bugler, also frequently called the “messenger,” who ran forward over the hills to sound his horn, or to negotiate with the wagon trains ahead, to clear the road for oncoming traffic.
The most common adjective that early 19th-century travelers used to describe the Allegheny ridges was “interminable.” Timothy Flint, the Congregationalist minister from Massachusetts who made a legendary trip down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1815, described the tortuous ridges of the Alleghenies as “a barrier to return almost as impassable as the grave.” Flint describes passing dozens of wagons every day mired on the shoulders of what was advisedly called the Pittsburgh Road. “Many of them had broken axles and wheels, and in more than one place… teams had plunged down the precipice and had perished.” Seymour Dunbar, in his monumental A History of Travel in America, describes the settlers from Virginia crossing the Cumberlands into Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s, along the equally poor Watauga and Wilderness Roads, as moving “like an army of ants.”
The chronically impassable American roads would have a critical impact on the eve of the 19th century, America’s golden age, when patterns of development were dramatically shifting. In colonial America, the prevailing settlement routes in the interior portions of the Atlantic Seaboard had moved primarily on a north and south axis—from New York, up the Hudson; from Massachusetts, north to New Hampshire and Maine; from Connecticut, north to Vermont; from Pennsylvania, south through the Shenandoah along the Great Wagon Road to southern Virginia and North Carolina. But the French and Indian War in the 1760s had introduced Americans to the rich possibilities of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. A quarter century later, the success of the Revolution liberated Americans from the patronizing and politically inept British crown, and by 1790 the compass had shifted in a perpendicular direction. The “Great Migration West” over the Appalachians had begun.
In his epic The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860, Amherst professor George Rogers Taylor explains that, even as late as 1815, “heavy wagons drawn along common roads or turnpikes by four-and-six-horse teams provided the only means of moving bulk goods over appreciable distances by land. It is hard to realize how prohibitively expensive was such transportation.” Taylor quotes from an 1816 report on transportation compiled by the U.S. Senate. “A ton of goods could be brought 3,000 miles from Europe for about $9, but for that same sum it could be moved only 30 miles overland in this country.”
That was the conundrum of America as its population and the commerce it generated shifted west. By the early 19th century, the first generation of trans-Appalachian pioneers were consistently growing agricultural surpluses, just as they had back in Pennsylvania and Virginia. But the bumpy wagon roads they had followed west were not suitable for shipping product back east. “Not one of the farm products” of early Kentucky and Tennessee, writes pioneer historian Thomas D. Clark, “could pay for its transportation costs overland, not even whiskey.” This would never do for a sprawling, new America of plentiful forests and rich bottomlands stretching eight hundred miles west over the horizon. The only route out was the Ohio-Mississippi waterway to New Orleans.
The Monongahela and Ohio River valleys are approached from the east across attractive, mounded foothills that drop sharply to narrow, sandy riverbanks. The rivers below trend north and then abruptly southwest through a series of graceful horseshoe bends that disappear around the forested slopes. Most Americans today see the Mon and the Ohio only from the high interstate overpasses near Monessen and Pittsburgh, briefly glancing below to the Rust Belt tableau of abandoned steel mills, dusty girder bridges, and tugboats pushing dented barges around the bends. But the dreariness of the region is deceptive because not only is the area economically rebounding, it was once one of the busiest and most auspicious locales in America. Between 1800 and 1840, about two million migrating farmers, traders, and mechanics traversed the Mon escarpments, or the Cumberland Gap between Virginia and Kentucky 450 miles to the southwest, exchanging their cumbersome wagons and packtrains for the jaunty new vessel of western movement, the flatboat.
For the weary travelers, the views along the Monongahela banks were as busy as a Pieter Bruegel canvas—welcome visual relief from the dark, sodden tunnel of trees they were leaving behind. Innumerable flatboats, scows, keelboats under sail, and even oceangoing schooners bobbed in lazy clumps at the wharfs or crawled down the navigable channel. Uphill from the banks, water-powered sawmills wailed and threw up rooster tails of hardwood shavings, and the sound of mallets pounding wooden pegs into hulls climbed up with the breeze. On the distant docks, as barrels of grain and ricks of cordwood were transferred from smaller, local boats to larger boats destined for Natchez or New Orleans, the broad-rim hats of the longshoremen skittered around like bees swarming their nests. As Archer Butler Hulbert described it in The Ohio River: A Course of Empire, the Mon Valley had become the gateway to the “vast pageant” of western rivers stretching thousands of miles into the American interior. Now there was a new horn sounding in advance of the republic’s push west. “And this was the boatman’s horn; where it sounded cabins and clearings appeared, hearthstones glowed, and a new nation arose.”
Historic periods rarely begin at a single, defined moment, and the flatboat era’s antecedents dated back more than forty years. The reason, mostly, was war, and the American passion for cleansing desirable new lands of their indigenous peoples. During the French and Indian War and the Revolution, and then again during Mad Anthony Wayne’s Ohio campaign against the Shawnee and the Miami during the Northwest Indian War in the 1790s, agents dispatched by British and then American army quartermasters had sailed southwest on the Ohio and the Mississippi in flotillas of flat-bottomed barges or keelboats, to trade Monongahela flour and whiskey for imported gunpowder, muskets, and bayonets in New Orleans. The bustling munitions trade between the Americans and the Spanish authorities in Natchez and New Orleans during the Revolution set the tone for the next one hundred years, when wartime needs accelerated transportation improvements on the rivers. During the Revolution, Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana and Cuba, was openly pro-American and even led successful expeditions against British forts at Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola. His sponsorship of arms smuggling along the Mississippi is still regarded as a decisive contribution to the American cause, and after independence Gálvez was awarded honorary American citizenship.
The success of the arms supply routes along the Mississippi midwifed the new commercial era, opening the Ohio and Mississippi corridor to a fresh, ambitious cast of players. By the late 1790s, French trading firms, mostly backed by investors from Philadelphia, had taken over the old military routes and established a reliable network of shipping agents along the Monongahela, the Great Falls at Louisville, and at Natchez and New Orleans. During the same period, according to one historian’s estimate, more than nine hundred “settler” flatboats bearing pioneers for the Kentucky frontier cast off every year from western Pennsylvania. These rakish boats, measuring fifty or sixty feet long, were particularly colorful, loaded bow to stern with everything a family, or several families, needed to carve a homestead out of the Kentucky forests. A fenced area in the stern carried horses, cattle, pigs, and goats, and the settlers’ boats were often called “arks,” after the fabled vessel of Noah in the Book of Genesis. A log cabin for the family to sleep in was built mid-vessel, and planting seed and flintlock powder were stowed in watertight barrels on the deck. Pioneers with less money to spend simply threw up a crude canvas tent on the deck and roped their milk cow and horses to the sides. Children romped in play spaces between the tents. After 1788, when the federal government issued the first land warrants in the West for Revolutionary War veterans, more than five thousand veterans from Virginia alone, including Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather, headed over the mountains with their families on these floating farms, plying the Indiana and Kentucky banks of the Ohio and its tributaries in search of likely homesites to clear.
Many of the early pioneers anticipated the later cargo designs by building watertight, warehouse-style structures that stretched almost the full length of the flatboat. Thomas Ashe, an Irish immigrant who in 1806 sailed all of the Ohio and stretches of the Mississippi in a forty-foot “Kentucky boat” that he purchased on the Monongahela, described his ark in his three-volume Travels in America. “The whole represents an oblong apartment—both ends perfectly square, and nothing indicates the bow but the small open space in the roof, and holes in the sides, through which the oars work.” Ashe did most of his living and navigation from the “quarter deck” roof of the apartment that, by raising his vista point by just ten feet, provided panoramic views of the river and the environs beyond the banks. Ashe’s floating abode had to be both durable and well-provisioned. “I had a good chimney built in my boat; four windows made… I laid in two coops-full of chickens, other kinds of stores, spirits, coffee, sugar, etc. I need not tell you how completely I set off.”
The pioneer flatboats had to carry everything a family might need for a year or two on the frontier—they were floating farms, almost floating villages. “We have seen family boats of this description, filled up for the descent of families to the lower country, with a stove, comfortable apartments, beds, and arrangements for commodious habitancy,” wrote the frontier diarist and minister Timothy Flint. “We see in them ladies, servants, cattle, horses, sheep, dogs and poultry, all floating on the same bottom; and on the roof the looms, ploughs, spinning wheels and domestic implements of the family.”
The Kentucky arks helped promote the idea of salvageability. Taking the boat apart after the river trip and selling the wooden decks and framing timbers as construction lumber became a welcome means of recovering the largest cost that Indiana or Kentucky settlers incurred on the trip—the price of their boat. In his multivolume collection of pioneer narratives, Early Western Travels, Wisconsin historian Reuben Gold Thwaites quoted contemporary accounts of pioneers buying arks large enough for four or five families and their belongings at the Monongahela boatyards for $75. The boat “could be sold for nearly its cost six hundred or eight hundred miles further down [the river].” This became an added financial bonus for the captains of flats carrying cargo instead of settlers, and the commercial flats were often called “one-ways” because they were designed to float just one trip south and then be disassembled. Historians estimate that, depending on the lumber market downriver, selling the salvage wood could contribute from 10 percent to 15 percent of the profits of a flatboat trip.
The rough-hewn settlers’ arks served in many other ways as design prototypes for the armadas of cargo barges that would soon follow. The weight-bearing capacity of one of these floating farms was considerable, and here the shape of the simple, boxlike hulls was critical. Just the livestock in the rear pens—typically a team of draft horses, a dairy cow, five or six pigs, and maybe some goats—could weigh more than five thousand pounds. A modest log cabin built on deck, frequently fitted out with a stone hearth and chimney, came to another twelve thousand pounds.
To maintain buoyancy under such loads, the flat bottom spread the displacement of water across a broad span at least fourteen feet across, while pushing only about a foot or eighteen inches of hull below the waterline. The modest draft of flatboats allowed them to safely cross the shallow edges of sandbars and banks, and their hefty mass and flat-bottom surface tended to scrape and bounce over submerged rocks and tree snags without grounding. This was critical, considering that on the Ohio-Mississippi transit, boatmen could encounter sandbars and floating islands of trees several times a day. The standard width of fourteen feet, originally established to allow the flats to pass through the narrow chutes of the Great Falls at Louisville, proved fortuitous. As settlement spread beyond the main rivers, the shallow-draft flats remained afloat in the low-water conditions upriver close to the headwaters, and in narrow tributaries and creeks that twisted far into the agrarian hinterlands. This opened up thousands of additional miles of navigable water, and millions of acres of farmland with river access. The settlers’ ark and its offspring flatboat should not be viewed solely as transportation vehicles. They were a farm-to-market implement, as common and useful as the family plow or wagon, that exponentially increased the tillable acreage of the new American West.
The simplest calculation propelled America past the Appalachians. The average flatboat could carry one ton per linear foot—a forty-footer would bear forty tons, even more, if you didn’t mind water sloshing over the sides in rough weather and a slightly deeper draft. The water displacement of a fifty-footer would allow the disembarking pioneers to take along the in-laws or grandparents, along with their field plows, walnut chests laden with heavy pewter tableware, and the old family stone sink.
Modest, low-income farmers from Pennsylvania or Virginia were not the only ones seeking a new life on the western rivers, and flatboats could be fitted out to suit almost every taste. In 1805, his career in ruins after he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Revolutionary War hero and former vice president Aaron Burr hastily departed for Pittsburgh to pursue land schemes and trading deals along the Ohio and Mississippi. Burr was a notorious womanizer, bon vivant, and social climber, and the description of the flat-bottom he had built at a Monongahela boatyard, in a letter to his daughter, aptly reflects his pretensions.
My boat is, properly speaking, a floating home, sixty feet by fourteen, containing dining room, kitchen with fireplace, and two bedrooms; roofed from stem to stern; steps to go up, and a walk on the top the whole length; glass windows, &etc. [sic] This edifice costs one hundred and thirty-three dollars.
Flat-boating drove the economy of the new American West, creating a network of inland ports to service the river traffic, just as Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston had grown to service the 18th-century transatlantic trade. In towns along the Monongahela, the Ohio, and the Wabash, basic industries like sawmills and iron foundries were established within a few years of settlement, and boatbuilding in particular sprouted like oat seeds blown into manure. Because of its proximity to the emigrant route along the National Road ruts, Redstone Old Fort on the Monongahela, later named Brownsville for land speculator Thomas Brown, boomed as a construction site for flatboats. Flatboat designs quickly evolved into the hulls for the much heavier steamboats, and after the introduction of the steam engine in 1811, Captain Henry Shreve and his many imitators in Brownsville built more than three thousand steamboats. The new boat works became one of the largest in the country, creating a kind of hyperlocal industrial revolution that fed development far downriver.
In The Navigator, Zadok Cramer recorded that, as early as 1810, Brownsville had “two tanyards [tanneries], a rope walk, two boat yards, two tin and copper manufactories, two factories of nails,… one scythe and sickle maker, blacksmiths, silversmiths (one of whom makes surveyors’ compasses), tailors, shoemakers, saddlers, etc.” The next year, Brownsville added a blast furnace for steel, a sawmill, and a glassworks. Just about everything a family needed to get started in the wilderness was available right there, in the cottage industries located on the banks beside their new boat.
The boom along the Monongahela revealed another critical aspect of frontier development—the occupational exodus required to support it. Again, war and its aftereffects played a large role. In the late 1770s, Stephen Bayard, a successful Philadelphia merchant with good banking and trading contacts, was swept up by the American Revolution and received several promotions as a Continental army officer, eventually serving as the second-in-command at Fort Pitt in western Pennsylvania. There, he married the much younger daughter of his commander, Elizabeth MacKay, inherited substantial lands along the Monongahela through her, and after the war opened a store, a land development company, water mills, and, later, a boatyard at a site along the river between Brownsville and Pittsburgh that he named after his wife, Elizabeth-town. The area could be easily reached from the Pittsburgh Road, and Bayard could see the vast commercial potential offered by the settlers streaming through. But initially he feared that a shortage of laborers would hinder the growth of his new works. In 1787, he announced his new establishment on the river by placing advertisements in the Pittsburgh Gazette and the Pennsylvania Journal of Philadelphia, including this plea for workers:
The proprietors are now erecting a saw mill thereon, where every material for building may be had at a very reasonable rate. Artists of all kinds, particularly boat builders, carpenters, joiners, masons, blacksmiths, are especially invited, and will find it to their interest in settling at this place.
Within a few months, Bayard was able to attract four veteran carpenters from the Philadelphia shipyards. The next year he was back as an advertiser in the Philadelphia and New York papers.
BOATS FOR SALE
At Elizabeth Town, on the Monongahela, may now be had
Kentucky boats of different dimensions, where also for the future, Boats of every construction and size may be had… at as low a price as any of those on these waters.
Bayard was an entrepreneur who understood the basics of advertising and marketing, among them, leaving little to chance and creating word-of-mouth by reaching as many venues as possible. During his three-year ad campaign in the eastern papers, he pointed out that detailed, printed plans for his new town and specifications for his boats could be found at the kind of resting places in the East where investors and adventuresome types were sure to congregate: “Mr. Oswald’s Coffee House in Philadelphia and the Old Coffee House in New York.”
Bayard also crowed about an additional advantage that would tempt easterners and war veterans desperate to reach the new lands of the West, but who were understandably leery about the well-known delays in finding and outfitting boats once they reached western Pennsylvania. He would offer one of America’s first package tours. His residential plan in Elizabeth-town included extra houses, where settler families could rest and store their belongings while they waited for their boat, “and be supplied with provisions of every kind at reasonable price.” In later ads, Bayard said that he charged what remained the standard cost for flatboats until the 1820s—$1.25 per linear foot. This generally meant that a pioneer family could expect to spend about $175 purchasing and outfitting a boat.
Brownsville and Elizabeth-town, later simply called Elizabeth, were only the beginning. By 1820, the Mon Valley was a smoke pot of industry, with the haze from the foundries and sawmills mixing with the river fog to create a dark overcast on still days. Along the river, where major tributaries like the Youghiogheny and the Cheat enhanced the flow and made boat launching possible almost year-round, boatyards specializing in flats, keelboats, steam-powered hulls, and tall mast ships flourished. Wheeling, McKeesport, New Geneva, and of course Pittsburgh all developed as boatbuilding towns to support the new commerce and migration. The Mon Valley shipbuilding towns played the same role in developing western traffic as Bath, Maine, or Marblehead, Massachusetts, played in the whaling and spice trades. Provisioning the thousands of settlers’ arks and cargo flatboats now departing along the Mon and the Ohio every year became another engine of growth, and Pittsburgh alone would double in population, from 2,400 people in 1800 to almost 5,000 in 1810. Building flatboats and steamboats and supplying the new export economy from the strategic three-rivers junction helped turn Pittsburgh into a small metropolis of 50,000 by the Civil War.
We should be grateful today that Zadok Cramer was a dogged compiler of fact. In The Navigator, Cramer’s list of Pittsburgh’s business establishments took up four pages in agate type, indicating how quickly the town grew as a manufacturing center to supply the booming Ohio-Mississippi trade route. He reported that an 1810 inventory of local establishments in Pittsburgh included “8 boat, barge, and ship builders, 1 pump maker, 1 looking glass maker, 1 lock maker, 7 tanyards, 2 rope walks, 1 spinning wheel maker, [and] 17 blacksmiths.” An “English artist,” James Patterson, was forging a line of metalware that was sure to be popular with the departing flatboaters: “Fire shovels, tongs, drawing knives, hatchets, two feet squares, augers, chisels, adzes, claw hammers, door hinges, chains, hackels,… [and] plough irons.” No, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick did not “invent” the steel business in Pittsburgh. As early as 1812, iron and steel foundries around Pittsburgh were already producing four hundred tons of ingots, wire, and beam per year. The annual production of construction lumber and “scantling,” or boat timbers, reached over seven million board feet. “The stranger is stunned,” Cramer wrote, “by an incessant din of clattering hammers, and blowing of bellowses from morning till night.”
And still more wagons were coming. In 1814, the Pittsburgh Gazette carried an item about a farmer who lived four miles outside town along the main wagon road. Impressed by the volume of traffic heading west for the boatyards, he decided to record every passing wagon between January 1, 1813, and January 1, 1814. His count over that one-year span came to 4,055. At least another five thousand wagons crossed every year on the National and Wilderness Roads. By then the business of building flatboats was so scattered up and down the tributaries of the Ohio, the Mon, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee—and from farm to farm anywhere west of the Appalachians—that no one could possibly count the number of vessels built every year. A few of these hulls would enjoy brief second careers as store boats or floating docks near town landings. But most of them were quickly recycled into frontier log cabins, the sidewalks of Natchez, or the rafters for Creole cottages in New Orleans, one reason why so little evidence of flatboat construction was either preserved or documented for posterity. History, in this case, was literally destroying a record of itself every time a flatboat landed and was taken apart to build something else.
By the middle of the winter, my flatboat research had brought me to a familiar, wearying place. I was pleased that the early 19th-century exodus to the rivers carried me backward and forward through so many strands of history, but frustrated that there was still so much to learn. I hadn’t even found reliable accounts on how to build a flatboat yet. I knew almost nothing about how to navigate a turbulent, obstacle-strewn river like the Mississippi. But my prevailing weakness for learning still more was also an asset. Research that begets more research is deeply satisfying for me. And the chaotic, democratic forces that had contributed to the flatboat era seemed endlessly seductive.
Besides, my times in Maine with my mother were golden.
My mother, Pat Buck, was petite and bookish, with a sharp, dry wit, and a smooth, rosy complexion. She was so sarcastic and hip that none of my friends could believe that she was eighty-nine. One aspect of her character had impressed me over the past thirty years. She had done all of her growing up after the age of fifty-five, when the last of her children had moved out or left for college.
It could not have been any other way—she simply didn’t have the time to mature while still young. She was a postwar bride who married quickly and young soon after she met my father in 1947. After the age of twenty-one, she bore eleven children over a span of seventeen years. We were a raucous and maddening brood, and surviving her offspring was itself a miraculous achievement. She had lost my father when she was forty-nine, with three children still in the house. In her early fifties, determined to improve her retirement income and help put the last children through college, she decided to start work—her first job—as a social worker. Despite her age, the state of Pennsylvania could not deny her a position; she had scored number one on the state civil service exam. Finally alone in her house with time of her own, she matured into a completely different person from the strict disciplinarian, Irish Catholic mystic, and overworked housewife I had known as a boy.
Pat Buck at ninety-one, eight days before she died. I spent the best eighteen months of my life caring for her in Maine while I researched flatboats, and her spunk and determination propelled me all the way to New Orleans.
Now retired to Maine to be closer to her children and grandchildren, she seemed to have the personality of a retired academic who couldn’t give up a life devoted to analysis and firm opinion. One book club was not enough for her; she always belonged to two. She attended every lecture that interested her at the local colleges and faithfully demonstrated every Friday against the Iraq War on the frigid green in Brunswick. At the age of eighty, dismayed by the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude toward women, and the craven behavior of the bishops during the priestly sexual abuse crisis, she left the Church and was proud and discerning about never going back. “I didn’t leave the Church,” she said. “The Church left me.” Her laughter, trust in a deeper spirituality, and plucky weathering of adversity were all very Irish and fun.
As an octogenarian, especially after she gave up driving, one of her favorite activities was supermarket shopping. It was a once-a-week affair—twice a week if she was expecting children, grandchildren, or guests for dinner—that made her feel independent and still fully part of the workaday world. She liked to be driven to the big, shiny Hannaford supermarket on Main Street and then to be left alone for an hour while she slowly circuited the aisles, using a shopping cart as her walker and stopping now and then with her hand on her chin, pensively examining the prices and ingredients of boxed foods and sauces.
I could see that her weekly strolls through Hannaford did her a lot of good, but still I was worried. She had taken a lot of spills lately, two of them when none of us were around and strangers had to carry her home before we arrived to rush her to the hospital. The first time I drove her to the supermarket, while we were waiting for a traffic light on a snowy day in Damariscotta, I told her that I was concerned about her roaming such a big store all alone.
“Stop being ridiculous,” she said. “You’re the one planning on building this Huck Finn raft and sailing it down the Mississippi. Nicky and Bryan think you’ll sink the thing on the first day. But I can’t spend an hour alone at the supermarket?”
My sister Bridget, the Big Nurse of the family who was supervising our assisted care program for my mother, had already admonished me about this.
“Rinky, Mom makes all of the decisions about her life,” Bridget said. “We don’t.”
“Okay, Mom,” I said in the car. “I won’t mention it again.”
“It’s fine, Rinky,” she said. “I just wish people would stop worrying about me. Am I less capable now than when I was raising eleven children?”
At Hannaford’s, I pulled into a handicap parking spot and ran around the car to open my mother’s door and offer my arm for the slippery walk up to the self-opening glass doors. Safely delivered to the handle of a shopping cart, my mother tossed her walking cane into the cart and gamely padded off through the produce department, gently smiling as she glanced side to side under the generous fluorescent light. I couldn’t believe how lovely she still was, so poised and well-dressed.
“I’ll see you in an hour,” she called back. “And don’t worry! I’m happy here.”
An hour later, as I nosed into the handicap spot to pick her up, I was relieved to see my mother’s serene, attractive profile, topped by a woolen cap, through the frosty glass windows. When I had her safely walked out to the car, and her shopping bags loaded on the rear seat, Mother announced that she would like another of her favorite things, which would become a secret between us.
“Take me to Wasses for a hot dog,” she said.
Wasses was a famous old hot dog stand from Rockland, popular with tourists, that had lately opened a new satellite concession trailer in Damariscotta.
“We’re not supposed to do that,” I said. “Too much salt, the doctor said.”
“Oh, what does he know? There’s a new study out saying that salt isn’t as bad as they thought. I heard it on National Public Radio.”
At Wasses, we munched on our hot dogs and chatted while the windshield wipers squeaked against the light snow. Mother was looking forward to the spring, when we could follow the pink and lavender bloom of the wild lupines along the banks of the Sheepscot River, all the way up to Head Tide. She loved bragging about her overachieving grandchildren—one of her oldest, Kitson Jazynka, had a new children’s book out and was regularly publishing articles in the Washington Post. The partisan attacks on the Obama administration dismayed her, and her recurring pet peeve, the Roman Catholic Church, was acting out again. There were new flare-ups of the priestly abuse crisis from Philadelphia to St. Louis and the College of Cardinals in Rome was, once more, waffling on the subject. The Roman curia, she thought, was “a comic farce.”
“Why can’t the cardinals just ditch all those silly red dresses and their skullcaps?” she said. “They could act like men.”
Once I got her home and all of her packages carried in, I stepped outside to sweep the snow off her deck. I always kissed her on the forehead and told her I loved her before I left because I knew that each parting could be our last. When I drove off, she was sitting at her kitchen table reading Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, absentmindedly stirring her tea.