William Least Heat-Moon

River-Horse Pavilion
Columbia, Missouri

By Kit Salter

In March 1995, my wife Cathy and I went to wish Godspeed to Columbia, Missouri, resident William Lewis Trogdon as he was leaving for New York City to begin a 103-day nautical journey, which he would chronicle in the 1999 book, River-Horse: A Voyage Across America, under the pen name of William Least Heat-Moon.

Trogdon called his newly acquired boat Nikawa, which means “river-horse” in the Osage language. This 22-foot C-Dory with twin engines was nestled in a solid towing trailer. As the author prepared to ease both his boat and his hopes into motion, Cathy presented him with an ivory amulet of a sea otter. I handed him a Timex Expedition watch that had been my trusty travel companion. On that spring day, little did we know that the C-Dory being carefully pulled into traffic would later stand in a bold wooden pavilion just outside Columbia.

Today, as you drive north on Highway 63 just coming into Columbia from the direction of Jefferson City, the massive red metal roof of the Boone County History and Culture Center catches your eye. Then you see an open structure next to the parking lot. This is the River-Horse Pavilion, built in 2006 to celebrate Heat-Moon’s journey in Nikawa, the very boat we saw leave his home some years earlier.

Heat-Moon wrote on the final page of River-Horse that he had ridden Nikawa “5,288 watery miles from the Atlantic.” At the very end of that trip, to celebrate arrival at the Pacific, he reached for a pint of Atlantic water he had safeguarded for 103 days. He writes, “I raised the bottle  high, sunlight striking through the glass, salt waves rising to it as if thirsty, and I said, ‘We bring this gift from your sister sea — our voyage is done. Then I poured the stream into the Pacific and went back to the wheel of our river horse, and I turned her toward home.”

Some years after completing that adventure, Heat-Moon presented his already fabled C-Dory to the Boone County Historical Society.  The Society was proud to have such a fine bit of Missouriana from one of the state’s most productive and creative authors, but they had to ask, “How do we display it?”

The historical society wanted to make Nikawa available 24/7, yet protect it from the weather and potential pilfering. Local architect Nick Peckham (himself a marine engineer) worked with volunteers to design and build the wooden pavilion that stands adjacent to the Society’s main building.  This open structure provides easy viewing of the boat (behind plexiglass), a map of Nikawa’s route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and photographs of the craft and the author. Nikawa, in fact, was now home, resting and lending its stature to all of Boone County.

But the backstory of this literary landscape possesses two more elements. In 1978, Heat-Moon was teaching at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, when it had to let him go because of declining enrollments. At the same time, he and his wife decided to divorce.

Heat-Moon reacted to that pair of events by undertaking a 13,000-mile solo trip in his 1975 Ford Econoline van. That 90-day journey (which began on Earth Day in 1978) resulted in the 1982 book, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, which spent 42 weeks on the NYT Best Seller List and has never been out of print. In the early pages of Blue Highways, Heat-Moon declares, “A man who couldn’t make things go right, could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life.”

With Nikawa’s historic voyage across the continent, William Least Heat-Moon showed again that he “could at least go,” and this time he took contemporary travel exploration to a new level of innovation. To complete the circle, I have my Timex back — but the amulet remains with the author.

Kit Salter lived in 22 different places by the end of high school. He graduated from Oberlin College and took his Masters and PhD at Berkeley. He is professor emeritus of geography at the University of Missouri and taught for UCLA, the University of Oregon, and National Geographic. He has been married to writer and geographer Cathy Lynn Salter for 38 years.