Sailing Uphill: An Unconventional Life on the Water

" I will again go a-voyaging." Sam McKinney has spent some of the most interesting times of his life on the water-sailing a dory alone along along Canada's west coast, shipping out deep-sea on a strange old freighter,having a ketch sink gently beneath him in the warm waters of Mexico. In midlife, when he sold the hull of an ocean-going schooner whaich had absorbed two years of his love and labour, he looked at his boat-building shed and thought,"Hmm. With all this lumber, I could build a boat and go across the continent, instead." So he did. In the Gander he travelled up the Columbia and Snake rivers, down the Missouri, up the Mississippi and on, ever eastward. It took him four summers and three Ganders, one of which had to be abandoned in the mud of the upper Missouri, but he made it all the way to New York City. Now in his 70s, Sam sails the Northern Spray, a sturdy replica of Joshua Slocum's famous craft, continuing his explorations of saltwater and self. Sailing Uphill is a perceptive and evocative memoir by a thoughful writer; Sam describes the joys, as well as the fears and frustrations, of adventuring in little boats on big waters.