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 more than 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.”
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 nurture 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, and he shared these inspirational and heart-warming stories as a CNN citizen journalist.
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.”
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
