[LMB] (chat) The Sharing Knife, Vol. 3: Passage -- catalog copy

[Lois McMaster Bujold]

Betsy Lightfoot jasinikc at gmail.com
Thu Aug 16 17:52:09 BST 2007

So they'll be going down the Mississippi on a raft, like Huck Finn? ;-) Or
will that be a different river?



***  Nope, different river.  I deliberately steered clear of Mark Twain 
territory.  Going by geography, but not a lot of other factors, the 
Grace River is analogous to the Ohio, and the Gray River to the 
Mississippi.  And I've been on the Ohio; my dad had a houseboat out of 
the port of Cincinnati, back in my late teens.  Back in *his* youth, for 
vacation his Dad and he would put a canoe on a train and take it up the 
Allegheny River, and take about two weeks to camp and canoe back to 
home-town Pittsburgh.  (For non-Usians: the Allegheny and the 
Monongahela join at Pittsburgh to become the Ohio River, which runs east 
to west and eventually, about a thousand river miles later, joins the 
Mississippi about halfway down.)

There was an amusing tale in my research reading about a sea-going 
sailing vessel built in the port of Pittsburgh, early in the 19th C., 
arriving at some European port and having a heck of a time convincing 
its portmaster where they came from, even with the aid of maps.  Or that 
might have been, especially with the aid of maps.

And it's a flatboat, not a raft.  I became intimately acquainted with 
all the distinctions, physical and social, among flatboats, keelboats, 
and rafts in my research reading. 

For a motherlode of flatboat images that I lately turned up to help the 
prospective artist, Google wins again:

http://images.google.com/images?q=flatboat


And yes, the brother in question is Whit.

Ta, L.




On 8/16/07, Lois McMaster Bujold <lbujold at myinfmail.com> wrote:
 >
 > So...
 >
 > I thought you all might like a peek at the catalog copy I mentioned the
 > other day. ...