Payne finds global history from one inch above water

SANDPOINT — Every far-off horizon, every bend in the river, has a tale to tell. For those courageous enough to seek them out, the reward is to become part of the story.

Huck Finn found that out in grand style. Jim Payne hasn’t done too badly himself, having explored several historic rivers and written books to share his adventures. The Sandpoint author’s first travel memoir, published in 2008, was titled, “One Inch Above the Water: Running Away on America’s Rivers.” That was followed, four years later, by “Discovering England from One Inch Above the Thames.”

Payne’s allusion to measurement in both titles comes from his method of travel — he explored the Hudson, Ohio, Mississippi, Columbia and Thames rivers by paddling along them in his kayak. Traveling by water brought the author face-to-face with what once was the welcome mat to civilization for cities along these great rivers.

“It was, but now, nobody even looks to the rivers,” Payne said.

On the surface, the shift in both transportation and culture has a whiff of melancholy to it. For the adventurer, however, it can be like discovering forgotten gateways that have fallen from collective memory for lack of use. The shift has been so dramatic, according to Payne, that a river traveler can float straight into locations such as refineries and dams, which, from the roadways surrounding them, might appear to be virtual fortresses.

“Because of terrorism fears, they put big cyclone fences all around the land, but you can paddle right up to these places from the water,” he said.

In England, he learned that a water approach can also grant entry to places that scream “keep out!” to landlubbers. Searching for a spot to spend the night after a day of kayaking the Thames, Payne drifted up to the skeleton of an abandoned abbey that beckoned from shore. Liberally placarded with no trespassing signs on land, nary a sign greeted him as he glided up the narrow channel leading to the heart of the place.

There he spent the night and slept the sleep of the just, comforted by the knowledge that he could truthfully say, “I didn’t know. There weren’t any signs the way I came in.”

Payne’s pair of memoirs differ from the usual “man against nature” school of travel writing, mostly because the author spends so much time describing how much he enjoys the people and places along the way.

“There’s travel writing and there’s the extreme travel genre, but the personal travel memoir — where you write about what you saw and what you learned — is rare,” he said. “All the hiking and biking tales are what I would considered as extreme. They focus almost exclusively on the danger and the challenges, but there’s almost nothing about the people — the human interest is not there.”

All the same, any time a traveler covers the kind of distance Payne has on his journeys, there are going to be some close scrapes and near misses. The element of danger, in other words, does crop up on occasion. It did just that on the Mississippi River. Noticing a storm rolling in fast, Payne paddled toward shore, only to find that his landing was blocked by a quicksand bog. The risk of becoming stuck there forced him back out into the shipping channel, where it started to rain so heavily that it became a toss-up between which was more life-threatening — the hypothermia that was beginning to set in or bobbing like a sitting duck with a complete lack of visibility on one of the nation’s busiest shipping lanes.

“How dangerous is that?” Payne asked. “You’re in a kayak, paddling blindly into the area where the barges come from?”

Fortunately, such startling chapters are but small sections of the writer’s work. Most of it, he noted, has to do with chance discovery and personal interaction.

“This style of travel that I do could be called. ‘social kayaking,’” he continued. “I bumped into history and stumbled into ruins, but I liked it when I met people and bumped into situations that tested me.”

Many of those situations also served as a litmus test for human kindness, according to Payne. On one particularly challenging stretch of river from New York to Quebec — which he describes in a section titled “Surprised by Samaritans” — he needed help 70 different times and got it from 70 different people.

“We say, ‘The world is falling to pieces; people are so nasty,’” Payne offered. I say, ‘Wait a minute — where else can you find a 100 percent batting average for people being helpful?’”

From England to the Ohio River, from the Columbia to the Big Muddy, the traveler, who holds a in political science from the University of California at Berkeley and taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins and Texas A & M University, encountered almost nothing but goodwill on his journeys.

“It’s a damn tear-jerker,” he said. “People weren’t just helpful, they went out of their way to help me.”

Part of it might be the aspirational element of running into an adventurous spirit and aiding, even obliquely, their expedition.

“I’m a traveler and the traveler does inspire support,” Payne pointed out. “People want to be part of somebody achieving something.”

As a result, some small part of them gets to tag along for the rest of the trip. Call it escapist fantasy. Running way, even. In both cases, Payne is a big proponent of taking a headlong leap into adventure. He removes all doubt with the first sentence from “One Inch Above the Water” which reads: “At age 57, I ran away from home.”

For most readers, enjoying vicarious adventure while being cozily tucked beneath the covers is close enough to the real thing. Payne, meanwhile, prods us toward a more direct encounter. Part of what breathes magic into a journey, he said, is “the errors — the things that can go wrong.”

“In planning, you take away all of the exciting accidents that make for adventure,” the memoirist shared.

What, then, is the first step in taking such a journey?

“It’s easy,” Payne answered. “Just walk out your front door and keep walking and you’ve got a travel adventure.”

Jim Payne will give a slide show presentation about his 2013, kayak trip on the Ohio River on , Jan. 12 at 7 p.m., the First Lutheran Church in Sandpoint.

For more information on the author and to read excerpts from his travel memoirs, visit: www.lyttonpublishing.com/one_inch_above_the_water.html or www.lyttonpublishing.com/discovering_england_one_inch_above_the_thames.html