Sailing Uphill: An Unconventional Life on the Water. This item is unavailable.Sailing Uphill: An Unconventional Life on the Water

Sam McKinney has spent many of the best parts of his life on the water -- sailing a dory along Canadas west coast, crewing on the deck of a river steamer, shipping out deep-sea in freighters across the Atlantic. In the middle of his life, when he sold the hull of an ocean-going sailboat which 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 Illinois and on, ever eastward, to New York City. 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. This is a lovely and evocative memoir by a perceptive and thoughtful writer.

Sam McKinney has been, among other things, a journalist, a small-boat builder, a founder of outward-bound schools and a professional seaman. The author of Reach of Tide, Ring of History, he lives in Vancouver, Canada, where he is a research associate of the Vancouver Maritime Museum.