Partial to Home: The peripatetic paddler Neal Moore paddles at Gates of the Mountains Wilderness Area near Helena, Montana in this courtesy photo. Moore, who has been in Columbus for nearly two weeks, is 5,194 miles into a 7,500 mile cross country canoe journey.
Courtesy Photo
Birney Imes
Look up the word “peripatetic” in a thesaurus and take your pick: nomadic, traveling, wandering, roving, roaming. You can’t describe Neal Moore without using one of them.
Moore, 49, grew up in Southern California; attended college in Hawaii and Utah; fulfilled his mother’s dying wish by becoming a Mormon missionary in South Africa; joined a childhood friend in Taiwan where he taught English; worked on a presidential campaign in Iowa with his half-brother and canoed the Mississippi River from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to New Orleans.
Discovering America in reverse Long-distance canoeist Neal Moore stands next to his 16-foot Old Town canoe after an outing on the Buttahatchee Thursday afternoon near Caledonia. Moore is paddling from Oregon to New York City via a network of 22 rivers, and is taking a break in Columbus after paddling up the Tenn-Tom Waterway from Mobile. He plans to continue north to the Tennessee River and on to the Ohio. He expects to conclude his 7,500-mile journey in December. Courtesy photo/Birney Imes
Neal Moore admits he’s going about this all backwards.
Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark made their way west across the North American continent on a well-supplied expedition of discovery.