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Ultimately, I decided not to include this fantastic article in my year-end round-up because it focused on many different locations around the world, not just the United States.
Power, who passed away this week while on assignment, was an excellent writer precisely because he was curious about the entire world and everything in it. An intrepid traveler, he reported from garbage heaps in the Philippines, the Amazon jungle, the Great Wall of China, salt mines in Bolivia, and the beaches of Costa Rica. But he also explored many U.S. places and wrote about them beautifully.
I knew Power only through his words, from a few interactions on Twitter and from his writing, which I have followed for years. While I hardly knew him enough to write a comprehensive obituary, I knew enough to know that his work was worth sharing. Below are a few excerpts of some of his U.S. travel writing. I will miss seeing his byline.
Mississippi Drift: River Vagrants in the Age of Wal-Mart (PDF), in Harper's Magazine
"Two summers ago, Matt sent an in vitation that I could not ignore.
He was in Minneapolis, building a home-made raft, and had put out a call for a crew of “boat punks” to help him pilot the vessel the entire length of the Mississippi River, all the way to New Orleans. They would dig through the trash for sustenance. They would commune with the national mythos. They would be twenty-first-century incarnations of the river rats, hoboes, and drifters of the Mississippi’s history, the sort who in Mark Twain’s time would have met their ends tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail."
Rocket Man (On experiencing "the weightless experience" with Zero-G), in Men's Journal
"Then things get really strange. The plane climbs steeply, and suddenly I am floating four feet above the floor. The flight director opens a water bottle and amoebic globules wobble through the air. Weightlessness is like swimming in breathable water; I try to dog-paddle but there's nothing to push against. My fellow astronerds are shrieking in delight, drifting, pirouetting, cannonballing off the walls. Bill House does a backflip. A balding participant has a comb-over blowout, his shock of hair drifting up like kelp. One of the Zero-G instructors opens a bag of toys, and a Slinky expands and contracts in midair. A Nerf football travels end over end, a slow-motion replay of a field goal. Thirty seconds later the flight director shouts, "Feet down!" and we are flattened again.
"This happens 10 times in a row. I try one-fingered handstands, elaborate dance moves, clinging to the ceiling like a human fly. Twenty-seven people who spend their lives succumbing to gravity are suddenly granted a pardon. Of course, none of us is really weightless. We are in fact plunging toward the Gulf of Mexico at the same speed as our airplane. We are viscerally experiencing Einstein's great revelation, which led to his General Theory of Relativity: A falling body is at times indistinguishable from a floating body."
Is It Possible To Save the Waterway That Made Chicago Great?, in Outside Magazine
"More than a century ago in this exact spot, human ingenuity shaped nature to its will, smashing through the earthen barrier that separated the Mississippi River drainage area from the vast freshwater reservoir of the Great Lakes, stitching together the commercial energies and distinct ecosystems of the North American continent. The consequences of that decision are still playing out today in a metropolis where more than seven million people draw their drinking water from Lake Michigan—and where those same people pump their sewage back into the river. Myriad threats, from water pollution to flooding and invasive species, have made the question of what to do about the Chicago River one of the most important questions facing the city. And simply by asking it, Chicagoans are acknowledging a basic existential struggle."
Find links to more articles on Matthew Power's website.
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