When Trapper Haskins and his wife, Mandy, were young newlyweds, they built a wooden rowboat with the intention of traveling down the Mississippi River, from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. The trip was supposed to take ninety days.

It took sixteen years. For reasons that would later haunt Trapper, they pulled their boat from the river in New Orleans, one hundred miles short of their goal.

More than a decade and a half later—now with two children and a rotting rowboat in the backyard—Trapper found himself in the doldrums of midlife, deeply unsatisfied, and ultimately suffering an emotional breakdown. In an effort to reclaim who he once was—a craftsman and traveler—Trapper rebuilt the old rowboat with the help of his children and relaunched it into the Mississippi exactly where he and Mandy left off, this time as a family of four, determined to finally reach the Gulf.

With the adventure-inspiring verve of Barbarian Days, the cultural history chops of A Walk in the Woods, and the bracing vulnerability of Wild, Haskins’s Crooked Old River is the story of a man betting it all, losing everything, and finding his way back in the most American of arenas: the Mississippi River. .