The Rivers of North America

By Zach Klein, Freda Moon
Contributed by Wes Modes
Photographs by Wes Modes, Bredette Dyer, Jeremiah Daniels

At first glance, Wes Modes is an unlikely candidate for the role of modern-day hobo. For three-quarters of the year, the fifty-three-year-old is a university professor in Santa Cruz, an affluent California beach town, and charged with the weighty responsibility of shaping young minds. But when summer arrives, Wes travels to a major river–somewhere new each time–and drifts downstream for months in a rustic 10-by-8-foot floating cabin called a shantyboat.

The project is an homage to the historic American tradition of river dwellings built by poor people and migrant workers around the time of the second industrial revolution, from the 1850s to the 1950s. The floating shanties were constructed of whatever their builders could find or the waters delivered. It’s a tradition that has long since disappeared from American waterways, but Wes keeps it alive in homage to the history of the “river people” who made their lives aboard similar vessels. Wes’s shantyboat-named Dotty in honor of his grandmother, Dorothy-was completed in 2012, but it looks as though it has been “floating in a bayou for many, many decades,” he says with pride.

In recent years, Wes’s shantyboat has been towed behind a Ford F-250 truck along 26,000 miles of road and floated down 2,600 miles of river. With a rotating cast of crew members, Wes has explored the Sacramento, the Upper Mississippi, the Tennessee, and the Hudson Rivers. Next, he plans to navigate the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Louisville, six hundred miles downriver.

Before Wes was an art instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he was a young artist hopping freight trains. Among the adventurers, free spirits, and troublemakers he met while riding the rails in the 1990s was one “hobo” friend who had other friends who were also hopping boats. He understood the attraction. In both forms of travel, “you’re on the back of something more powerful and it requires the same amount of knowledge, caution, and improvisation,” he says. He began riding rivers on simple rafts-“stupid unlikely boats”-made of truck tires and salvaged plywood.

During those fledgling trips downriver, Wes developed a fascination with “the backyards of America,” the places you see when you’re away from the highways. He was amazed at how wild they were, how much nature there was to experience on American waterways, just around the bend from big cities and major industry.

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The rafts that Wes and his friends built were seasonal. They’d put them together over a few days while camped on a riverbank, push them into the water, and spend a chunk of the summer floating downstream. On these simple floating platforms, they might put an old couch they’d bought at a thrift store, some carpet remnants, or a simple tent roof to protect them from summer thunderstorms. The rafts could be plush, Wes insists. But they were unpowered and, ultimately, disposable-built for a moment and left behind after they’d served their purpose.

After five summers of rafting, Wes began to crave a more permanent boat. In 2011, he conceived of a project-part art installation, part oral history, and part adventure-about the history of American shantyboats. And he would hand-build his research vessel: a shanty of his own.

Wes began digging through historical sources and archives, including issues of Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1940s and ’50s, for a suitable design. A first-time boatbuilder, he was primarily concerned with creating a hull that would keep his shanty afloat. He’d initially planned a pontoon-style platform, he says. But as he researched, he became concerned with stability. Pontoon boats “do tend to flip if there’s something heavy on top,” he says.

Eventually, Wes concluded that a barge-style boat, with a flat bottom and twin keels, or skegs, would be both traditional and stable. After considering a dozen or so different plans, he settled on a hull design from designer Glen L. Witt’s book Boatbuilding with Plywood, which Wes calls “the bible” of plywood boats.

As an artist, Wes relishes improvisation. But with this aspect of his shantyboat, Wes relinquished creativity, relying instead on the expertise of others and following Witt’s plans closely. When it was finally time to build, Wes went to work with the help of like-minded friends, “about a million screws, and many cases of beer.”

But once he had his hull and was ready to build the shanty’s cabin, Wes gave his creativity free rein. His grandfather was a builder, and Wes was more confident constructing buildings than building boats. Growing up, he says, he’d often wake up to the sound of his grandfather’s hammering and leap out of bed to help. As the two generations worked together on building projects that repurposed old materials, Wes’s grandfather “showed me the value of reuse and recycling long before those were values that America rediscovered,” he says. With Dotty, Wes drew upon the skills and values his grandfather had taught him and, in the shantyboat tradition, built his cabin from scrap.

A century ago, when shantyboats were a common sight on American waterways, there were sawmills up and down most major rivers. People would build their floating homes out of the milled wood that floated downriver. Wes had to work a bit harder for his materials. He pulled apart a hundred-year-old chicken coop for its wood, and when the owners asked if he wanted to take down a nearby outhouse as well, he jumped at the chance. The boat’s deck was built of old-growth redwood fence boards because “everyone has a fence in California.” He topped his shanty with a gabled roof. The choice was initially an aesthetic one. But soon, Wes saw the practical merits of the design and built a loft into the gable that’s just big enough for a cozy but comfortable double bed.

Friends helped at every stage of the shantyboat being built. Dotty was constructed over a period of two years, mostly from reclaimed and recycled material

Historic shantyboats were built by people on the margins of society-migrant laborers who constructed these simple structures to take their homes and families in search of new opportunities. For Wes, Dotty is a tangible connection to that tradition, which he documents in his ongoing oral history project, A Secret History of American River People.

But the shantyboat has other joys. Everything has a place: “I love that feeling of needing something and knowing exactly where to find it,” Wes says. There are built-in food cabinets and bookshelves, a bar behind the couch, and shelves in “every nook and cranny.” Over the years, Wes has continued to improve his shantyboat, installing electrical outlets for when Dotty is plugged into shore power, lanterns for added light, and more storage for things that have proved essential: “pencils and marine radios, maps and rope, towels and spices.” Wes says that despite its 80-square-foot layout, Dotty doesn’t feel crowded even when there are several people working on the boat at once.

Next, Wes will launch Dotty in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and float past some two hundred riverfront towns before ending his trip in Louisville, Kentucky, in August of 2019, when it’s time to resume another semester in Santa Cruz. From friends, he’s heard that the Ohio River is “big and immensely beautiful,” with low banks and farmland on the northern and western shores and rugged Virginia and Kentucky mountains to the east and south. Unlike other builders, Wes has no fear of tiring of his cabin’s setting. The Ohio River alone could occupy his attention for several summers. It’s nearly a thousand miles long, he explains, “so there will still be more to explore later.”

For Wes, there will always be more to explore later.

Cabin Porn: Inside was released in October 2019. It can be picked up at your local bookstore or Amazon.