Rinker Buck
Rinker Buck is an American journalist and author who has built a distinctive career around firsthand adventures with historical machinery and the open landscapes of American history. Born in New Jersey in 1950 into an aviation family — his father was a barnstormer who taught all his sons to fly — he grew up with an unusual intimacy with mechanical craftsmanship and physical adventure. He worked as a journalist for the Hartford Courant and other newspapers, and began writing books relatively late in his career, discovering in narrative nonfiction the form best suited to his combination of historical curiosity, mechanical enthusiast’s knowledge, and a talent for the comic set piece.
His memoir Flight of Passage (1997) recounted the cross-country flight he and his brother made in a small Piper Cub when he was fifteen years old — a genuinely remarkable adventure story told with warmth and humor. But it was his two major historical adventure books that established his reputation most firmly. The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey (2015), reviewed on WritersReview, recounts his journey across the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail in a mule-drawn wagon, retracing the route of the 350,000 emigrants who crossed it between 1840 and 1870. The book weaves together Buck’s account of the contemporary journey — the mechanical breakdowns, the difficult mules, the small-town America he encounters — with a rich historical narrative of the original migration and its consequences for the landscape and the native peoples it displaced.
His subsequent book, Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure (2022), applied the same formula to another great American journey, this time a flatboat voyage down the full length of the Mississippi River. Buck built or assembled a replica nineteenth-century flatboat and navigated the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, using the journey as a framework for a history of the river and the culture that grew up along it. Like the Oregon Trail book, it combines adventure narrative, historical research, and a comedy of mechanical misadventure into a distinctly American form that owes something to Mark Twain, something to John Steinbeck, and something entirely to Buck’s own eccentric sensibility.
What makes Buck’s books work is the combination of genuine physical risk and undertaking — these are not easy or safe journeys — with a humility and humor that prevent them from becoming exercises in masculine self-congratulation. He writes about his own failures and misfortunes with as much relish as his successes, and the historical material he weaves into the adventure narrative is well-researched and thoughtfully integrated. He belongs to a tradition of American writers who insist that the best way to understand a landscape and its history is to move through it at the speed and with the means of the people who first traveled it, and his books make a compelling case for that conviction.