River Run

Brian Nold is building a boat out of barrels, Pepsi containers, four-by-fours and a mast. He’ll use the Hillbilly Hobi Cat for his second river adventure along the Missouri.

“Basically, it’s a floating garbage pile,” Nold says. He isn’t worried about whether it will get him where he wants to go; he’s just glad he doesn’t have to worry about someone stealing it.

On his first trip, which he chronicles in Voyage of the Maxed Out, Nold and his brother put $1,000 into a sailboat that they navigated — with only the help of a State Farm road atlas — to Key West. Starting in Missouri. Never having sailed before.

Nold, who lives in Warrensburg, and his brother enjoyed stopping along the way, but someone always had to stay with the boat. With the Hillbilly Hobi Cat, they won’t have to. It’ll be like backpacking … in the river. If they want to tie up the boat to shoot guns and drink whisky, that’ll be fine.

Nold isn’t some guy who got a kooky idea for a book, deliberately acquired the cheapest boat money almost couldn’t buy and then carefully composed the whole volume as he went. It’s not Survivor. Nold set out to have a real experience. When he returned to work as a commuter pilot, he’d tell his stories up in the air, and his coworkers would laugh in the cockpit. That’s when he realized he had to put it all on paper.

“It was pretty scary sitting down to write it, because I don’t really consider myself a writer,” he says. “I was really afraid I was going to put a lot of golly-gee-whiz-who-gives-a-shit type stuff in there.” But he didn’t. And he didn’t try to hoity-toity anything up for publication, either.

“I tried to tell my proofreaders, ‘Don’t get too worked up about the King’s English,'” he recalls.

Now Nold’s trying to convince his brother to join him for the Hillbilly Hobi Cat adventure. “I think I need to put him under hypnosis.”