The Tuber: Having constructed the greatest flotation device mankind has ever known, our fearless writer embarks on an ill-conceived, possibly insane crossing of alligator-infested North Florida via a string of seriously imperiled and incredibly beautiful rivers. (Yeah, it's a tube.) (Wells Tower, March 19, 2009, Outside)

The river is as black and flat as freshly screeded tar. Submarine visibility is at a distressing half-inch or so, max. Anything could be down there.

I’m floating the Wekiva River north of Orlando, moving at what feels to me like a pretty good clip, when a husky teenager in a decrepit red kayak slips up alongside.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Are there alligators in here?”

“Yeah, kind of,” he replies. “Just saw one back there. Not too big. Seven feet, about.”

“Back where, exactly?”

Obviously more intrigued by my vessel, he halfheartedly jerks a thumb upriver.

“Where’d you get that boat?”

“I made it,” I say.

He hoists his eyebrows in an expression of very mild impressedness.

“Awesome.”

He toodles off, leaving me to fend for myself in a craft that probably wouldn’t survive an attack by a determined koi.

There was, believe it or not, a time when an author could make a living off of writing magazine essays. Those days being long past, we no longer have many essayists whose work people specifically seek out. For a while, David Foster Wallace was king of the hill. Perhaps the most revered current practitioner is Patrick Raden Keefe. Wells Tower is highly regarded not just for essays like this one but for his short stories as well.

In this classic from Outside magazine, he makes the tubing adventure into his own madcap version of John Cheever’s The Swimmer. But where the original story is notoriously bleak, Towers’s tale is quite funny. Not only is he self-deprecating, his assistant is hilariously abusive and the locals are vocally skeptical of his mission. Mix in some natural history and you’ve got an exemplary instance of the once well-remunerated craft.

(Reviewed:08-Sep-26)

Grade: (A) Orrin C. Judd

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Wells Tower Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: Wells Tower
    -FILMOGRAPHY: Wells Tower (IMDB)
    -PUBLISHER PAGE: Wells Tower (MacMillan)
    -ENTRY: Wells Tower (BookBrowse)
    -ENTRY: Wells Tower (Grokipedia)
    -ENTRY: Wells Tower (GoodReads)
    -INDEX: Wells Tower (Outside)
    -INDEX: Wells Tower (GQ)
    -INDEX: 10 Great Articles and Essays by Wells Tower (Electric Typewriter)
    -INDEX: Wells Tower (The New Yorker)
    -INDEX: Wells Tower (Granta)
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    -ESSAY: The Tuber: Having constructed the greatest flotation device mankind has ever known, our fearless writer embarks on an ill-conceived, possibly insane crossing of alligator-infested North Florida via a string of seriously imperiled and incredibly beautiful rivers. (Yeah, it's a tube.) (Wells Tower, March 19, 2009, Outside)
    -ESSAY: Bird-dogging the Bush Vote: Undercover with Florida's Republican shock troops (Wells Tower, March 2005, Harpers)
    -STORY: Hammer Island (Wells Tower, December 2014, Harpers)
    -ESSAY: The elder modernist (Wells Tower, February 2014, Harpers)
    -ESSAY: Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?: What kind of a person looks upon the world's largest land animal—a beast that mourns its dead and lives to retirement age and can distinguish the voice of its enemies—and instead of saying“Wow!” says something like “Where's my gun?” Wells Tower joins an exclusive hunting party and reports on one of the last elephant hunts in Botswana. (Wells Tower, October 2, 2017, GQ)
    -STORY: The Brown Coast (Wells Tower, Spring 2002, Paris Review)
    -ESSAY: Moto : The world wasn't right unless the Knockwoods were winning (Wells Tower, 3/02/11, ESPN The Magazine)
    -STORY: The Landlord (Wells Tower, September 13, 2010, The New Yorker)
    -PODCAST: David Sedaris Reads Wells Tower’s The Leopard (With Deborah Treisman, January 2, 2018, New Yorker Fiction Podcast)
    -ESSAY: THe Great Paper Caper (Wells Tower, March 2014, GQ)
    -ESSAY: My Kushy New Job: With pot laws changing, we thought it'd be a good idea to send our weed-averse correspondent to see what life is really like in Amsterdam, the world's cannabis capital. He took a job at a marijuana coffee shop, inhaled the best stuff on earth, and saw the totally righteous future of legalized ganja (Wells Tower, August 2010, GQ)
    -ESSAY: (Near) Death in Venice: Ah, Venice, city of love and site of one of the world’s largest, goofiest rowing regattas, where anybody is welcome to paddle anything through the storied canals for 19 glorious, grueling miles. Into this tempest we tossed WELLS TOWER and his big brother. Their orders? Finish the damn thing without killing each other. (Wells Tower, March 11, 2010, Outside)
    -ESSAY: The Thing with Feathers: Is it a bird or a haunting memory? Wells Tower tracks an uncertain resurrection of the ivory-billed woodpecker in the big woods of Arkansas. (Wells Tower, March 1, 2006, Outside)
    -ESSAY: In Gold We Trust: When the economy goes to pot, we the people place our faith in one indisputably sexy commodity. It's the lone bright spot on Wall Street and a rallying cry for the riotous right. So as the Ron Pauls of the world dream of a return to the gold standard, we sent our intrepid correspondent to the Klondike, where a new gold rush is on and rumors of a mother lode have everyone acting a little feverish (Wells Tower, January 2012, GQ)
    -ESSAY: Love in the Ruins: A year after Katrina crashed the Big Easy’s party, former local WELLS TOWER returned to check up on New Orleans’s most beloved outdoor escape, the path on top of the Mississippi River levee. But, as he found, biking the high lonesome trail is no longer such an easy thing. (Wells Tower,February 22, 2007, Outside)
    -STORY: Leopard (Wells Tower, November 2, 2008, The New Yorker)
    -ESSAY: What Charles Portis Taught Us (Wells Tower, February 20, 2020, The New Yorker)
    -REVIEW: CD Boxed Sets (Wells Tower, November 16, 2008, The New Yorker)
    -ESSAY: Wild America (Wells Tower, December 1, 2008, Vice)
    -STORY: On the show (Wells Tower, May 2007, Harpers)
    -ESSAY: The Un-Screw-Up-Able Feast: Ten men, fifty guests, and a pig (Wells Tower, May 23, 2011, GQ)
    -ESSAY: The Book That Changed My Life: Wells Tower: The acclaimed author on the subtle genius of True Grit author Charles Portis' underrated gem, Gringos (Wells Tower, May 27, 2011, GQ)
    -ESSAY: Desperately Seeking Mitt: They say Mitt Romney is a robot. They say he is an unusually handsome cyborg. They say if you opened up his chest, you'd see a pile of crackling circuitry or maybe a bale of old straw. And as we prepare (finally!) to crown him the Republican nominee in Tampa, Florida, this month, there is but one real question on everyone's mind: Is there anything behind the mask? (Wells Tower, July 24, 2012, GQ)
    -ESSAY: The Elvis Impersonator, the Karate Instructor, a Fridge Full of Severed Heads, and the Plot 2 Kill the President: Remember that crazy story about the dude in Mississippi who mailed ricin to Obama and then tried to frame some other dude in Mississippi for the crime? Well, as Wells Tower discovered when he traveled to Tupelo and started poking around, the story is a thousand times crazier than you thought (Wells Tower, September 29, 2013, GQ)
    -ESSAY: The Old Man at Burning Man: It’s something we've all been meaning to do. The father-son bonding adventure. You know: The big fishing excursion, The road trip down Route 66. Last year, Wells Tower took a completely different approach with his dad: Burning Man, the world's largest chemically enhanced self-expression festival. They went to witness the Slut Olympics. They went to see the art. They went to discover what draws 60,000 people to one of the least hospitable places on Earth. Then they set up camp and took off their clothes. And things got truly interesting. (Wells Tower, August 31, 2015, GQ)
    -ESSAY: Breaking Down The Show: Bright Lights. Low Pay. Thrilling Rides. Hard Living. And A Roof Over Your Head. Welcome To A Week On The Carnival Circuit (Wells, Tower, July 2, 2000, Washington Post Magazine)
    -STORY: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Wells Tower, 2/28/18, Granta)
    -REVIEW: Wrestling With Nature: a review of Wild Child by T. Coraghessan Boyle (Wells Tower, Jan. 26, 2010, NY Times Book Review)
    -AUDIO: Wells Tower reads Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: The hotly-tipped American writer reads the title story from his debut collection of short fiction (The Guardian Books podcast, 9 Apr 2009)
    -ESSAY: Will the Real Guadalajara Please Stand Up?: With 24 hours’ notice, AFAR sent writer Wells Tower into the mazelike markets and Lucha Libre dens of Mexico’s notoriously misunderstood megalopolis. (Wells Tower, August 9, 2016, Afar)
    -STORY: Door in your eye: Neighbourhood watch (Wells Tower, May 3, 2009, Prospect)
    -ESSAY: Magic Kingdom: In New Orleans, communing with the other world can put you under the city's spell (Wells Tower, 9/20/03, Washington Post)
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    -PROFILE: Witness to Luckless Lives on the Periphery (Eric Konigsberg, April 10, 2009, NY Times Book Review)
    -PROFILE: The Still Lives of Wells Tower (Paul Maliszewski, February 2011, Brooklyn Rail)
    -PROFILE: A Sort of Introduction to Wells Tower (Mauricio Hernandez, Oct 16, 2019, Medium)
    -PROFILE: Wells Tower, Fiction Writer, Is Looking for Joy: “Being a human being isn’t just all misery and despair. There’s a lot of available joy out there, even if (Leon Neyfakh, 03/23/09, NY Observer)
    -INTERVIEW: An Interview with Wells Tower (David Varno, April 2009, BookSlut)
    -INTERVIEW: Author Wells Tower Shares His Hatred of the Internet, His Love of Action Plots, and an Old Norse Recipe: Born in Canada, raised in the South, and now living in the writer's paradise of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Wells Tower offers a fresh ear for dialogue and well-researched characters drawn from seemingly anywhere and any time. (The New York Public Library, Jun 11, 2010, Huffington Post)
    -INTERVIEW: An Interview | Wells Tower: From the archives: Evelyn Spence talks with Wells Tower (Brooklyn Review)
    -INTERVIEW: Bookforum talks with Wells Tower (Shona Sanzgiri, April 9, 2013, BookForum)
    -INTERVIEW: It’s All Painful: An Interview with Wells Tower: His debut collection features sentimental Vikings, hungover moose-hunters, and fuming stepsons, among other luckless men. Wells Tower talks jokes, beauty, and painful, teeth-gnashing revision with Rebecca Scherm. (Rebecca Scherm, 3/15/12, Fiction Writers Review)
    -INTERVIEW: The Exchange: Wells Tower (Thessaly La Force, April 6, 2009, The New Yorker)
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    -ESSAY: The utterly talentless Wells Tower (Colin Flemin, 11/19/18)
    -ARTICLE: Tin House Gathering Erupts Over Wells Tower Reading (April Baer, July 19, 2018 6, OPB)
    -ESSAY: Matt Sumell’s top 10 fictional troublemakers: Bad choices make for good stories – and here are some of my favourite characters raising hell, from a perverted billionaire to a Viking hoodlum to a feckless hospital orderly (Matt Sumell, 25 Feb 2015, The Guardian)
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    -REVIEW: Land of Promise, Home of the Bedeviled and Bewildered (Michiko Kakutani, March 23, 2009, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: Hard Times (Edmund White, March 26, 2009, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: The Call of the Wild: Wells Tower’s debut collection is strong stuff. (Juliet Lapidos, March 24, 2009, Slate)
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    -REVIEW: of Everything Ravaged : Wells Tower - All the American characters are Vikings: randomly violent, tough, and dangerous to know, invading a tiny country for no apparent reason (zoran rosko vacuum player, 3/15/10)
    -REVIEW: Books to give you hope: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower: In a time of bitter divisions, these inventive depictions of some very different struggles remind us of our common humanity – and the rude health of short fiction (Matt Lewis, 19 Aug 2016, The Guardian)
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