Around the Bend: Floating Down the Missouri River

Bison Books| 2026 | 228 pages

Who knew a book about a bunch of cousins floating almost 800 miles down the Missouri River—one of the most dangerous rivers in the country—could be funny? Who knew the story of a slow two weeks in a 40-year-old pontoon boat named FloteBote could move so quickly? Author Lisa G. Dill pulls it all off in Around the Bend: Floating Down the Missouri River, a story about “a big, muddy, nondescript river without much scenic value or recreational opportunity.” But, she insists, “the Missouri is a river we should all pay attention to.” It wasn’t until I read this book that I realized how true this is.

Full disclosure: I first met Lisa Dill at the 2015 Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, where she read an excerpt from her then work in progress. Several of us attended that conference and we all had manuscripts, but the guest agent in attendance was only interested in Lisa’s absorbing story about the Missouri. Eleven years and one agent later, Around the Bend paints a picture of Asian carp, wing dikes, revetments, flash droughts, “a floating snarl of water moccasins,” and bald eagles that she saw “in startling numbers,” although locals she bumped into at marinas and parks repeatedly claimed not to have seen any. A pallid sturgeon, she writes, “long, pale, and every bit as prehistoric-looking as the Horseshoe crab, engenders affection if you look at it long enough, like the Ugliest Dog in America that they show on morning news shows.” She watches a great blue heron take off “like origami in reverse.”

Dill’s trip got off to a dubious start, over Christmas dinner with family. After an aunt announced she had decided to run the family’s old pontoon boat down the Missouri River and then give it away, someone whispered, “They’re all going to die.” Dill writes, “No one thought this seemed like a reasonable idea. I immediately asked if I could go along.”

By July, after a day’s delay because FloteBoat’s motor wouldn’t start, the crew of cousins headed downstream. “I can’t clearly articulate, even to myself, even now, why I went on this trip,” Dill admits. As a reader, I willingly accompanied the group down the river, along the way picking up interesting delights about a river I, guilty as charged, had never previously paid attention to.

I even grew fond of FloteBote , which Dill describes as “in a word, ridiculous.” She acknowledges that “affection overlooks a multitude of flaws.” I found its flaws charming, but then I didn’t need to deal with their consequences. The cousins took turns driving it; when it was her turn, Dill writes, “the whole thing felt a bit like what I imagine steering a bathtub might be like.” When they arrived in marinas for the night, people tended to stare. At one marina stop, one of three “twenty-somethings” asked the author about her trip. “’You must be one of the lucky ones who owns a boat,’ he said. ‘That depends on your definitions of both “luck” and “boat,”’ [she] said, and pointed. All three of them stared at it for a minute and then burst out laughing.”

She compares her initial apprehension about the entire idea with thoughts recorded in the journals of other excursions down the Missouri, including the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804. She imagines what must have been in the minds of the expedition’s members: “Fear. Most of the men were in their twenties, an age at which most of us believe ourselves immortal.” Youth often overlooks a multitude of potential dangers; the rest of us get to enjoy the fruits of that daring. Any apprehension Dill felt was outvoted by her sense of adventure.

I am aware that the Lewis and Clark Expedition opened the door to settler encroachment on Indigenous lands and depletion of their natural resources, and otherwise impacted the more than 50 tribes the expedition interacted with. Dill does not shy away from the subject; rather, she addresses it directly. Her research into the Native tribes of the region—including the Iowa, Ho-Chunk, and Sac and Fox—together with conversations with the Ioway people she met, led her to a conclusion about her own involvement with “a nineteenth-century land grab, achieved through appalling violence, cruelty, lies, and manipulation, by the government of my own country.” Her ancestors were Dutch immigrants who “bought as much farmland as they could afford, just as the federal government was offering land on the frontier for pennies on the dollar.” She concludes, “I don’t know what I can do about this, or what the Ioway would want me to do. One of the only things I can do is tell the story of my brief time with the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska… all of whom were unfailingly kind.”

The amount of research the author did is evidenced by the 28-page bibliography. Each day on the river presents a new chapter, in chronological order, from the launch in the Big Sioux River on the Iowa/South Dakota border to Jefferson City, Missouri, more than 750 river miles downstream. Each chapter is devoted to a different topic of natural history, climate, engineering, and political, social, and cultural history. “It’s the reason the book took ten years,” she told me in a recent phone conversation.

Dill hadn’t set her expectations very high before setting off on FloteBote , although she whispered “Good morning” to the river every morning. At the start of the trip, she writes, “I wanted to… learn whatever it had to teach me about itself, and about myself.” At the end of the trip, she adds, “The river is going to give me whatever it gives me, and my job is to figure out what to do with whatever that turns out to be.” My job, as a grateful reader, was to enjoy the stories and information this book offered me, and turn to them the next time I encounter a river.

Around the Bend: Floating Down the Missouri River

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