Whitewater Home Companion: Southeastern Rivers, Volume 1
Laugh out loud with this hilarious collection of William Nealy’s beloved river maps, together in book form for easy reading!
A celebrated author and cartoonist, William Nealy gained cult-hero status in the outdoor-sports community by blending his passion for the outdoors with his unique style of caricatures. He had a knack for learning—not by doing but by crashing and burning! For years his informative and hilarious cartoon maps of popular canoeing and kayaking streams have delighted whitewater paddlers. Practically collectors’ items, these maps are sought by paddlers all over the United States for their relevance and wild insider’s perspective.
In Whitewater Home Companion: Southeastern Rivers, Volume I, William coupled his most celebrated Southeastern US river maps with an anthology of cartoons, paddling homilies, and unsolicited advice. Artistically bizarre, totally irreverent, and laced with lethal doses of macho-deflating, highly barbed wit, this masterpiece helped establish William as the Kliban of outdoor literature. Through his distinctive drawing and wholly peculiar river-submarine terminology, William successfully portrays rivers and boaters as never before.
Featured Rivers:
- Chattahoochee
- Chattooga, Sections III & IV
- Cheat Canyon
- French Broad/Big Laurel Creek
- Gauley
- Haw
- Hiwassee
- Locust Fork of the Warrior River
- Nantahala
- New River Gorge
- Nolichucky
- Ocoee
- Savage
- Youghiogheny
William’s zany illustrations have been bound and bandaged together in a monumental new collection of books that include cartoons long out of print. Whitewater Home Companion is a wonderful part of The William Nealy Collection, ideal for anyone who loves to laugh and enjoys the great outdoors.
William “Not Bill” Nealy was a wild, gentle, brilliant artist and creator turned cult hero who wrote 10 books for Menasha Ridge Press from 1982 to 2000. William shared his hard-won “crash-and-learn” experiences through humorous hand-drawn cartoons and illustrated river maps that enabled generations to follow in his footsteps. His subjects included paddling, mountain biking, skiing, and inline skating. His hand-drawn, poster-size river maps of the Nantahala, Ocoee, Chattooga, Gauley, Youghiogheny, and several other rivers are still sought after and in use today.
William was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He and his wife, Holly Wallace, spent their adult years in a home William built in the woods on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, along with an assortment of dogs, lizards, pigs, snakes, turtles, and amphibians. William died in 2001.
His longtime friend and publisher, Bob Sehlinger, wrote: “When William Nealy died in 2001, paddling lost its Poet Laureate, one of its best teachers, and its greatest icon. William was arguably the best-known ambassador of whitewater sport, entertaining and instructing hundreds of thousands of paddlers through his illustrated books, including the classics: Whitewater Home Companion Volumes I and II, Whitewater Tales of Terror, Kayaks to Hell, and his best-known work, Kayak, which combined expert paddling instruction with artful caricatures and parodies of the whitewater community itself.”
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