Photo submitted to Times Observer Floating down river to the Gulf of Mexico is not always as relaxing as it sounds.

Over 2,000 miles.

Covered at a pace of around 7 miles per hour.

And, most importantly, countless lessons learned.

In 2008, Russell native David Whitten put a boat he’d built himself – with the help of his son Kyle and Kyle’s lifelong friend Robert Barrett – into the Allegheny River at a boat launch intended for kayaks and canoes at Buckaloons.

Photo submitted to Times Observer The group made their way to Benton, Ky., to finish up the second leg of their three-year adventure.

David got the idea for the trip from a book he’d read in the winter of 2006 about Harlan Hubbard and his shantyboat, which Hubbard turned into a lifestyle along with his wife Anna. The pair of them, in 1944, built themselves a boat and floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. And David took it into his mind that he would do the very same.

“I wanted to have this adventure with (Kyle) before he was grown up and off living his life,” explained David, as he, Kyle, and Robert reminisced the great storytelling highlights of the trip that began when Kyle and Robert were just 15. When the weather broke in the spring of 2007 he got himself to work.

For their parts, Kyle and Robert were excited about the idea, but skeptical that it might actually happen as immediately as David suggested until, as Kyle puts it, “pieces of a boat started showing up in the yard.” The trio worked on that boat over the course of one year, with David – a master carpenter – teaching the boys not just how to build such a vessel, but how to do it right.

“He was always telling us don’t do it this way, do it like this. He kept saying, ‘we have to live on this’.” That was Robert’s memory of the setup for what would truly be the trip of a lifetime. That ability to delay gratification, to set himself up for success in the future, is only one of the countless life lessons Robert and Kyle agree they both learned in large part on the river.

While it may not replace formal education, Kyle feels strongly that the three summers he spent getting from Warren to Mobile, Al., “absolutely” gave him a more solid setup for living real life than the knowledge and skills he could’ve gained in a classroom. From physics to budgeting, the river trip taught him how to survive on the strength of his own planning.

Photo submitted to Times Observer The crew put in at Buckaloons in June of 2008.

“We’ve always been outdoorsy,” explained Kyle. “We’d go camping, we always were able to do fine out in nature.” Still, he added “I don’t think I was prepared for the impact (the trip) would have on me.”

The first summer, the crew of five – which also included Kyle’s cousins Dylan and Jed and his uncle Vance – made it from Irvine to Carrollton, Ky. At that point, they overwintered the shantyboat there and rented a moving truck to haul themselves back to Pennsylvania. Not, however, before stopping by the home that Hubbard and his wife eventually made. Right there on the banks of the river in Carrollton when they were finally ready to put down their own roots.

“It wasn’t like we planned it,” said Robert. Kyle chimed in, “no, it just happened that that’s where we landed at the end of that summer.”

The second year the group made the least progress, from Carrollton to Benton, Ky., and the third year saw them finish up their trek from Benton, Ky., to Mobile, Al.

Little signs that the stars were aligned to make this trip a success were sprinkled throughout the three years that the group made their stagewise way to Mobile. Mostly, those signs came in the form of human kindness from strangers they’d never met a day in their lives. From the support of locals, who peppered the banks of the Allegheny between Irvine and around Oil City the first year the group set out, to an elderly woman in Kentucky who offered them a ride back to their boat when she saw them walking miles carrying cans of gasoline from the station where she was filling up. From showers to food to tanks of gas and invitations of fellowship at campsites all along the way, all three men agreed that the biggest, and by far the best lesson they learned on their trip was that human kindness exists. And it exists in spades.

“Don’t lose your hope in humanity,” said Kyle amid waves of laughter shared between himself, his father, and his friend. “And don’t live your life through a screen.”

David agreed wholeheartedly. “There’s adventure out there,” he said, to which Kyle added that “you just have to seek it.”

Above all else, said Kyle, “don’t live your life through a screen. Get out there and really live it.”

The boat that took a year to make, that neighbors joked was David Whitten’s modern incarnation of Noah’s Ark, stayed in Mobile when the group came home that final year. David said he traded it to the owner of the gas stop where they ended up, whose son had just come home from Afghanistan. He traded it for the cost of their lodging and supplies as they prepared to head home for the final time, he said. The boat was to be a therapeutic project for the man’s son to use as a way to heal from his own trauma of war.

What ever happened to it, David said he doesn’t know. But either way, all three agreed that the stories that remain are the most precious part of the entire odyssey.