Reading Water: Lessons from the River

By Rebecca Lawton

Book Overview

2002 FINALIST, FOREWORD INDIE Nature Book of the Year

" [A] seasoned depiction of the nomadic culture, empty canyons, and wild western rivers that define and haunt her. Honest in her assessment of the psychological costs of a gypsy life, artful in her understanding of currents and seasons, Lawton depicts the rivers taking away as well as giving . . . " - David James Duncan, author, The River Why and My Story as Told by Water

You've read about famed explorers and early boatmen whose legendary strength fills book after book. Now dive into this classic about an early woman river guide whose love of reading water and quest for understanding the underlying science took her all over the West.

For those who have navigated America's great rivers by boat-and for those who wish they could-this book shares deep knowledge from a writer who not only guided on rivers in the 1970s and 80s but also trained and worked as a fluvial geologist. As Lawton writes, "The river taught me instinctive responses in an unparalleled mentorship that led me throughout the American West every day for more than a decade. Being on the river taught me to read water-to psyche out where rocks hid in riffles, find safe passage in inscrutable rapids, and keep moving in flatwater sections."

Living in the river community, allying with water, Lawton became part of an enduring subculture of people changed forever by rivers. In this tenth anniversary edition, her insight learned from other guides and from her own observations of rivers and currents is more timely than ever.

"Reading Water is both mirror and map, a reminder that a life can take the shape of the river itself-fierce and tender, restless and serene, asking us only for our unwavering fidelity to living, moving water." -Ellen Meloy, author, Eating Stone and The Anthropology of Turquoise

Rebecca Lawton begins this literary float trip: "My first view of the river looked like this-a long, blue being at the bottom of a steep canyon." Jump in the raft and join this "whitewater gypsy" and naturalist as she rows you down some of the American West's greatest rivers. With her, you'll come to understand rivers and their impact on the human emotional landscape in a deeper sense. Reading Water offers seekers not only the thrill rides of our rivers, but also their rich ecosystems and spiritual wellsprings. Lawton views river life through various lenses: the hydrological, spiritual, and personal. Even armchair river runners will find much to love about this book-its affection, adventure, wisdom, and sense of place.

"Rebecca Lawton doesn't just read water, she understands it, speaks it, lives it, and loves it. The finely crafted chapters in Reading Water reflect the wisdom and sharply tuned senses that a life spent on the water can nurture. Lawton's book examines everything from the loss of her mother to marriage, friendship, and work through a shimmering, water lens that reveals remarkable depth." -Pamela Michael, cofounder of River of Words and The Gift of Rivers

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0977785637
• ISBN13: 9780977785636
• Release Date: September 2021
• Publisher: Wavegirl Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Flowing Prose

Rebecca Lawton is a wonderful writer. I found this series of essays to be engaging and informative. I also found her work as a woman in a primarily-male field to be inspiring. I can't imagine doing the work she did, and I always love reading stories about adventures I will never take! I also loved her descriptions of nature and the power of her connection with the natural world. A strong, informative read!

Reading Water is a learning *and* feeling experience

This lovely book seems simple enough on the surface (the memoirs of a woman river rafting guide), but, like water itself, there's much more going on beneath the surface. Reading Water is part of the Capital Discoveries Book Series from Capital Books, chosen for their focus on "journeys of self-discovery, transformation, inner awareness, and recovery." This book is a perfect fit for that series. Lawton weaves many threads into each essay, much like the interwoven currents of the braided rivers she describes in one essay. Some threads are past, present, and further past; others are experience, observation, and research. These threads feel somewhat unrelated until the questions gradually flow over the reader like a gentle sprinkle as opposed to a downpour of forced epiphany. Her writing style is beautiful and poetic (with the minor exception of an undue fondness for sentence fragments). Her style takes a few pages to get used to, but then it becomes hypnotic. To pose an obvious metaphor, her phrasing pulls the readers along with the sureness and variety of a peaceful river with occasional rapids. Lawton's greatest strength as a writer is how she combines a scholar's depth of knowledge with a romantic's depth of feeling. She does a great job of interlacing fact and experience. The curious patterns in the lives of salmon might be discussed objectively in one passage, followed closely by the delight of feasting on their flesh in the next. Turning the pages of Reading Water, like reading the best of memoirs, is a learning *and* feeling experience. As a memoir or as an investigation of the power of moving water to affect human beings, Reading Water is strongly recommended.

Reading Life

"reading water" is the river runner's term for seeing things below the surface, things that might leave only a subtle sign on the surface but may be crucial to your survival. Lawton is a trustworthy guide to the subtle signs--signs of time and geological forces and biological creativity and poetic wonders and human truths--that are easily missed but which make life far more wonder-ful. This is a gem of literary nature writing, with a keen poetic eye, but unlike much of the genre, in which writers may have spent too many years in the classroom and then tried to impose too many abstractions or too many other writer's styles onto nature, Lawton's classroom has been the roaringly real and deep and raw and beautiful nature of the Grand Canyon and other wilderness rivers, where river guides must face real matters of life and death and meaning, and she has allowed it to speak to her directly and meaningfully.

as captivating as a lovely river

This collection of essays, in which Rebecca Lawton recounts adventures she's had in her many years as a boatman on Western rivers, is lovely. Though her descriptions of nature are not particularly lush, they capture memorable scenes with a brief, snapshot effect that leaves detailed images in the reader's mind. She fleshes out her descriptions with scientific and geologic facts--her writing is not burdened by science, but rather enlivened by it.Lawton tells of how she nearly drowned a friend of hers with her own hubris; how she learned to get out of swift eddies; and how she became a boatman in the first place, despite the bias against females in that profession. She also talks about her failed marriage, her mother's death from cancer, and a faithless lover. She draws life lessons from the characteristics of rivers, and although a few of the lessons seem too pat, or contrived to fit the river motif, many of them seem right on the money.And always Lawson's writing has a sincere, honest tone, as if she is not trying to make herself look good so much as pondering what she has learned, from life and the river. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about lives they will never live, or who values the wisdom others have worked hard to attain.

Wonderful Essays about Nature

Rebecca Lawton's collection of essays is lovely. She describes her rafting trips, the geology of the rivers she loves so much and draws comparisons to how rivers are like life. I thoroughly enjoyed the tales of her adventures and learned a lot about life by reading "Reading Water."