Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water

by Kathleen Dean Moore

Book Overview

In these twenty elegant essays, a philosopher and amateur naturalist meanders along the rivers and streams of the american West-and muses on love, loss, aging, motherhood, happiness, the art of poking around, and other important matters. "A smart, compassionate, and wise meditation on living in place" (Terry Tempest Williams).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156004615
• ISBN13: 9780156004619
• Release Date: August 1996
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, perceptive writing

Kathleen Moore is my favorite author. She writes beautifully and perceptively about the relationship between humans and the natural world, and how that influences relationships between people. I ordered "Riverwalking" because my original copy is somehow missing. I can highly recommend her other books, "Holdfast" and "The Pine Island Paradox."

Wet feet again.

Although I first read this collection of essays nearly five years ago, Derrick Jensen's recent interview with Moore in "The Sun" magazine prompted me to get my feet wet in this river again. "I have come to believe that all essays walk in rivers," Moore writes in the Preface. "Essays ask the philosophical question that flows through time--How shall I live my life? The answers drift together through countless converging streams, where they move swiftly below the reflective surface of the natural world and mix in the deep and quiet places of the mind. Tthis is where an essayist must walk, stirring up the mud" (p. xiii).There are reflections of love, loss, motherhood, and happiness in these twenty river essays, which tend to run deep. We find Moore river-camping on the Willamette, wondering "What will draw our children back home?" (p. 8); contemplating happiness and sorrow on the John Day River; discovering "love can lead people to beauty" (p. 27), while night-skiing along the headwaters of the Rogue River with her husband, Frank; poking around Winter Creek (my favorite essay in the book); contemplating erosion in the Little Stoney River; "keeping house in the woods" (p. 54) while camping near the Smohalla River; identifying plants at the McKenzie River; spending time with her father under a full moon at the headwaters of the Metolius; walking barefoot up Bear Creek; camping among Sonoran Desert arroyos; country-western dancing to songs about rivers; travelling in the jet stream to see her dying father; contemplating motherhood, loss, and aging by the Puget Sound; studying newts at Klickitat Creek; fly-fishing on the Deschutes River; soul searching on the Salish River; encountering a rattlesnake near Alamo Canyon Creek; and looking at the Maclaren River under the midnight sun in Alaska.RIVERWALKING shows that we can never step in the same river twice, and will appeal to those who have ever had seeds in their socks, or rocks in their pockets (p. 31).G. Merritt

Walking in the rivers with Kathleen Dean Moore

Writing with clarity and purpose is difficult, but Kathleen Dean Moore has mastered the craft in Riverwalking. Her essays are both simple and complex as they mix her experiences in the natural world with her philosophical questions about life.She is at her best in the essay, "The John Day River", where she questions a universal balance between happiness and despair. She wonders if the joy of cowboys who park their trucks in wheat fields and turn up their radios "to dance in the headlights" (page 20) enjoy themselves at another's expense. In her casual, but eloquent style she questions the possibility of Nature collecting a debt, payable by sickness or sorrow charged to one (her own father's hospitalization, perhaps) to cover the cost of happiness for another.Kathleen Dean Moore is a gifted essayist. She has found a beautiful confluence where her philosophical questions empty into the deep ocean of nature writing. She has earned her place as one of the genre's very best.

A refreshing collection of essays

The title of this book is what caught my eye - as a kid, I loved walking in rivers, feeling the water rushing against my skin - I still do.Although there are plenty of rivers running through the essays in this book, there is more to them than that. My favorite essay is the chapter dedicated to the merits of "poking around". It gives a fantastic justification of spending a day doing absolutely nothing - my kind of day! This is the kind of book that you read in more than one sitting. When you're stuck somewhere you don't want to be - when you're feeling stifled - when all you want to do is escape somewhere to your own little universe - that's the time to read a chapter of this book. If you can't get away to spend a weekend in the mountains, reading these essays is the next best thing.

Much more than rivers

This is excellent, engaging writing.Moore unfolds bits of her life as she takes us along various rivers. The result is poignant, memorable stories inspired by life outdoors.