Reading Water: Lessons from the River (Capital Discoveries) [Paperback]

Rebecca Lawton (Author)

Book Description

Series: Capital Discoveries | Publication Date: July 2004

In the tradition of America’s strong pioneer women, Rebecca Lawton was one of the first women river guides in the West. For millions of Americans and foreign visitors who have navigated America’s great rivers by raft or boat - and for those who wish they could - this book will help them understand rivers and their impact on the human emotional landscape in a deeper sense. It offers such seekers, not only the thrill rides and vacation destinations of our rivers, but also their rich ecosystems and spiritual wellsprings. As Rebecca Lawton says, "To those who come to know them well, rivers are home..It was the river that 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 every day 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." Now, years later, she offers "Reading Water" and the countless lessons she learned from interpreting rivers and currents, living in the river community, and becoming part of a boater’s subculture.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Rivers provided the main routes for discovery of the American West. Today, rafting or boating those same rivers can still provide a vehicle for a different kind of discovery-of one's self. Lawton is a seasoned, licensed boatwoman who has navigated many of the most beautiful and technically difficult rivers of the West. Her experiences as a woman succeeding in a very physically demanding profession (she was one of the first female river guides) and the people with whom she works are interesting by themselves, as are her passing observations about the geology and natural history of the rivers. The overarching theme of these short essays, though, is how she connects with nature, and ultimately with herself, on the water. Her reflections are not especially profound, and her prose tends to be a bit airy, but the thoughts and feelings that she expresses are affirmative, introspective, and unpretentious. For its honesty and relative simplicity, if this book were a river it would be broad, not deep. For larger general collections of nature essays.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Lawton, a retired river guide, came to her passion for the outdoors through her mother's love of the wilderness and her brother's river guide career. As these essays meander through time, they reveal not only her love for her calling, but also her development as a person, guide, and scholar of the rivers of the West. The hard work and danger that a river guide faces on a daily basis become a comfortable routine as awareness and familiarity with the ways of the rivers grow, and readers come to share Lawton's loves and fears, and the black hole of depression that follows her thrilling summers. Lawton does, however, make use of her off-the-river seasons in college and graduate school, where she studies the geology and history of the landscape that she loves; then, later, after marriage and parenthood, she starts a career as an environmental consultant. The lyricism of Lawton's prose mirrors the natural elegance of what she describes, and the excitement she conveys makes readers long for a run through the rapids. Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Capital Books; Paperback edition (July 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931868611
• ISBN-13: 978-1931868617
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,384,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars as captivating as a lovely river, June 24, 2003

By 

"ellenlymond" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reading Water: Lessons from the River (Capital Discovery) (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Essays about Nature, December 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Reading Water: Lessons from the River (Capital Discovery) (Hardcover)

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."

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading Water is a learning *and* feeling experience, December 14, 2006

By 

John Sheirer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reading Water: Lessons from the River (Capital Discoveries) (Paperback)

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.