Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water [Paperback]

Kathleen Dean Moore (Author)

Book Description

Series: Harvest Book | Publication Date: August 26, 1996

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).

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Kathleen Dean Moore is a stunning new voice among the literary naturalists. Her writing, like that of Annie Dillard or Edward Hoagland, shows us a vast, complex, partly hidden and startling world that has always been right before our eyes. In these twenty elegant and provocative essays, she invites us to travel through the West with her, and often with her family, as she rafts down rapids, hikes through dunes, camps in the desert, and walks along riverbanks. All along the way, she shares her remarkable observations about the life - both human and otherwise - that is sustained by rivers. Moore ponders love, loss, motherhood, happiness, evolution, and country music with ease and acuity.Moore is a philosopher by training and a naturalist by sentiment. The way in which she sees the world and way in which she gracefully imparts how she sees it, is a mixture of both disciplines: part keen analysis, part sumptuous embrace, of all that she sees, hears, and feels in the moving water of rivers and of memory.The result is Riverwalking, a collection that is enlightening, moving, and brilliantly conceived.

About the Author

Kathleen Dean Moore is an essayist, philosophy professor, activist, parent, and lover of all things green or flowing. Her first book of nature essays, Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water, is set on Oregon's wild rivers. The rocky intertidal edge of the sea is the setting for the essays in Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World. The Pine Island Paradox, which begins under the cold salt sun of southeast Alaska, makes the case for an ethic of care based on the kinship of all being. The books have won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Oregon Book Award. Her forthcoming book of essays, Wild Comfort: A Book of Healing, will tell of the wild Earth's power to move us from sorrow to courage and hope.

Moore writes about cultural, spiritual, and moral connections to the natural world for magazines such as Orion, Audubon, Discover, The Sun, and the New York Times Magazine. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Orion Society and for the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska.

Moore is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and University Writer Laureate at Oregon State University in Corvallis, where she teaches environmental ethics, Native American philosophy, and a field course on the philosophy of nature. She is the author of several critical thinking textbooks and a study of the ethics of forgiveness, Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest (Oxford UP), selected by Choice as an "Outstanding Academic Book" of the year. She publishes about environmental ethics and moral reasoning in academic journals such as Conservation Biology and the Journal of Forestry and in books about the management of forest and ocean resources. She is co-editor of three new anthologies: Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge, In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens, and How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova.

At OSU, Moore is the founding director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. Its mission is to bring together the practical wisdom of the environmental sciences, the analytic clarity of philosophy, and the emotional power of the written word to re-imagine our relation to the natural world. This is the base for her work as a public speaker, educator, and activist, convinced that we have an obligation to leave to the future a world at least as rich in possibilities as the world we inherited.

Moore lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with her husband, a biologist. They have two grown children -- an ecologist and an architect. Moore writes in the WaterShed, a tiny writers' studio that her daughter designed to gather water from the roof and pour it past the door into a trough where deer come to drink.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (August 26, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156004615
• ISBN-13: 978-0156004619
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wet feet again., April 13, 2001

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water (Paperback)

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

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A refreshing collection of essays, February 25, 2000

By 

shel99 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Life, rivers and a philosopher, June 3, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water (Hardcover)

In the essay in which the author describes her initial encounter with graduate level philosophy, Kathleen Moore gave away a major distinction between herself and myself ... her first paper topic was on Descartes - as a undergraduate philosophy major, I thought Descartes marked the point at which Western philosophy became a waste of time. Admittedly my view has mellowed, but Kathleen Moore's essays lack the almost mystical quality one finds in the essays of Kim Stafford, Annie Dillard etc.

Several of the essays, however, are charming especially her meditations on poking around, on her elderly neighbor, and on the funeral arrangements for her father. From her essays as a whole, one gets a sense of life fully lived in the details.

This is a book I enjoyed, am glad to have read but am unapt to read more than one or two essays again.