A Holiday List Of River Books

This December, we need the world to focus on rivers. Two United Nations conferences have just concluded and, now, decision makers need to follow through on commitments and prioritize rivers for climate adaptation, food production, biodiversity and other values.

For too long, rivers and other freshwater ecosystems have been overlooked in these international agreements and the funding and policies that follow.

What do global decision makers need to see the light? With the holiday season upon us, perhaps they need some good reading material. Not stuffy policy briefs, but a great book to curl up with by the fire and sink deep into the magical waters of rivers.

To prompt that fireside reading, here is a list of books about rivers for their (and your) holiday reading and shopping lists, books that go deep on our relationship to rivers and the role they play in both our history and our future.

And while policy-making is ostensibly a rational process, ultimately, decisions reflect what people care about. Cultivating a commitment to rivers thus requires the heart as much as the head. As such, this list has both fiction and non-fiction.

I acknowledge that there is a strong U.S. bias in my list; I would love for readers to help broaden this list to include books from other countries. Please add in the comments or to my Twitter handle, @jjopperman.

Fiction

A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean). A river, specifically the Blackfoot River in Montana, runs through the relationships and lives of the characters of this novella, published in 1976. The story draws heavily on Maclean’s life in the Rockies – his childhood and then years as a young man working for the US Forest Service. Maclean’s writing is spare and reverent and celebrates the beauty of rivers but, even more importantly, how time spent learning how a river truly works is time invested in understanding ourselves and what matters in life. And while we can do that alone, it’s even better to do so with people we love. The closing lines are unforgettably beautiful: “Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”

Shadow Country (Peter Matthiessen). Matthiessen is perhaps America’s most celebrated storyteller of people and nature, in both fiction and non-fiction. He originally conceived of a single sprawling novel that explored the lives of the people scratching out an existence in Florida’s Everglades at the turn of the 20^th century. However, what emerged through the writing and publishing process was three separate books. With Shadow Country he stitches those three back into the single novel originally planned. There are two enormous protagonists in Shadow Country: E.J. Watson, an historical, but semi-mythological, businessman, trader, outlaw and murderer who ran roughshod over his neighbors in southwest Florida. The other is the Everglades themselves, the “river of grass,” a protagonist on the receiving end of people running roughshod over the region’s marshes and mangroves. In the end, Watson is gone—his neighbors rose up and killed him (not a spoiler, we learn about it in the first pages)—while the Everglades persist, a bit tattered and in need of repair, but free of the fever-swamp plans to drain and dredge them. (Bonus crossover points here because one of my favorite river songs, River by Jason Isbell, was inspired in part by this river book).

Big Two-Hearted River (Ernest Hemingway). Originally published as two short stories, Big Two-Hearted River follows Nick Adams (a veteran of World War I and regular protagonist of Hemingway’s) as he disembarks from a train, alone, in a vast desolate wasteland in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, an area recently devastated by wildfire. He walks past charred stumps until he reaches a river, a ribbon of verdant life flowing through the burnt-over country. The river is full of trout “making circles all down the surface of the water as though it were starting to rain.” In the morning he catches grasshoppers in the lush vegetation near the river and, with his fly rod, uses them as bait to catch trout. And that’s the whole story. The writing consists of simple descriptions of what Nick sees and does but the story’s underlying meaning is, like the eponymous river, deep and clear: the devastation of war, the lingering trauma of those who fight in wars, and nature, particularly rivers, as a dependable source of refuge and regeneration.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain). Speaking of Hemingway, he once said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Huck Finn is also something of a literary prototype for both the road movie and buddy movie genres. In this case, the road is a river and that river, the Mississippi, is also an omnipresent third character to the main buddies of Huck and Jim. The book’s influence on American literature and cinema is profound, yet its appeal lies in the simple beauty of the relationship between Huck and Jim and the simple beauty of the river they floated down together. I read this book to my kids while we traveled down the Mekong River and I was amazed by how I could have lifted Twain’s description of the untamed Mississippi—its submerged islands, riverside towns on stilts, and huge catfish—and used them directly in my journal describing what we were seeing along the Mekong.

Non-fiction

Goodbye to a River (John Graves). The Brazos River runs through the heart of this lovely and poignant book which describes Graves’ several-week canoe trip down the river, accompanied only by a dachshund pup he calls “the Passenger,” in a sort of farewell to a river he grew up paddling down, swimming in and hunting and fishing along. Five dams had been planned for the Brazos and his beloved twisting river was soon to be transformed into a series of lakes, so Graves and the Passenger take one last float. Read this book if you love rivers, Texas, or simply flat-out beautiful writing. For example: “Big oaks gone red, and yellowed ashes rose precariously from slanted alluvial soil beneath the cliffs, piles of drift against their boles in prophecy of their own fate…” Pretty poetic for riparian vegetation, depositional features, and instream wood. If Cormac McCarthy floated a river with a dachshund, it would sound a lot like Goodbye to a River.

Rising Tide: the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (John Barry). Rising Tide is an epic tale of what is still the most damaging flood in United States history (in constant dollars and geographic scale of impact). Much of the book reads like a novel, such as when city leaders and bankers in New Orleans, rattled by a sense of impending doom as the rain poured down and the Mississippi kept rising, argued about whether they should dynamite levees outside of town to save themselves by flooding their neighbors (they did). The great Mississippi flood of 1927 inundated an area the size of South Carolina for months, displacing nearly a million people. This is an essential book about our relationship with great rivers – their resources, their threats, how we shape them through management and how they, in turn, shape us – including our politics, demographics and culture.

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (Marc Reisner). The American West is confronting a drought so persistent that scientists now believe the climate has shifted to a drier state, which will pose dramatic challenges for water supplies in that region to support its vast irrigated agriculture and some of the fastest growing cities in the country. Reisner’s book chronicles the decades of decisions that led to this perilous moment and, writing in the early 1980s, he questioned the sustainability of Western water decades before persistent drought set in and when the region had a population about half that of today’s 80 million. Like Rising Tide, Cadillac Desert is an essential book about our relationship to rivers and water that also reads like a novel. Particularly poignant is the story of William Mulholland, the person most responsible for securing water for Los Angeles to fuel its stupendous growth in the 20^th century; at the 1913 ceremony to open the aqueduct that began delivering water he said to the assembled city leaders, “There it is, take it.” If his career was built by solving the challenge of too little water, it was destroyed by the disaster of too much of it. In 1928, the St. Francis Dam—built to store a reservoir of drinking water—collapsed, unleashing a wall of water that killed 431 people. Mulholland took full responsibility for the tragedy, saying during the investigation, “The only ones I envy about this whole thing are the ones who are dead.” He retreated to seclusion, but the city and region he watered has grown to tens of millions.

Water: A Biography (Giulio Boccaletti). Full disclosure, Giulio Boccaletti was my boss for about four years, during which time I was consistently amazed with his ability to place water within a broader framing of history, society, economics and governance. His book, Water: A Biography, chronicles the ever-evolving relationship between water and society. That relationship status took a turn toward “it’s complicated” when, about 10,000 years ago, “we decided to stand still in a world of moving water.” Ever since, water—access to it and the management of both its scarcity and abundance—has shaped where and how we live and the forms of government we live under.

Encounters with the Archdruid (John McPhee). Encounters is comprised of three sections, each of which describes a camping trip with three people: McPhee, David Brower (of the Sierra Club and the “archdruid of the environmental movement”), and one of Brower’s “opponents.” Each camping trip takes place in a wilderness setting that is at risk from the activity of that opponent: a barrier island and a housing developer, a mountain range and a mining executive, and the Colorado River and Floyd Dominy, head of the Bureau of Reclamation (who is also a major character in Cadillac Desert). I may be biased, but the book hits its grandest heights during the narrative and conversations that rise from deep in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. While Brower has his opportunities to argue for restraint and preservation of wild rivers and wilderness, the others have their chances to defend their actions. McPhee is quite evenhanded, so while a reader comes away with a deep appreciation for the values that drive Brower, they also grapple with the reality that the world we live in does require materials that are mined (e.g., today to underpin the renewable revolution) and the management of water resources.

26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Songs (Greg Vandy, with Daniel Person). From a political perspective, opposition to dams is associated with the left (of course, affected communities and indigenous groups often lead opposition to specific dams). This book examines how those political dynamics have shifted with time, underscoring just how complicated river management and water infrastructure can be. In 1941 the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River was nearing completion and the Bonneville Power Administration, the agency responsible for distributing the electricity it would soon generate, was looking to push back against criticism of the dam (and other dams being built on the river). The BPA hired Woody Guthrie to write songs that celebrated the harnessing of the Columbia for power and water. This icon of left-wing folk music enthusiastically wrote songs such as “Roll on Columbia” and “Song of the Grand Coulee Dam.” While this work has prompted criticism of Guthrie as being a corporate shill or stooge for the government, in fact he believed strongly in the mission of an activist government delivering power to poor people to transform their lives. Opposition to the dam came from the political right who felt the government should not be in the business of competing with the private sector for power generation. The book tells this complicated story, including how indigenous people suffered the dams’ costs (the loss of salmon) while largely being excluded from the dams’ development benefits. Reading it—and lyrics such as “Your power is turning our darkness to dawn, So roll on, Columbia, roll on”—underscores the tangled complexity of developing rivers and how, even when people like Guthrie sing its praises, that development has been so difficult to do in a way that is equitable and balances tradeoffs.