The Oasis This Time
Living and Dying with Water in the West
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD WINNER
"The problem of dominion that has always complicated humanity's relationship with wild places is at the center of Rebecca Lawton's essay collection…her expertise is apparent, as is her enthusiasm."
—THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Water, the most critical fluid on the planet, is seen as savior, benefactor, and Holy Grail in these fifteen essays on natural and faux oases. Fluvial geologist and former Colorado River guide Rebecca Lawton follows species both human and wild to their watery roots—in warming deserts, near rising Pacific tides, on endangered, tapped-out rivers, and in growing urban ecosystems. Lawton thoroughly and eloquently explores human attitudes toward water in the West, from Twentynine Palms, California, to Sitka, Alaska. A lifelong immersion in all things water forms the author's deep thinking about living with this critical compound and sometimes dying in it, on it, with too much of it, or for lack of it. The Oasis This Time, the inaugural Waterston Desert Writing Prize winner, is a call for us to evolve toward a sustainable and even spiritual connection to water.
REBECCA LAWTON grew up exploring rivers and deserts throughout the American West. Her writing on water, climate, and wild and human nature has been honored with a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, the Ellen Meloy Award for Desert Writers, the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, a WILLA for original softcover fiction, Pushcart Prize nominations in prose and poetry, and residencies at Hedgebrook, PLAYA, and The Island Institute. She lives with guitarist Paul Christopulos in Summer Lake, Oregon, where she directs PLAYA's residency program for writers, artists, and scientists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Part memoir, part conservation treatise, and part history lesson, this essay collection from a fluvial geologist and former river raft guide is well-intentioned but uneven. Lawton's focus is on how human lives are urgently shaped by their connection to water, whether it is in pieces on her love for her favorite river, the Stanislaus in California; a past Native American community's connection to that same river; or the 1970s-era engineers who built the dam that inundated it and erased those connections. While this central theme is resonant, the essays themselves often feel forced, as when Lawton, discussing her time working in a national park, melodramatically describes how a lone kayaker answered "a siren call to the oasis in deliberate defiance of the rules" detailing when and where kayaking is permitted. She makes a valuable point here and elsewhere that parks post rules for a reason, typically to protect the environment. But that point is undermined by overheated prose, as when, while describing the exhilaration of Grand Canyon river rafting trips, Lawton writes, "the unbinding of souls came from an authentic immersion into a mile-deep place." She has a gift for expressing the rationale behind conservation policies clearly and simply, but the book's passages of memoir and commentary don't measure up to these lucid explanations.
