River Reflections

Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water
Kathleen Dean Moore
Lyons & Burford, $19.95, cloth, ISBN 1-55821-408-9

Kathleen Moore tells us, in the preface to her first book of essays, that "the essays in this collection are river essays because I began to write each one alongside a stream or floating down a river, and so they may still carry the smell of willows and rainbow trout."

Some of the selections previously appeared in publications such as The New York Times, North American Review, Reading And Writing the Environment, and elsewhere. It should also be noted that Riverwalking is the winner of a 1996 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.

Kathleen Dean Moore writes in an open and relaxed manner, inviting the reader to share her enthusiasm, and sometimes awe, for the beautiful rivers and woods she and her family treasure.

As an amateur naturalist, her curiosity and respect for the natural world are endless, as she walks or floats her favorite, mostly western, rivers, collecting unique, smoothly worn pebbles; discovering abandoned caddis cases; looking for ferns, for snails; watching the singular antics of a water ouzel searching for food.

As a professional philosopher (she currently chairs the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University in Corvallis), Moore uses the natural world with the physical pleasures it imparts as inspiration for her reflections on personal and family relationships. Her discoveries and memories are always interesting, frequently profound or surprising, and prompt the reader to identify with her meditations.

Bill McKibbon, author ofThe End of Nature, says:

Riverwalking is more than a fine book of essays. It's important--it's pointing the way toward a new kind of nature writing, one where the outdoors is in dialogue not only with our inmost souls but with our families, our relationships, our lives. Something powerful is at work here.

Kathleen Moore recalls growing up in Cleveland: "Each Sunday afternoon, through all the summer and winter Sundays of my childhood, my father led nature walks through the beech-maple forest at the bottom of a valley that divides the suburbs from the western edge of Cleveland, just under the final approach to the Cleveland Hopkins Airport." (Mr. Dean was a biologist, specializing in taxonomy, and the Rocky River Park naturalist, apparently bequeathing his love and appreciation for the natural world to his young daughters.)

Shortly after Kathleen Dean and Frank Moore married, while living in an apartment over a deli in Cleveland, they began to think of moving. Frank, a biologist and an alleged "maniac fisherman," argued for Oregon because it had "clean, cold rivers."

They moved to Oregon's Willamette Valley where they have lived for over twenty years. Kathleen Moore tells us, ". . . as immigrants to the west . . . a sense of connection eludes us, . . . we live for small transcendent moments that may exist only in the imagination, when we will belong completely and perfectly to this land."

The author's genuine love and respect for the rivers, woods, and streams she values are equally balanced by her obvious affection for husband and children. She writes with a sure hand and intelligent mind, and I hope this is the first of many books from her.

Janet Lembke, author of River Time, Skinny Dipping, and others, puts it so well:

The essays in Riverwalking are as fluent as the rivers Kathleen Dean Moore hikes beside, boats upon, and walks in. And they're just as surprising. From the Willamette to the Maclaren, each river she writes about is fed by tributaries of memory and meditation. The meaning of happiness, the rewards of poking around, the need for domesticity, motherhood, death, or the peculiar reproductive habits of the rough skin newt--anything might be waiting around the next bend.

RWOL

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