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| James Graves, "St. John River" (1976) |
I love rivers and I love river stories – especially factual
ones. The New Yorker has a long history of great river writing. Here are five
of my favorites, with a choice quotation from each in brackets:
1. Berton Roueché, “The River World,” The New Yorker, February 26, 1972; included in Roueché’s 1978 collection,
The River World and Other Explorations
(“At the head of the tow, where I am sitting on a coil of rigging near the bow
of the starboard barge, there is the feeling of a raft – a peaceful sense of
drifting, a sense of country quiet. The only sound is the slap of water under
the rake of the bow. I am alone and half asleep in the silence and the warmth
of the mild midmorning sun. The river is empty. There is only the bend ahead, a
sandy shore of brush and willows on the near bank, and a steep bluff crowned
with cottonwoods a quarter of a mile away on the other – no towns, no houses,
no bridges, no roads, not even another boat”).
2. John McPhee, “The Keel of Lake Dickey,” The New Yorker, May 3, 1976; included in
McPhee’s 1979 collection, Giving Good
Weight (“We are a bend or two below the Priestly Rapid, and we can see more
than a mile ahead before the river turns from view. Bank to bank, the current
is running fast. It is May 28th. The ice went out about a month ago.
We have seen remnant snow in shadowed places on the edges of the river. The
hardwoods are just budding, and they are scattered among the conifers, so the
riverine hills are bright and dark green, streaked with the white stems of
canoe birch”).
3. Bill Barich, “Steelhead,” The New Yorker, March 2, 1981; retitled “Steelhead on the Russian,”
in Barich’s 1984 collection, Traveling
Light (“From my available gear, I’d assembled a kitful of lures and a
makeshift steelhead rig – an eight-foot fiberglass rod and a medium-sized
spinning reel wound with twelve-pound test – and I took it in hand and walked
off into a seemingly static landscape that could have been painted by Hokusai:
twisted live oak trees, barren willows, new winter grass, and vineyards laced
with yellow mustard flowers, everything cloaked in river mist”).
4. Alec Wilkinson, “The Riverkeeper,” The New Yorker, May 11, 1987; included in Wilkinson’s 1990
collection, The Riverkeeper (“I went
out with him one evening in December to look at a cove that is so choked in the
summer with water chestnuts that he can’t get the boat into it, and we came
home in the dark, and it was really cold, and the water was so smooth that the
sensation of crossing it was almost like flying. I have been out with him on
hot, hazy days when the river is gray and the sky is white and the hills in the
distance are blue. I made a trip with him one spring day from Cold Spring to
Catskill Creek – sixty miles. In Poughkeepsie, we stopped and watched police
divers haul the body of a drowned man from the river. We spent the night in a
slip at Hop-O-Nose Marine, on Catskill Creek. Herring jumped all night in the
creek. It sounded like someone spooning water from a basin with his hands”).
5. Ian Frazier, “Five Fish,” The New Yorker, October 8, 2001; included in Frazier’s 2002
collection, The Fish’s Eye (“Storm
clouds moved in, and the afternoon light became a wintry gloom. Snow began to
fall hard, hissing in the bare branches of the cottonwood trees. The river scenery
– bare-rock bluffs, dark-red willows, and tawny grasses along the shore – faded
like something you see as you fall asleep. Daryl and I waded in deeper, crossed
the river, tried different spots. The water in the Bitterroot actually felt
warmer than the melted snow trickling around our ears. My fly line began to
make a raspy sound in the line guides as it passed over the edges of ice
building up in them. Steam rose from the water and moved in genie-sized wisps
with the current”).
Credit: The above illustration by James Graves is from John McPhee’s
““The Keel of Lake Dickey” (The New
Yorker, May 3, 1976).
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