I relish it for two reasons: (1) its subject (river trip); (2) its writing style (first person, present tense). Is anyone writing a more vivid, imagistic prose than Macfarlane right now? I don’t think so. He’s a master of both short and long lines. His sentence fragments are almost haiku-like:
Spruce, pine, alder, rowan. Waxwings on the rowan.
A single star. A thin line of orange light to the east, smudged by rain. Three loons on the water, calling now and then. A strong northerly wind.
Bronze of the rivers, gold of the sandbanks, red-green sphagnum tapestry.
Water blue-black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs; peat-brown where it is stretched towards and away from the rapids; churning green, gold and cream in the rapids and falls.
Lacustrine calm. The kayaks wrinkling the smoothness. Everything mirrored. Double the trees, double the cliffs. Clouds crossing the water before us with huge slowness.
Scent of pine resin in the cool air.
He also writes gorgeous stream-of-consciousness passages. Consider this riveting 460-word beauty:
And then I’m into the rapid, hard into it, the water now vinyl-tight under my boat, and I’m accelerating as the river enters the channel before the block, the golden rocks on the bed of the river are fleeting beneath me, and time is stretching in the way it does at certain moments of terror and exhilaration, so that in the thirty or so century-long seconds it takes to run the rapid, I can see in isolated and shining detail each water droplet and boiling pool, and I slip nose-first over the sill and skim like a ball-bearing on a metal slide down the slope of the tongue and – bang! – straight into that big polar-bearish standing wave, and the nose of my craft crashes into its snowy front face which fills it and me with river, and I must surely be flipped or buried by the wave, but somehow, perhaps because I have hit it so straight, the nose of the kayak shakes itself free of the impact, and the boat bucks beneath me and begins to rise right up and over first the point and then the ridge of the big wave, and surely I must fall backwards out of the boat or be flipped, and then I am punched full in the face by a fist of water but it is in the standing wave’s valediction and I’m through and upright and the elastic curve of the current pulls me round the 150-degree bend and I can hear Danny yelling something behind me and Wayne is whooping, great belts of sound that rise over the roar of the rapid, and I’m thumping over the smaller green-cream-bronze waves and then I’m under the flat-faced rock wall – goddammit but this last wave isn’t going to flip me if the biggest one didn’t – and I plant the paddle as Danny told me and pull on it like I’m trying to uproot an iron fence post and the pull boosts me into the last standing wave, the sneak-wave right under the rock wall, But I don’t hit it at the perpendicular as I had the biggest one and so it shrugs me off its right-hand slope and the boat cants sideways but some amygdalan part of my brain tells me to lean uphill not down and I re-right and then I’m over the blast-wall and into the long black pool below the rapid where the Boss and the Bear already wait, grins on their faces and shouts of congratulations, and Wayne is through too without flipping, and the Salmon swims up to us and my heart is piston-block pumping and Wayne says something like, Living right, my friend, living right! with a manic smile on his face, shocked and exhilarated and enlivened.
Wow! Macfarlane’s writing puts me right there with him as he runs the rapid. It’s an amazing passage! And there are more in this piece that are just as thrilling. I’m still savoring “The Living River.” I’ll write about it in more detail later. For now, I just want to ring the gong for a species of masterpiece.
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