Offutt - The Same River Twice: A Memoir

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Praise for Chris Offutt and The Same River Twice

Mr. Offutt has it right, there are men who play games and also try to face the pain. They pride themselves on their destructiveness, and then they turn around to face the consequences. For them, life is a river at once tearing down and building up. And despite Heraclitus insistence that to do so is impossible, Mr. Offutt boldly immerses himself in that same river twice.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

Offutts rambles through the lowlands have shown him the ugly in life, and in himself, and in that confrontation he has realized his art. He is a writer now, and I hope for all of us he sticks with it.

The Washington Post Book World

[Offutts] journey is a classic.... In a world that is sometimes dangerous, usually depressing, and perpetually grimyalso a world darkly humorousone remembers his story as one of restoration and reconciliation, redemption and rebirth.

Brad Knickerbocker, The Christian Science Monitor

Offutt has the sharpest eye and most potent style of the several talented writers to come recently out of the coal country.

D. T. Max, New York Newsday

A picaresque tale of a decade on the road... engaging and irreverent... The effect is Candide following the path of Orwell down and out in Paris and London.

Kirkus Reviews

An outrageously funny memoir... Offutts humor is Rabelaisian.

Booklist

There sometimes creeps into the tone of memoirs a voice too sincere, too literal in intention, to capture the narrative freedom that fiction allows. But Chris Offutt finds an angle of entry that loosens things up... [and] achieves an amazing closure.

Vince Passaro, Mirabella

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Copyright 1993 by Chris Offutt

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition 2003

Originally published in hardcover in 1993 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

S IMON & S CHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Offutt, Chris.

The same river twice: a memoir/Chris Offutt.

p. cm.

1. Offutt, Chris. 2. United StatesBiography. I. Title.

CT275.035A3 1993

973dc20 [B]

ISBN 0-7432-2949-5

ISBN 978-1-4391-2919-7 (eBook)

The lines from The Town We Know and Leave Behind, The Rivers We Carry With Us are reprinted from White Center: Poems by Richard Hugo, by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright 1980 by Richard Hugo.

For Rita and Sam

I forget the names of towns without rivers.

A town needs a river to forgive the town.

Whatever river, whatever town

It is much the same.

The cruel things I did, I took to the river.

I begged the current: make me better.

Richard Hugo, THE TOWNS WE KNOW AND LEAVE BEHIND, THE RIVERS WE CARRY WITH US

T he midwestern land has a softly undulating quality, like concentric circles spreading from a rock tossed into a farm pond. Before the giant plowing icebergs, water covered everything here. Often I see the bottom of an ancient ocean quite clearlythe ripples left by forgotten tides, the gentle upsweeps of a reefand I imagine that the land is still under water. I possess gills in the woods and move against the resistance, exploring an abandoned sea.

Cloud shadows are great fish moving swiftly overhead. The prairie disappears into the glare of refracted sunlight fading with the depth, and becomes the living floorboards of an ocean. Jet contrails in the sky are a ships prow, cleaving the surface far away. Breath bubbles around my head as movement slows. Sound drifts into silence. I have slid out of my century and into an undersea past, alone with an uncaring force.

I am as alien here as in a city. I dont belong, none of us does. Thumb and cranium lucked us into our current status and weve traded curiosity for erosion. Dinosaurs evolved until their bodies were too big for their brains and they could not command their limbs. The human mind has outstripped its bodywe are as ungainly as the last great lizard.

The rivers of the nation are only water now, no longer rivers in any sense, trickles mostly, filled with poison. In ten million years a stranger will explore this former sea, this former iceberg, this former prairie, and sift through our remains. Instead of spear points and mastodon bones he will find bits of plastic, I should be a rock sculptor, carving a mighty pantheon to rival the debris we left on the moon. The ashes of Alexanders library reveal the fragility of books.

M y arrival in Iowa coincided with a two-year drought that left stunted corn drooping dead in the field. Brown grass crackled underfoot. The shadeless terrain reminded me of cheap plywood warped from too much time in weather. Temperatures at night surpassed a hundred. After my years of living in cities and mountains, the prairie offered me the unique ability to see trouble coming a long way off.

Rita and I rented a small house along the Iowa River. Due to zoning laws and the risk of flood, people owned their homes but not the land. Many of the houses were built on skids to be pulled by a bulldozer in case of eviction. Our dirt road ran parallel to the river past a wire fence thick with lopped-off catfish heads. Thirty acres of forest surrounded us. I took a long walk in the floodplain woods every day.

The locals accepted my presence; the state has long been known for tolerance. Public poker is legal at low stakes and motorcycle helmets are not required. Iowa is host to Amish and Mennonites, a large band of Maharishi folk, and the communal farms of the Amana colonies. Everyone has lived through drought, tornado, hail, blizzard, and fierce winds that scream across the prairie for hundreds of miles. There are two seasonshot and cold. With any luck, autumn lasts a week; spring but a single afternoon.

There is no national park in Iowa, and if its state parks were stitched together, theyd occupy a space less than ten miles square. Ninety-five percent of the land is given over to agriculture, the highest of any state. Iowans wrestle, read, play miniature golf, and fly scale model aircraftpastimes that require little ground space. Manned balloons drift every summer sky. Farmers have used the land so long that the richest soil in the nation is just old dirt, requiring a variety of chemicals that stay in the earth. Tap water cannot be trusted.

I was born and raised on a ridge in Eastern Kentucky, in the middle of the Daniel Boone National Forest. Trees grew close together, tangled with dense undergrowth. A greater variety of flora and fauna coexisted there than anywhere else in the country. I spent most of my childhood in those woods. Half of what I know, I learned there alone. At nineteen I left, vowing always to own my time. What began as an adherence to freedom became an inability to hold a job.