Rebecca Lawton - The Oasis This Time: Living and Dying with Water in the West

Praise for The Oasis This Time

Rebecca Lawtons powerful and poetic The Oasis This Time celebrates water as a precious natural resource. The collection is as diverse as it is illuminating. Each essay addresses a unique topic, but all are anchored by keen observations of the environment and musings on alternative solutions to pressing environmental problems.

FOREWORD REVIEWS

Part memoir, part conservation treatise, and part history lesson Lawtons 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 communitys connection to that same river; or the 1970s-era engineers who built the dam that inundated it and erased those connections.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

A collection of strong, smart, wise, and deeply knowledgeable essays on water in the West, what it means and has meant to the author throughout her life, and what it means to all of us who depend on naturethe biggest oasis of allfor our lives. I came away from this book better informed, deeply touched, and quietly recommitted to the work of living more gently in our fragile world.

JULIA WHITTY, author of Deep Blue Home and The Fragile Edge

The essays in The Oasis This Time flow like tributaries in a desert river. They meander and eddy and braid. They offer respite and challenge. Rebecca Lawton, as both intimate friend and knowledgeable guide, takes the reader on a dynamic journey from Las Vegas to Alaska, from the Grand Canyon to Ottawa. Her musings on this beloved arid land and its water shimmer with wonder at the life around usbirds, birds, and more birds!and within us, and burn with urgency.

ANA MARIA SPAGNA, author of Uplake and The Luckiest Scar on Earth

I opened The Oasis This Time assuming I was going to read about water. But what I read about instead is thirst. In straightforward, sometimes rascally, prose, Lawton digs into all the ways we want to be satiated. Our thirst for adventure, for love, for power and control, for ambitious development with an often warped sense of progress. Hers is a wake-up call, shaped by Lawtons deep knowledge and love of place, and mostly her commitment to waterways, streams and creeks and rivers and oceans. We need this book.

DEBRA GWARTNEY, author of Live Through This and Im a Stranger Here Myself

In a parched and burning land, humanitys crimes against fresh water stand out with increasing starkness as crimes against ourselves. Through deft, spirited storytelling, Rebecca Lawton faces with compassionate courage the painful truths of our defiled and dwindling waterways; The Oasis This Time bids us to nurture the vital wellsprings we have too long taken for granted.

SARAH JUNIPER RABKIN, author and illustrator of What I Learned at Bug Camp

Rebecca Lawton brings a poets eye to the landscapes she loves, but she is, at heart, a warrior. With every sentence she fiercely defends what remains, totals her losses, and moves on to the next critical confrontation. In the end The Oasis This Time offers us a surprising amount of hope. Hope that we can survive even the worst of mankinds depredations. Hope that this planet is more resilient than we ever imagined.

ANDY WEINBERGER, author of The Ugly Man Sits in the Garden

THE OASIS THIS TIME

LIVING AND DYING WITH WATER IN THE WEST

THE OASIS THIS TIME

LIVING AND DYING WITH WATER IN THE WEST

Rebecca Lawton

TORREY HOUSE PRESS

SALT LAKE CITY TORREY

Excerpt from Requiem for Sonora, from Selected Poems, 19691981, by Richard Shelton, copyright 1982. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Epigraph from The History of Clowns for Beginners, copyright 1995 Joe Lee. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Excerpt from On the Loose, copyright 1967 Renny Russell. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Excerpts from Wesley Smiths oral history interview in Volume 9 Number 3 (Summer 1996) of the Boatmans Quarterly Review. Reprinted with permission of Grand Canyon River Guides, Inc.

Excerpt from Cadillac Desert, copyright 1986 Marc Reisner. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Random House LLC.

First Torrey House Press Edition, March 2019

Copyright 2019 by Rebecca Lawton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Published by Torrey House Press

Salt Lake City, Utah

www.torreyhouse.org

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-937226-93-0

E-book ISBN: 978-1-937226-94-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956435

Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

Interior design by Rachel Davis

Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

These essays include excerpts from articles published in the following journals.

The Sentinels from In the Oasis, in Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Essay, Tiny Lights Publications, 2005, edited by Susan Bono.

Send in the Clowns from Midnight at the Oasis, Aeon, https://aeon.co/, November 6, 2015, edited by Pamela Weintraub.

A Lot to Learn from The Big Dam Era Is Not Over, Undark, https://undark.org/, July 27, 2016, edited by Jane Roberts.

May All Beings Be Stoked from How to Develop a Spiritual Connection to Water, The Wisdom Daily, http://thewisdomdaily.com, April 3, 2017, edited by Elad Nehorai.

The Lone Kayaker from Breaking the Rules Outdoors, Aeon, https://aeon.co/, July 25, 2016, edited by Pamela Weintraub.

First Responders from Fire Victims Humbled, Awed by Generosity, Press Democrat, January 25, 2018, edited by Linda Castrone; and from Pepperwood Field Notes, https://www.pepperwoodpreserve.org/, November and December 2017, edited by Tom Greco.

Where the Birds Are from Giving In, Hunger Mountain: The VCFA Journal for the Arts, http://hungermtn.org/, March 23, 2017, edited by Jennifer Gibbons.

Widowmakers from Helping Wildlife Survive in the Heat, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, July 26, 2017, edited by Corinne Asturias.

Three Days to Be Here from The Healing Power of Nature, Aeon, http://aeon.co/, September 6, 2017, edited by Pamela Weintraub.

Fountain of Fountains from Birding the Burn, Audubon, http://www.audubon.org/, January 9, 2018, edited by Hannah Waters.

The Oasis This Time from Midnight at the Oasis, Aeon, http://aeon.co/, November 6, 2015, edited by Pamela Weintraub; and from How to Develop a Spiritual Connection to Water, The Wisdom Daily, http://thewisdomdaily.com/, April 3, 2017, edited by Elad Nehorai.

For my father, Russell E. Lawton,
who beamed us to the oasis

CONTENTS

I have watched the workings of Fortune; I know her genius for envious dealings with [Hu]Mankind; and I also know that her empire is most absolute over just those oases in life in which the victim fancies his sojourn the most delectable and most secure.

Polybius, Histories, 146 BC

Lets keep each other alive. Lets help each other out here.

Wesley Smith, Grand Canyon river guide, 1996

INTRODUCTION

W HAT CAN WE SAY ABOUT OASES? THAT THEY ARE LUSH and lifesaving refuges in landscapes that are otherwise harsh and apt to kill us. That they are rare. That were crazy for them, to the point of spending billions to build them in places where they wouldnt last a day without our adding vast amounts of water. That were willing to murder for them, commit environmental crimes to emulate them, and fly the world to worship at their feet. That well pour our hearts and souls into basking in their shade and sustenance with the little free time our schedules allow. Its no wonder. The oasis is a rarity among ecosystems, a unique gem in an inhospitable worldin the words of the inestimable