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

Part memoir, part conservation treatise, and part history lesson, this essay collection from a fluvial geologist and former river raft guide is well-intentioned but uneven. Lawton’s 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 community’s connection to that same river; or the 1970s-era engineers who built the dam that inundated it and erased those connections. While this central theme is resonant, the essays themselves often feel forced, as when Lawton, discussing her time working in a national park, melodramatically describes how a lone kayaker answered “a siren call to the oasis in deliberate defiance of the rules” detailing when and where kayaking is permitted. She makes a valuable point here and elsewhere—that parks post rules for a reason, typically to protect the environment. But that point is undermined by overheated prose, as when, while describing the exhilaration of Grand Canyon river rafting trips, Lawton writes, “the unbinding of souls came from an authentic immersion into a mile-deep place.” She has a gift for expressing the rationale behind conservation policies clearly and simply, but the book’s passages of memoir and commentary don’t measure up to these lucid explanations. (Mar.)