Waterborne

Zusatztext 77462267 Informationen zum Autor Bruce Murkoff was born in 1953, spent many years in California and now lives in Stone Ridge, New York.   Klappentext When Filius Poe sets out for Boulder City, the country is in the grips of the Great Depression, the Hoover administration in its final days. Filius, a young engineer from Wisconsin with a number of dams under his belt, has secured a job helping to tame the mighty Colorado and hopes the sheer scale of the era's greatest engineering feat will distract him from recent, devastating losses. Meanwhile, Lena and Burr McCardell, a young mother and son fleeing a shocking betrayal, and Lew Beck, a diminutive fighter with a short fuse to match his stature--as well as thousands of other workers-have embarked upon similar pilgrimages to "the only city in America where everyone has a job." Soon, the lives of these troubled souls have intersected, offering up both the promise of second chance at love and the threat of shocking violence and wrath. Bruce Markuff, the literary equivalent of a master river guide, navigates the stories of these characters and more to offer a breathtaking vista of history and humanity. Leseprobe The river begins, squeezed out of rock older than the earth itself, high in the snowdriven streams and alpine lakes of the Rocky Mountains, running clear and bright through the clenched fist of granite peaks. Finding its course, feeding off tributaries, for two thousand miles it cuts and shapes, hews and contours, gnaws and seeps through rock and soil, this magnificent gash in the American West. The river works, ever steady, carving a path through stubborn plates of shale and limestone, while the ground convulses and heaves, sending up rock sheets hundreds of feet tall. These walls rise, nicked and scarred, and the river pours between them, crimson in the dusky sunlight, the color of violence and birth. A roar thrums through these canyons, slick in their newness, only to fade and disappear as fissures heal and molten rock knuckles the ground, frozen in place, supplanted by the rhythmic slap of water on rock as only the river continues to move. When evening comes, the river is a rich velvet, black as licorice. On clear nights the riffles are razorcut by moonlight, the surface phosphorescent; in the morning the water is milky, its edges patinated with algae; at high noon the sun radiates the surface with the warmth of a silver dollar; and as the sun sets the water dulls to tungsten, then to ink, as it keeps on flowing. The river is fat with trout, their tails pushing against the driving current as they feed on drifting nymphs that tumble in the gravel rubble. Deer tongues shatter the glassy pools that crescent sandy beaches. Beavers build submerged dens on the cusp of faster water. Speckled hawks nest in the pocked faces of sheer cliffs. Rattlesnakes leave soft impressions in the crumbled sandstone that dusts the ever-changing shoreline. The river ebbs and eddies, reacting to centuries of seasons. A flurry of high mountain snowflakes will cause it to run its banks on yellow plains below. Years of drought will encase silver-bellied fingerlings in crosshatched miles of rockhard mud. But rain will fall again, and underground aquifers, always cool with dampness, will refill and bleed into trickling creeks that will rise, tumescent and swift, to nourish a river that sustains itself on droplets and torrents, fog and sleet, a champion of its own drama. For centuries the river remained remote, settled only by Indian tribes along its lesser tributaries and feeder streams. The Papagos built canals and irrigation ditches to cultivate their crops in the valley of the Gila, and wisely built their stone pueblos on higher ground. The Chemehuevis, near-naked wanderers between the forests and water, lived like poor relations on the banks of the Rio Virgen, and tribes of Utes lived in the canyo...

Product details

• Authors: Bruce Murkoff
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 08.02.2005
• EAN: 9781400032587
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-3258-7
• No. of pages: 416
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 204 mm x 23 mm
• Series: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature