That Water, Those Rocks

THAT WATER, THOSE ROCKS, by Los Angeles writer, Katherine Haake, is a rare hybrid: a regional history with a post-modern plot, and one of the deepest, most original memoirs I have ever read. Set in the Trinity Alps, the story of her life is a story about storytelling, but also about the history of water in California. Did you know that "of the water we consume every day, on average, 10 percent will have fallen in the last year, another 20 percent in the last decade, and another 20 percent in the last century, the rest of that water, a full 50 percent, will have fallen some time in the last 20 million years--old, old water." Haake teaches us how to read her book in long, fluid sentences that often turn back on themselves, in order to ask the reader to reconsider what she's already said, in relation to characters who are either real or imagined. "I was relieved to have my uncle corroborate stories I felt sure I had invented, but how can I be certain he wasn't lying too?" In the process, she avoids the post-modern pitfall of distancing her readers with editorial commentary. Her voice is by turns warm, poetic, funny, and friendly. How else to make us understand that writing is listening or that our personal geographies are inseparable from the landscapes that sustain us? What I love is the way she brings heaven to earth--"Imagine a sea of yellow grass so infused with dying light it was as if the earth itself has somehow been transformed into the sun"--while keeping our feet squarely on the ground: "Believe me, I am not some wild and scenic rivers nut."