…CONTINUED FROM PART ONE
It came about when an alliance was formed in 2018 between the Innu, local river lovers, a municipal council and an influential conservation group. The regional Mingan Council and the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit drafted a mirror resolution: “two differently inflected versions of the same declaration, one Innu and one non-Innu, which shared common principles and conclusions concerning the river’s life and future.”
Both resolutions recognized the river as legal person with rights — to live, to flow unimpeded, to evolve naturally, to be preserved and protected — that would be violated if new dams were built on the lower Mutehekau Shipu.
In 2021, the resolution was signed first by the Innu Council, and soon after by the Mingan Council. “Right at the heart of this success was an Innu poet and activist,” Macfarlane writes.
The encounter between Mestokosho, Macfarlane and Chambliss is a gorgeous pas de trois in which Rita gently schools the two adventurers in Indigenous ways of seeing and being with the river and of being in right relations with her (the river), of the necessity to fast at some point in their journey, to make offerings to the river, to find a sacred tree, and to ask the river a question and oh, to always pitch their tents facing east so the first thing they see each morning is the sun.
She tells Macfarlane to leave his precious notebooks behind. “You need to pay attention to the river, Robert. The important thing is to wake up not the consciousness but the heart. Rather than you speaking of the river, it is the river who will speak to you.”
What follows is an exhilarating and dangerous guided paddle and occasional portage from the northernmost point of Lac Magpie, south for about 80 kilometres on the lake, and then onto (and into) the river itself for a weeklong whitewater descent to the Gulf of St Lawrence.
Once more, Macfarlane’s love language speckles the pages.
“Lacustrine calm. The kayaks wrinkling the smoothness. Everything mirrored. Double the trees, double the cliffs. Clouds crossing the water before us with huge slowness. The water forms millions of lozenges of light, through which we slide.”
Eventually, the mouth of the Mutehekau Shipu beckons, not so much inviting as commanding them to surrender to the pull of the river.
“I am suddenly now in the threshold where flow takes over from flat, and I call back to Wayne with a whoop — ‘Can you feel it too? Can you feel it!’ — and an involuntary shudder of force moves through me, and the current’s pull becomes stronger, less negotiable — you will come with me now — and then it is as if the lake has somehow tilted such than I am now sliding down its slope, and the water ahead is behaving strangely — a funny piece of water, that — for it looks deckle-edged and cockled, forming a triangle of movement and shallow turbulence, but amid that turbulence I see, lying puzzlingly clear, a huge arc of silver-smooth water, a flat-fallen slice of moon over which lines and coils of foam are sliding seemingly without friction, in perfect laminar flow — like ice riding its own melting on a cast-iron stove — and my boat bumps over the stipple-line that marks the boundary of that shining moon-slice and I know I have crossed the event horizon.” And that’s just half of one paragraph that it feels almost like theft to further reproduce here.
Like William Finnegan in his book Barbarian Days, Macfarlane achieves a transcendence in his depictions of kayaking (Finnegan’s vessel of choice was the surfboard) that is utterly rare.
It’s not the kayak, or the surfboard, and it’s not even the kayaking or the surfing that matters. It is the immersion in something — a river, an ocean — whose immensity is both a magnet and mystery that can never be entirely captured in what Macfarlane refers to as “language’s short reach.”
But it is language in the end that will save us.
‘Language is an earth-shaping force’
I tell Macfarlane about Australia’s Murray-Darling river system, whose management is divided into allocations of water for irrigation, industry, communities and for “the environment.” As if, somehow, the environment is a separate thing from, well, everything else.
“I think I say in Underland,” he responds, “That language is an earth-shaping force. That kind of objectifying, quantifying, mechanizing, separating world view is thoroughly installed, has its own grammar, has its own numeracy, its own forms, but there are these amazing counter-forces that are now emerging that are trying to find ways in which the law can be made to train people to listen to and learn from rivers.”
To that end, he says, Is a River Alive? is not just about rights. “There are places where the moral imagination is beginning to take form in law,” he says.
Near the end of their journey, Chambliss challenges Macfarlane’s notion of giving voice to or for a river. “It strikes me as both insufficient and fraught with the risk of ventriloquizing,” Chambliss says.
“It’s the crux that needs solving, for sure,” Macfarlane admits. “Not, ‘Who speaks for the river?’ but ‘What does the river say?’ These are two distinct questions. And while it is relatively trivial to answer the first of them, it’s a philosophically immense task to answer the second.”
As close as Macfarlane can come is in a closing meditation. He looks into a “river-maw” at the brink of the Gorge, a rapid unlike any he has ever encountered for its sheer power and force, and realizes that between its jaws of bedrock, there is a tongue. Try as he might though, he cannot comprehend what the river’s voices say and sing, other than to conclude, “I am rivered.”
Such is the passion, the erudition and the moral imagination that positions Macfarlane to be one of the world’s foremost interlocutors between the natural world and us. Perhaps the river is saying, “Rob, you are not rivered. You are river.”
Join Robert Macfarlane in conversation with climate journalist Laura Lynch in a public talk that offers a radical re-imagination of both rivers and life itself. The event takes place June 18 at Performance Works on Granville Island in Vancouver. Tickets are available online. [Tyee]
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2025/05/30/Robert-Macfarlane-Trip-Inside-River-Lives/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=020625
