The Same River Twice Part One

After reading the first paragraph of Chris Offutt's memoir, I knew I'd enjoy reading it. I love the outdoors and nature, and I can see much of Offutt's writings would involve his experience with the wilderness. I especially enjoyed the sentence, "Cloud shadows are great fish moving swiftly overhead" (page 9). This evoked a sense of laying down in an open field looking up in the sky, giving me a very relaxed feeling.

I did look up a few words to get a greater meaning from the book. Amok literally translates to a psychic disturbance characterized by depression followed by a manic urge to murder, which is something I never really knew. Gestating means to carry in the womb. Finally, tribulation refers to a severe time of suffering.

The story starts off with a prologue of Offutt talking about the timelessness and power of nature. He discusses how nature will be here after we're gone just as it has been here before humankind existed. I liked the sentence, "The ashes of Alexander's library reveal the fragility of books" (page 10).

Throughout the reading, I noticed many places where Offutt describes things in very clever and humorous ways. One example was when he described his wife and him making love trying for a baby as "I felt like Zeus field testing his swan suit before the seduction of Leda. Gamete met zygote. DNA merged into the corkscrew that resembled the Milky Way's spiral, Herme's Staff. the swift helix of infant birth" (page 16). Just the word choice here is fantastic, along with his tapping into knowledge that one wouldn't generally expect from a redneck out of Kentucky.

When describing his hometown, I liked it when he says "my hometown is a zip code with a creek." I can relate to this as my dad grew up in a town that consisted of a volunteer fire department, two churches, a double wide post office, and farmland as far as the eye can see. I also like the immediate contrast the Offutt experiences when he throws himself into the city after he has never even crossed the county line.

He does, however, find some similarities between the two. He says that "manhattan was filthy and loud but similar to the hills" packed with illiterate men, unattainable women, and threat of injury." Offutt is completely out of place in the city, and struggles to adapt. I thought it was quite funny when he figured out that the ladies in the laundromat were speaking in Spanish, which he had taken for some strange dialect. The situation with the hermaphrodite, although somewhat disturbing, was also a pretty funny story for the redneck getting acclimated to the city.

As far as his relationship with Jahi goes, I thought one line in particular was insightful. He says that "no doubt she was a tad nutty, but I hadn't met anyone in the city who wasn't." I think this goes along with the saying, we're all weird, it just depends on who chooses to show it the most. You can either choose to bottle up all of your emotions and feelings, or lay them out in the open and not worry about what others are going to think of you.