The Same River Twice (Pages 153-188)

In this last section of The Same River Twice, the memoir neatly wraps up the latent expectations that I have had from the beginning with Rita’s pregnancy.  When Chris decides to leave Boston to be a naturalist in the Everglades, he had a heck of a time catching a ride that far down.  I thought it was pretty funny how other hitchhikers had left a heads up to the rest that it was going to be a hard task to accomplish by engraving how long it took to get a ride on the back of a road sign.  Once he got to the swamp, he wrote, “Initially, life in Flamingo reminded me of a rooming house—inhabited by kooks and outcasts, dice that rolled off the table, wrinkles on the face of God.”  This quote included several metaphors that helped draw a picture of the type of people Chris was amongst.  However, after meeting the Captain, Chris seemed to find someone to trust in.  Whenever he slept over with the captain and his wife, though, Chris said, “His son has come between us in a way I never understood.  Captain Jack seemed to resent knowledge of him, the way a man feels anger toward a friend who saved his life.”  In my opinion, the captain built a barrier between himself and Chris afterwards as not to get too close to him.  He had seen the same characteristics within Chris when he jumped into the “shark water” to save the boy that he knew his son had possessed to save three men during war, and he didn’t want to get close to Chris in fear of losing him as well.  From there, everything just seemed to get worse for Chris as all of his co-workers seemed to turn their backs on him.  He was at his lowest point, which is well represented whenever he said, “In the sudden rain I realized I was crying, utterly frustrated by my failure to be defeated.”  Failure usually means defeat, but that was not what Chris was seeking.  He wanted to be defeated; he wanted it all to end.  It was as if he had come to an epiphany that he was too old to be living such a reckless, unstructured life, realizing that after twelve years, he had nothing to show from his adventures, not even a reliable friend.  Things started looking up for him after Hurricane Jacob, whenever he left to go back to Boston to stay with Shadrack.  It was there that he met Rita and his life began to fall into place as an adult’s should.  They eventually got married, moved around a few times, and settled in Iowa after he was accepted into a graduate program there.  It was there that they decided to have a baby, and Rita’s pregnancy was recorded in every other chapter of the memoir.  Their son finally arrived in the final chapter, and in the Epilogue he is three months old.  Chris carries him on his back to his first escapade in the woods, remarking, “The load on my back weighs nothing and everything.”  I loved this quote, which suggests that even though the baby is very light, he has come to mean everything to him.  So much as changed in Chris’s life, but he realizes just how much these changes mean to him.  We have finally seen Chris grow up to be a real man with real priorities.

Vocabulary Words

Ø  Vagrant (Page 154):  a person without a settled home

Ø  Androgynous (Page 159):  having characteristics of both male and female

Ø  Corrugated (Page 162):  creased, shaped into folds

Ø  Egret (Page 171):  a heron that is white or buff

Ø  Preemptive (Page 178):  taken as a measure against something possible, anticipated, or feared

The Same River Twice (Pages 54-109)

As the book continues to unravel, Rita’s pregnancy continues, as does Chris’s experiences across the country in alternating chapters.  On page 54, we see Chris contemplate whether one can step into the same river twice.  This references to the title of the book, and in my opinion casts some foreshadowing to future events.  At four months, Rita decides she wants an amniocentesis, which is an amniotic fluid test that is used in prenatal diagnosis of chromosomal abnormalities and fetal infections.  While reluctant, Chris finally gives in and they find that their baby’s chromosomes appear to be “structurally sound.”  Though a short chapter, I found this one especially important.  It ends with a strong image of the circle of life with the words, “The embryo has already set cells aside for its own offspring like a farmer saving seed corn for next year’s crop.  Female mosquitoes land on my skin, needed fresh blood for their young.”  In the next chapter, he heads to west Texas where he takes a job painting houses with Bill, a Vietnam war veteran.  Bill tells Chris that the only adrenaline rush that even comes close to what he experienced at war is skydiving, and he offered to pay for Chris to do it if he would go with him.  Half a mile above the earth, Chris began freaking out a little bit, but he was “…too scared to be a coward” after witnessing the way the instructor regarded another guy that chickened out.  I thought this was an interesting phrase that many can relate to.  I know I’ve experienced this feeling several times in my life.  Growing up as a competitive cheerleader, I got this feeling before every competition.  I would be so nervous that I would get sick, but I’d always do my part because I was too scared to let my team down to be a coward and back out.  Soon after, Bill killed himself without explanation and Chris moved along to Colorado, then to the Grand Canyon where he worked as a dishwasher until a degrading manager took control.  He decided to head to California from there, and the story drifts back to Rita’s pregnancy and their shot at Lamaze classes.  On page 77 when the setting shifts once again, Chris is asleep in the desert when a white coupe comes by to pick him up.  He said, “My mind groped the curious state between sleep and vigilance that stained reality like a minor hallucination.”  I thought this was an interesting and accurate way to explain the struggle to adjust after waking up from a deep sleep.  The two men he hitched a ride with were extremists on both ends of the spectrum, but he finally ended up in California where he soon discovered wasn’t the place for a dreamer and amateur.  From there, the memoir goes back to Rita’s pregnancy and a snow scene where Chris blends in with nature by sitting in a dead maple, concealing himself.  Bad thoughts once again creep in his mind, but he sees Rita at the end of the chapter waiting on the porch, and all of his worries evaporate.  The next and final chapter in this section has been my favorite thus far.  I thought it was really cool that he began working for a circus, and slowly worked his way up from the very bottom of the totem pole, even if he didn’t make it far up.  I loved the part where Gabe wouldn’t participate in the circus activities because of his embarrassment, and it took everyone apologizing and Arnie showing his goods to Gabe for him to accept their mistake and the next day he “performed exceedingly well.”  I also found it interesting that they had Chris dress up in walrus suit to please the crowd and pretend that the walrus was very intelligent.  After drinking martinis with the parrot lady, however, Chris couldn’t perform under the harsh circumstances of heat, and thus “decapitated” himself (took off the walrus head) and didn’t stop until he was headed out of there.  It seems to me that Chris knows when it’s time for him to move on, and he doesn’t stop until he’s far, far away.

The Same River Twice (Pages 9-53)

From reading the Prologue, we are introduced to a very negative view of modern society in a complicated format.  The narrator uses complex phrases, metaphors, and similes that take careful thought to pull apart.  One that especially appealed to me was when he said, “Thumb and cranium lucked us into our current status and we’ve traded curiosity for erosion.”  I interpreted this to mean that hard work and brains have gotten us this far, but we no longer possess the curiosity it takes to maintain our greatness, and thus things will only get worse from here.  These deep thoughts drifted into the first chapter of this memoir, with the mood reversing to an almost peaceful sense as the narrator describes his current location with his wife in Iowa and their circumstance of the decision to have a child.  On page 14, the narrator describes this decision with, “The subject remained with us, floating like an ovum waiting for a sperm.”   I found to be an extremely clever simile and pun.  As the story continues, Chris finally gives in after considering himself a saboteur, a person who commits sabotage (in relation to Rita’s remaining child-bearing years), and decides to try to have a baby with his wife Rita.  However, he struggles with the fear and responsibility of becoming a father throughout these beginning chapters once she finally gets pregnant and the child begins to develop.  With a change in chapter, the narrator shifts the story back to when he lived in the southern Appalachia of Kentucky.  While he talked about his homeland, I came across “VISTA” which is a national service program designed to fight poverty, revealing the lack of wealth where he was raised.   We see that he tried to sign up for the military, but got denied, then hauled off to Manhattan, where he experiences a culture shock.  He saw a “tall woman with a huge jaw” being harassed, so he ran the guy off, and followed her back.  Come to find out, this “woman” was actually a guy, which rattled him for an entire week.  He goes on to say, “…Appalachian men could acceptably fornicate with daughters, sisters, and livestock, but carnal knowledge of a man was a hanging offense.”  I found this a bit odd, since incest and bestiality are, in my opinion, just as appalling (though I’ve always heard throughout my life that mountain people inbreed).  He soon meets Jahi, who takes him on outrageous adventures and introduces him to sex.  After a terrible accident involving a young boy during a leisurely horseback ride that Chris felt like he caused from prompting the horse to gallop faster, he left Jahi’s place.  When she called him a couple of weeks later, he “hung up on her laughter and never saw her again.”  I was surprised that he just completely dropped his only friend (and lover) that he had in Manhattan, although the circumstances seemed reasonable. This seemed to be a reoccurring action with Chris, though, as he went on to leave Manhattan for home when he broke his leg, left home again for Minneapolis, and headed back west at the end of page 53, fleeing from the prospect of marrying the twins’ cousin, Maria.  Each chapter is contrasting various times in Chris’s life, and he always seems to be comparing his life to nature, floods, Daniel Boone, or anything he can think of for justification of his actions and thoughts.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories

“Emergency” by Dennis Johnson

This short story was extremely interesting to me.  As a nursing major, I found it startling that Georgie and the narrator, who were the orderly and clerk of the hospital, were allowed to work there when they were both clearly under the influence of heavy substances.   Didn’t the pharmacists within the hospital notice that drugs had gone missing?  Granted, the setting of the story is in 1973 and many things have changed since then, but it was clear that even the nurse knew Georgie was either mentally disturbed or on some kind of drugs by her statement, “I hope you didn’t do that to him,” whenever Terrence Weber came in with a hunting knife in his eye.  The doctor also said, “That person is not right, not at all, not one bit,” in regards to Georgie singing before prepping Terrence for surgery (or what would have been surgery had Georgie not taken it upon himself to pull out the knife).  However, I almost found it even more disturbing that the doctor seemed so nonchalant about the situation.  When he first peeked into Terrence’s room, he asked, “What seems to be the trouble?” after seeing the guy lying there with a knife sticking out of his face.   A few moments later, Georgie shows up with the knife in his hand, and everyone, including nurses and physicians, just stands there in pure shock.   The first person to speak up was an ICU nurse who only announced that Georgie’s shoelace was untied.  This led me to believe that the entire staff was on drugs, considering that any nurse or physician in their right mind would immediately go see about the patient if an orderly were to pull out an impaled item.  Their driving trip after work proved to be just as entertaining.  When the narrator said, “It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after.  The sky is blue, and the dead are coming back,” at the beginning of the escapade, I received a strong sense of gratitude for the simple things in life that I often take for granted every day.  Soon after, they headed to the fair and the narrator seemed to have an epiphany when he realized exactly how much acid he has taken after seeing a famous guru being interviewed about his drug use.  Later, whenever Georgie ran over the rabbits, it was obvious that they were not sober after he reversed the truck to “camp in the wilderness” and “breakfast on its haunches.”  This campout was almost disastrous until they “got their eyes back,” or sobered up, since it had started snowing and they couldn’t find the truck.  On their way back the next morning, they picked up one of the narrator’s old roommates who was AWOL, and told him they could get him to Canada.  From there, the story ended abruptly as Hardee asked what Georgie does and he answered, “I save lives.”  This was a very odd response for an orderly, especially one of Georgie’s caliber.

“Home” by Jayne Anne Phillips

Right from the beginning, I got a distinct sense of melancholy from this short story.  It was written so that conversations flowed without quotation marks, although indentations were used whenever the speaker switched so that it was still easy to differentiate the speaker from the listener.  At twenty-three years old, the narrator is living at home with her mother.  Her mother is very old-fashioned, with nearly out-dated views about sex, which posed a conflict between her and her daughter when an old lover comes to stay with her.  The barriers of their relationship became apparent from the very beginning whenever the mother explained how much time, effort, and love she put into caring for her mother whenever she was sick near the end of her life.  She said that guilty people should feel guilty in reference to people who neglect their family when they need them the most.  The narrator goes on to say, “My mother has often told me that I will be sorry when she is gone,” inferring that her mother doesn’t feel like her daughter is doing everything she can to take care of her mother, who we later find out has had breast cancer, which reinforces her obsession with determining whether news anchors and television figures have cancer or not.  I found the part where the narrator dreamed about her father standing over her with an erection to be very disturbing, maybe hinting at some sort of sexual abuse in the past.  The narrator and her mother openly talk about sex, though they have varying opinions about it.  Daniel, one of the narrator’s ex-lovers, comes to town to visit the narrator, and her mother is very impressed by him, stating to her daughter, “You’ve known some nice people, haven’t you?”  However, her feelings changed abruptly the next morning when she hears her daughter and Daniel having sex upstairs.  The story ends in the mother/daughter confrontation after Daniel heads back home and the mother returns from church, feeling completely disrespected and betrayed in her own house.  I feel that she has every right to feel this way.  Regardless of how her daughter feels about sex, she should respect her mother’s opinions when living under her mother’s roof.