SO SAID THE RIVER

Divorce sends a woman on an unforgettable paddleboard journey with her mom in Miniuk’s memoir.

Lake Powell is man-made, formed by a dam in the Colorado River. It’s no placid recreational lake—the second largest reservoir in the United States, it “slices through the Colorado Plateau like a blue lightning bolt starting near Hite, Utah, and ending near Page, Arizona,” its 1,960 miles of shoreline “a mostly treeless collection of hardened buttes, chiseled bluffs, and crusty, petrified sand dunes.” What’s more, the lake has a river’s current, one that has only increased in strength as drought has lowered the water level. Sailing the length of it—on an inflatable standup paddleboard, no less—is no easy feat. Yet that is precisely what the author, a photographer, decided to do in the fall of 2015, following a difficult year that included both her 40th birthday and the dissolution of her marriage. When Miniuk, who did not even own a paddleboard when she decided to make the trip, was advised it would not be smart to do so alone, she recruited her mother, Jacque, to accompany her. Despite her inexperience and the dangers ahead, the author set off with a swell of confidence. “The comical comments from doubting Thomases and nervous Nellies made me laugh and then check my head for loose screws,” she remembers. Was that confidence misplaced? Miniuk’s frank prose illuminates both the desert river and her own interior landscape: “I hadn’t ever lived alone except for one year, my senior year in college…I had never faced the shadow of myself unaccompanied. For forty years, someone had always sheltered me. Until now.” It’s a divorce memoir as much as it is a travel book, though Miniuk’s brilliant full-color photographs keep the journey from ever feeling too dark. One can’t help but finish the book wanting to embark on a wild adventure of one’s own.

An inspiring tale of self-discovery and mother-daughter friendship.