McCue delivers by interacting thoughtfully, impulsively or profanely with his close quarter companions, reporting stories and dialog in the natural language of the participants. McCue does not have to tell you when a companion is a punk youngster or a village man whose grandparent spoke another language, or when a guided hunter is a jerk, ruined by privilege. It\u2019s all there in the speech. And lovely idiomatic descriptions abound in McCue\u2019s own voice, as with Neal of the camo cab turned opportunistic outfitter \u201cwho could sell water to fish.\u201d<\/p>\n Unless he\u2019s backed himself up to give you some scientific or cultural perspective, McCue is a participant in the action. He has a dog in this fight, and he is often the dog. You might not like him all the time. He invites his reader to be shared with, put off or be engaged, to look at what is being described from a number of viewpoints. The sum total of all these partial or partisan views is sometimes a breathless uncertainty for the reader. Outcomes are in no way certain. As I read One Water,<\/em> I was often cheered by the heft of the remaining unread pages. These reassured me that the narrator had lived past a childhood, a drug deal, antipathy toward a big game client, a a bad decision in a mountain pass, another threatening midnight rider, even a banal transport to bingo that morphed into the passenger\u2019s own compelling story.<\/p>\n McCue hands off the joystick to the reader early in the book, when he initiates us into the workings of cab drivers and dispatchers. In subsequent cab sessions, he never has to tell you again when he\u2019s \u201cRed 29 North,\u201d or \u201cGreen for Fred Meyers,\u201d or that the urgent abusive banter pouring out of Smurf the Dispatcher as he works the board can be regarded as a form of love.<\/p>\n The stories of One Water<\/em> are compressed from multiple instances\u2014this is probably why McCue chooses to call them stories instead of non-fiction essays. But people familiar with scenes oscillating between McCue\u2019s Fairbanks cab and his wild country adventures will experience the pleasure of recognition. From the small white bow on a blue cap worn by a Native elder to the way a chunk of peat splashes into cold chocolate-colored water at a cut bank, McCue\u2019s ability to capture detail reminds the initiated and welcomes the newcomer, in spite of McCue\u2019s early interdiction that \u201chordes from the lower 48\u201d are welcome to remain where they are.<\/p>\n A river trip on the \u201cSkoog\u201d near the end of the book is especially crowded with details of experience. As McCue watches a dragonfly, he describes the dozen molts that precede its flight. He faces off with a cow moose and calf on nearly every river bend. A bear stalks him while another bear bolts, its coat rippling. There\u2019s the gaze of a great horned owl, \u201cBig yellow eyes on me like he\u2019s checking out the insides of my pores.\u201d There\u2019s a kingfisher disappearing into its muddy tunnel, an eagle, a cross fox, white fronted geese, the probable thoughts of blackpoll warbler, more moose. Because McCue has gathered the observations he wants to share from many trips, this trip has a supernatural density that belies the narrative of Alaska\u2019s sparse and empty land. McCue, I think, has crowded these paragraphs with intention, with determination for us to see the profundity of this place.<\/p>\n McCue takes on big questions throughout the book, about human nature, about the endangered earth. One of the strengths of One Water<\/em> is that he\u2019s able to bring those immense topics down to personal, a trick analogous to reconciling Newton and Heisenberg. Methane and the thawing of the north are a subject of the river trip, as is the childlike glee of McCue\u2019s neighbor Kurt, who frees swamp gas bubbles with a log spike and lights them with a butane torch.<\/p>\n He wants you to see substrata in cab clients and companions, too, inter-generational trauma from years when Native groups lost 60 percent of their populations to illness and the layered lives of soldiers, drunks and junkies, shrunken men wheeling their oxygen tanks. As he warns us early on, \u201cThat\u2019s why if I\u2019m behind the wheel, nobody in the car is in the second person. Anything they might be is more complicated than what\u2019s merely apparent\u2014larger than you and than me.\u201d<\/p>\n McCue also likes physics and refers to it often, especially ideas about time. There\u2019s a sense of ever-increasing distance between himself and friends he\u2019s lost, friends like Eric who became the name of a loved river and a possible twist in time itself: \u201csometimes I wonder if we exist in all the moments of our lives simultaneously, and we\u2019re still those wide-eyed, barely-old-enough-to-drink guys on the adventure of a lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n In his naturalist voice, McCue describes the northward march of black spruce forest and compares the cold-thwarting strategies of winter resident red polls and chickadees. He brings archaeology and anthropology to bear with a suspicion of his own suppositions regarding the ancestors of the Gwich’in: \u201cMy envy of their relationship with the natural world is misguided; they weren\u2019t part of a relationship. They were part of this place. And if I were able to meet them and tell them of my admiration, they\u2019d probably tell me to go back to my time and bring them some food.\u201d<\/p>\n In his urban interludes, there are comparisons to make between McCue\u2019s sanguine looks at the fact of himself and his midnight cab clients, \u201csharing our mutual desperation until the sun returns,\u201d and Andre Dubus III\u2019s memoir, Townie<\/em>, a frank account of growing up rough in a derelict eastern textile town. Like the young Dubus, McCue\u2019s adrenaline can rise at the fear of a murderous \u201cother,\u201d in McCue\u2019s case a sullen young man who takes the invisible seat behind the driver, where the driver can\u2019t see him. McCue draws his knife and has it ready, he\u2019s prepared to crash the cab into a bank at 50 mph. He\u2019s amazed by his readiness to join the \u201criver of blood flowing just beneath the veneer of social convention.\u201d<\/p>\n Also like Dubus, McCue conveys a respect for human differences by just laying a scene of despair or disheveled human behavior, without additional explanation, up against a description of his hopes or an avowal of what he believes. A cab ride with some lost boys of the Stryker Brigade with their innocent obscenity precedes an account of McCue\u2019s evolving love for his wife, Michelle, and the difficult birth of their son, Cord. A moment of intense sexual temptation at a young woman\u2019s door is followed by an account of the ways Cord has changed McCue\u2019s expectations for himself.<\/p>\n The overarching movement of One Water<\/em> is toward self-knowledge and family, but McCue doesn\u2019t confuse stability with standing still. His companions have no interest in standing still, either. Michele, his wife and a respected public school teacher in the now of the book, once joined him in the dangerous thrill of being swept along the icy outside walkway of an Alaska ferry from bow to stern. As the book tends toward loyalty, in the vernacular of the book, \u201can urgent need not to fuck this up,\u201d it also insists on movement: \u201cKeep moving. Keep taking trips. Keep writing. Keep building the house. do something good for humanity from time to time. But keep moving and be aware of each step to be truly alive and free.\u201d<\/p>\n And Cord, McCue\u2019s reason for \u201cunderstanding the stories I\u2019ve lived,\u201d is celebrated for his wild three-year old exuberance. He\u2019s ready to take on that bear and protect his family, pretty much like his dad has been doing.<\/p>\n One Water: <\/em>Stories by Rob McCue was released October 25, 2018 in paperback. ISBN: 978-1-59709-907-3. Publisher Boreal Books is an imprint of Red Hen Press.\u00a0<\/p>\n Photo of author \u00a9 Rob McCue\/Cord McCue, photo of owl \u00a9 Michael Alexia.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_team_member _builder_version=”3.22.7″ name=”Rob McCue” position=”Book Author”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_team_member][et_pb_team_member _builder_version=”3.29.2″ name=”Mary Odden” position=”Book Review Author”]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Update 6\/10\/2020: See our review of Mary’s new book, Stories that Connect: Review of Mostly Water<\/em> by Mary Odden<\/a>, also published by Boreal Books.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_team_member][et_pb_cta _builder_version=”3.22.7″ button_text=”Buy the book One Water” button_url=”https:\/\/aerbook.com\/maker\/productcard-3894628-5961.html”]<\/p>\n![\"Front](\"https:\/\/denalisunrisepublications.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/FrontCover-194x300.jpg\")
<\/span><\/p>\nStories of an observant cab driver<\/h3>\n
Who participates in the action<\/h3>\n
Sharing his view from behind the driver’s wheel<\/h3>\n
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Details familiar to rural Alaskans<\/h3>\nDensity of wildlife<\/h4>\n
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<\/p>\nMethane’s moods<\/h4>\n
History both broad and deep<\/h3>\n
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McCue knows a lot about a lot of things. One Water<\/em> has a strong vertical dimension, descending at times through an asphalt-covered street to a pre-contact Athabascan camp on a river, down in the riverbed to forms of mastodon and tiger, to the silt-winds that filled the valley, on down to the crunching of tectonic plates that wrinkled the valley into its shape. McCue knows Alaska geology and history, loess and granite domes and schist shot with gold-laden quartz and the effect of that particular composition on all of us. He wants you the reader to know that the place you are sitting has not always been the kind of place you perceive it to be\u2014even if McCue has just made it so vivid you can smell the mud or see the cab meter numbers turning and glowing in the dark.<\/p>\nCompassion comes from understanding<\/h4>\n
Weaving science with emotion<\/h4>\n
The forest and the people are inseparable<\/h4>\n
People still defer to large animals\u00a0<\/h3>\n
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<\/span>To bring his wild companions into focus, McCue fearlessly anthropomorphizes, converses, observes, and speculates. Bull moose are on the menu and they are exuberant expressions of male sexuality, too, a pheromone and pee-soaked conversation between hunter guy and moose that McCue invents and loads with machismo. McCue and his dog companion argue over killing a bear, \u201cAre you waiting for him to come back in the night when you won\u2019t even be able to aim your boom stick?\u201d while McCue is also explaining bear biology to the reader, the probable hunger of an exiled bear youngster, and the fact of himself right square in the bears\u2019 way.<\/p>\nAnd sometimes he defers to other people.<\/h3>\n
Complex life stories<\/h3>\n
Bring author McCue home<\/h3>\n
One Water.
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<\/em><\/h3>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/denalisunrisepublications.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/P1010638-1.jpg\")
<\/strong>From the publisher: Rob McCue<\/strong> has lived in Alaska for thirty years. He has worked as a commercial fisherman, cab driver, construction worker, and backcountry guide. He spent several years camping in the Alaskan wilderness. He enjoys hanging out in the woods, letting his mind wander and being with his family. He currently lives with his wife and son outside of Fairbanks.\u00a0One Water<\/em> is his first book.<\/p>\n![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/denalisunrisepublications.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Version-3-300x214.jpg\")
Mary Odden came to Alaska in the 1970s. She worked on the Yukon, Kobuk, and Kuskokwim Rivers at seasonal jobs including wildfire and aircraft logistics. Selected columns from Mary’s years as editor of The Copper River Record<\/i> have been published as Who’s Driving – Windshield Time with a Small Alaska Newspaper.<\/i> Her essays about Alaska places and communities have appeared in various publications including The Georgia Review<\/i>, Nimrod<\/i>, and Alaska Quarterly Review<\/i>. Boreal books will publish a volume of Mary’s memoir essays, Mostly Water<\/i>, in the spring of 2020. She lives with her husband Jim in Nelchina, Alaska.<\/p>\n