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Robert McFarlane has this lyrical, meditative writing style that helps him convey his deep engagement with

the natural world. He's written about mountains and forests and caves and root systems, and his

books are chronicles of his journeys to these places. And often he's working through a question.

Now, this latest question is the title of his new book. Is a River Alive? It's about

three rivers in a cloud forest in Ecuador, in Southeast India, and in the deep wilderness of

Quebec. But he begins the book, and that question, at a chalk stream not far from his house

in Cambridge, England.

A river is born twice.

One of those births is always ongoing.

That is the spring that feeds the river that seeks the sea, and that's a continuous process. But there's a second birth,

then that's the singular birth that a river has in time. Twelve thousand years ago, a river is born.

In a hollow at the foot of a hill on which flints lie white as eyes, water rises for the first time from a crack in the chalk and flows away.

I lived a mile from this little spring, the waters of which run through the pages of my life.

And I at some point just realized,

I want to know when that river was born.

The one-off birth, the deep time birth.

And so I began following the threads back.

This spring water fell first as snow.

It settled, melted, seeped slow through the bedrock, then surfaced here as a spring,

a sleepless flutter of silver movement, rippling the pool it has made with whispers and mutters.

...