Riverhorse Nakadate: Love Is All That Matters (M&P READS episode!)

Riverhorse Nakadate (0:01)

Sometimes in life, there's going to be an open door, and you have to have the heart or the common sense to go through that door. Like, there's that opening. There's only a few, they're big deals in life, and like, go get it.

Ed Roberson (0:20)

This is the Mountain & Prairie Podcast. I'm Ed Roberson. My guest today is River Horse Nakadate.

River Horse is a writer, Patagonia ambassador, conservationist, and a canoe paddling, fly fishing, bird loving, self-described tree hugger. He's also the author of the book Water Lines, a life on marshes, rivers, seas, and in the rain.

River Horse and I had been trading emails for many years, so it was a real treat to finally meet him in person when he came through Boulder on his book tour. He's one of the warmest people I've met in a long time, and I felt like I was chatting with an old friend. This conversation also marks the launch of something new, Mountain & Prairie Reads, the Mountain & Prairie Book Club. The idea is very simple. I sit down with an author of a book I love, we have our normal podcast conversation, and then I ask them a few questions sent in by readers like you, and I couldn't think of a better guest to kick things off. River Horse was born in Texas to a teenage mom who went on to practice medicine, become a mountain climber, and live as an off-the-grid wild woman. At age five, he was adopted by his father, a Stanford Literature Ph.D. who took classes from Wallace Stegner.

Summers at the family's fishing cabin on the Oregon Coast turned him into a surfer, and his writing eventually took him to the University of Iowa, then to a decade as a staff writer for Surfing Magazine, and later to the pages of the Flyfish Journal. His films, Love and Water and Northern Light, which document his 200-mile paddle to fight a proposed copper mine in Minnesota's boundary waters, and later aired on PBS, brought his voice to a much wider audience. Water lines gather stories from a lifetime spent on the Texas salt marshes, rivers, oceans, and wilderness lakes, illustrated with 24 beautiful paintings based on River Horse's own photographs. Fly fishing runs through the book, but as River Horse says, it's just the vehicle. Water lines is really about love, community, family, and standing up for the wild places and people that you care about. River Horse and I talked about how the book came together, from his stacks of journals to the art, to the long and winding editing process with Patagonia. We talked about his time at the University of Iowa playing water polo, how he stays calm when a flood is barreling down the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and how being a lifelong pacifist fits together with being willing to fight for what you love. We talked about his mom, his take on news and social media, his work to protect the boundary waters, the dangerous shark finning story he reported along the Rio Grande, and his friendships with Andrew Luck, JT Van Zandt, and Alvin Ditto.

We also talked a lot about books, including John Muir's lesser known A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. We then turned to your questions, covering which river he would paddle to recreate the book Goodbye to a River, whether he wrote the book with the fly fishing crowd in mind, and how everyday people can treat wilderness as a necessity rather than a luxury. This was such a fun conversation, and be sure to click through the episode notes to grab a copy of Waterlines if you haven't already. And before we get started, I want to announce the next Mountain & Prairie read selection, and it is The River's Daughter by Bridget Crocker. I'll be chatting with Bridget in late November or early December, so now is the perfect time to grab a copy and read along. The River's Daughter is a memoir by a world-class whitewater rafting guide. After her parents' volatile divorce, Bridget moved with her mom from Southern California to Wyoming, where she grew up in a trailer park on the banks of the Snake River.

For a while, life was great. A stepfather she loved, a new baby brother, and the river right outside her door. Then, her mother suddenly took up a radical new lifestyle and became someone Bridget barely recognized. Through all that upheaval, the river was the one place Bridget felt whole. She found her calling in whitewater rafting and became one of the few female guides on the snake. From there, she went to Africa to guide the Zambezi, some of the most dangerous whitewater on the planet, where she faced death and learned to conquer her fears, both on the water and off. If you like water lines, I think you're going to love this one. The book reads like an adventure story, but like River Horse's book, it's really about much more than the river. It's about how wild places can teach us to trust ourselves, to work through betrayal and trauma, and eventually to help heal our families.