The same River Twice: End of Novel

As the novel comes to an end, the two stories, one of Chris’s life as a young man and the other his life married and with a child on the way, finally come together.  Chris ends up in the everglades in Florida working as a naturalist.  He is not properly qualified for the job as he describes, “I borrowed all his books and learned enough to fool any hapless tourist into believing I knew the area like a Seminole” (161).  He worked as long as he could, loving the nature and tracking the hurricane that finally gave him a reason to quit.  Chris had lost any friends that he made at this job and after the hurricane he went back up to Boston and stayed with his friend Shadrack for a time until he met Rita.  They dated for a while and married in Manhattan where she is originally from.  Keeping a journal had been Chris’s most prized possession at times and relied on it in many occasions where he had no one to turn to.  Now however, with Rita in his life he explains, “The journal had become useless, an obvious dodge” (176).   He no longer needs this form of escape from the outside world because he appears to be happily married. 

As the book comes to an end we see Rita going through labor and giving birth to their son.  She has a long and difficult delivery and Chris handles it the best he can, getting sick at times and being there for her.  Throughout the novel when the author would talk about Chris and Rita there would always be scenes where Chris is out in the woods looking and thinking about nature.  The outdoors seems to calm him and give him greater self worth.  The very last scene is Chris in the woods with his son wanting to tell him all the right and wrong things to do in life.  Instead Chris says, “I give him a leaf which he calmly tastes.  He can’t learn from my mistakes, only from his own” (188).  The real life lesson at the end of the novel is that Chris has learned from every place he traveled and every mistake he has made in his life and now knows that he would not be the person he is if he had not gone through it on his own.

Definitions:

Roving – roaming or wondering

Corrugated – to draw or bend into folds or alternate furrows and ridges

Bathysphere – a spherical diving apparatus from which to study deep-sea life, lowered into the ocean depths by a cable