Early in The Boundless River, Mathijs Deen’s stirring and accessible history of the mighty Rhine, the author mentions a desire to travel upstream into the river’s headwaters in the mountains of southeastern Switzerland. Deen’s wish is to find the precise spot where the infant stream can first be jumped across. This reader’s heart sank a little at the articulation of such a wish: bestriding a young river feels all too monotonously like one further act of human mastery and control over nature — of a piece with mapping a river to its notional source, like Stanley splashing about in the headwaters of the Nile and Congo. Deen at last finds a good spot — but his crossing of the Rhine is emphatically not one for the ages: “I’ve decided, rather unheroically, to clamber instead of jump, and I’ve crossed the Rhine on my hands and feet in three slippery steps, I imagine how silly it must have looked, but […] there was no one to see it. I kneel in the snow and drink from the Rhine; it tastes of stone.”
Deen soon learns to think of the Rhine, and of all rivers, in rather different, more expansive — and considerably less human-governed — terms: and in this learning lies the strength and electricity in his book. The Rhine, like all rivers, consists not only of the water flowing between its banks but of every part of its vast drainage basin; the river that we see is merely one element in a vast entity upon which the rains fall. And as with space in this book, so with time. “The Rhine was always there,” writes Deen: it was flowing three million years ago, before humans walked the earth, and will flow when humanity is no more.
The human relationship with and grievous impact upon the Rhine through the centuries is therefore set against its proper context of aeons of planetary time. And it is moving, and still rare, to read a book which accords, as this does, a history to the animals: to the salmon and mastodons and rhinos whose lives have been bound up with the Rhine. Increasingly, our rivers — in Canada, Bolivia, New Zealand — are being recognised as living entities, with legal rights. Read this book, and you will understand why.
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