The Ways of Water

The Ways of Water is historical fiction set from 1906–1921 inspired by author Teresa H. Janssen’s grandmother Josie Belle Gore, daughter of a Louisiana locomotive engineer and a Texas seamstress. It is written in the first-person from the point of view of Josie, who tells the story of her family’s early years, difficult ones during which mother and children follow their husband/father’s railroad postings in the arid, often desolate Southwestern United States. The harshness of the desert environment, the scarcity of water and other comforts, and the difficulty of eking out a living and holding a family, or a town, together, permeate the novel’s pages.

The Ways of Water opens with a powerful, stark scene when Josie, age six, is lowered deep into a dark, dank well to remove a dead animal that is fouling the family’s water: “I dropped the rabbit onto the ground and gulped the clean desert air, and it was too much. My stomach cramped, and I vomited into the dirt. I looked up into Mama’s soft eyes. She cupped my cheeks and wiped my face with her handkerchief that smelled of roses.”

With their father mostly absent as a train engineer, Josie’s mother is left with little money to feed a growing family and a husband whose tendency to drink and squander employment opportunities leaves the family vulnerable. This first chapter also foreshadows her mother’s death and the role young Josie will ultimately play in raising and protecting her siblings, while struggling to keep the family together. 

Readers will find chapters set during the Mexican revolution when the family moves to Chihuahua in search of railroad work of interest. Other moves are precipitated by the boom-and-bust nature of mining, to towns that rapidly appear and just as rapidly disappear near mines and railroad spurs.

Through Josie’s eyes, locales from Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico, rural Mexico, and the mining towns of Engle, Bisbee and Cutter to the larger cities of Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are brought to vivid life. Janssen is adept at bringing emotion to landscape and her characters’ experience of the vagaries of the environment, which can have lethal consequences for those unprepared for the challenges. Josie Bell is a compelling narrator forced to make difficult choices to survive.

One has the sense of reading a very personal story, one that brings to life the hopes and dreams of Josie, her siblings, and their parents. In that, the author has succeeded in creating a moving tribute to her grandmother. As Josie Bell expresses: “I’m telling my story for Mama. She would want to know about the ones she left behind and what happened in the end. The places have disappeared under a cover of sand, the people have gone to ghosts, and Mama’s grave is vanished and unvisited. I’m the only one left who remembers.”

And isn’t that why most writers write and most readers read? To memorialize what we hope will be remembered and to find connections with our loved ones and with our own lived lives? I recommend The Ways of Water for lovers of historical fiction, family history, memoir (though this is not a memoir, it often reads as one), those interested in the American Southwest, coming-of-age stories, stories of strong women, and more.