The River Why

by David James Duncan

  We shook our heads and smiled at the fire as if it were the Navy. We rocked slowly, side by side, and slowly drained the wine. I couldn’t say if I was drunk or sober: I was aware only of an opening and a light inside me where before there’d been nothing. Then Nick said, “Oh. Almost forgot—that big fisherman, Gunnulf.…”

  “Yeah?”

  “He had a sister,” he said, looking sheepish.

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s my wife,” he grinned, “and right now she’s wonderin’ where I’m at.”

  It was near midnight when we walked again to his truck. The second farewell felt right.

  4

  The Trek

  and i am saying to the hand

  turn

  open the river

  —W. S. Merwin

  Thinking I would be slow with wine, I climbed to the loft to sleep. I lay down, turned to the window, watched the river glint beneath the night-blackened boughs of cedar. I kept hearing Nick’s voice, seeing his face, wondering what it must be for a man so scarred to handle a fishhook. Or to fish! Every hook he touched must set his heart and hand throbbing, must be to him over and over what the pine knot had once been to Bill Bob. No wonder he would pause, no wonder work so slowly.

  I tossed, turned, couldn’t sleep. My mind danced and reeled amid vague, watery images—glimpses of sun or moonlit river surfaces; of lines reaching from men to water, swinging downstream in long arcs, turning golden at dusk; of flashes deep in a dimensionless green flow; of sudden swirls on a still pool’s surface; of pierced hands and mouths, gaffed sides, blood melting away in water.… I could connect and order nothing. All these darting pictures encircling me, fishslick and swift: they felt important. But what did they mean? And how to catch them? Despite their elusiveness, despite the fact that they nibbled and teased and darted down, vanishing under too-close scrutiny, I couldn’t rest: a once-empty-and-dark current was alight with intimations; cold deeps had warmed and shallowed. I was feeling things I’d never felt, and I knew—these things were of the soul. I had to act, had at least to try and glimpse them, whether or not they could be caught.

  At 2 A.M. I arose and fixed breakfast—pancakes, eggs, coffee. I knew that eating was a risk; I’d heard and read of the sages fasting. But I wanted to be strong and sober. I was no fakir. I was a fisherman. Fishermen eat before going fishing.

  The meal removed the last traces of wine. I sat and pondered. These quiverings and jolts inside, they were not indescribable: they did to my head and heart what striking fish had always done to my hands as they held the rod. But these jolts came from an inner stream other than the obvious red one; these were waters my five senses could never ply. What waters were they? To fish them, I must learn them. But learning new water takes time, and in the morning there would be kids and customers, work and words to do and speak that had nothing to do with this stream, nothing to do with these glimmering rises. “Well,” I thought, “inner waters must be portable: where I am, there they must be also.” So I put on my winter coat, filled my pockets with fruit, pipe, tobacco, knife, and leftover pancakes, then I fed the fish, fed Charles the Second, hid the Flies for Sale sign in the bushes, and set out walking.

  I headed up the River Road with no more specific destination than a remote and quiet place, choosing upstream instead of down because I’d no human neighbors in that direction. It was still dark—a moonless, one-dimensional shade. I walked quickly for warmth but quietly for hearing, and over the heel/toe crunch of gravel came the changing speech of the Tamanawis, the rasp of leaves, the flutter and flit of sleeping birds my steps disturbed. When those steps grew loose and my breathing easy, the glimmering began again; but when I’d make a stab at the thing that caused it, try to name it or even to guess at its nature, then the glimmering abruptly stopped. So I called it Nameless.

  What was it in Nick’s story, what was it in the image of hook and hand that set me off inside? What had it been in the pine knot that set Bill Bob off? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I’d set out walking in the dark of the night, without destination, and with no more cause than a glimpse of a stream flashing secrets. What in a scarred palm could cast such a spell? Who cast it? I didn’t know. But I felt that the one I called Nameless was trying to speak to me—had long been trying. And his “words” were silent, spoken in a language of images: the drowned fisherman, the pine knot, the in the river, old Thomas, Eddy in the alder, the scar in the palm—these were the signposts marking both my inner and outer journey. They were not much like the usual sacred signs—but fishing was hardly an orthodox faith.… And these things had been given as gifts—like rain, like rivers—unlooked for, unasked for: I had to follow the signs that I was given, as rivers follow valleys, as spring follows winter, as leaves turn and salmon spawn and geese fly south in October. I couldn’t trade the trail these images blazed for me for a straight and narrow way—not when water’s ways, meandering and free flowing, had always been my love.

  Dawn came up behind the hills, extending her old fingertips of rose. I plodded on toward the outstretched fingers and the glimmering continued; fish-bites, birth-pangs, I didn’t know what they were. But the further I walked, the less I cared. It was enough to feel them.

  I trudged on, helpless to catch hold of things, but hopeful. And when the first sunlight lit upon the tallest ridge’s highest vineleaf maple, when the rosy fingers faded into blue behind the mountain, when the vineleaf’s leaves shone out in scarred and blazing scarlet atop that wave-like ridge of dull alder gold a chill shot from my thighs to the top of my head, surged up my backbone, again and again—for in that moment I felt as though an oldest, greatest, longest-lost Friend had come to walk the road, unseen beside me.…

  When the dull alders brightened the moment passed; the chills subsided. My thoughts began again. Because I watched the changing trees I thought the word “botanist”; and because thoughts are like starlings (they usually come in flocks; they can sing, but would just as soon chatter; they can fly, but would just as soon walk; they’re English exports, but thrive almost anywhere) my thoughts swerved to botanists, telling how deciduous leaves in autumn reveal their truest colors.…

  The colors come when the life-giving water and chlorophyll take their green wet business elsewhere, the leaves turn ghost, and we’re left looking at shades—shades of minerals, sipped in secret from the earth all spring and summer. But what the botanists never tell is: who told the alder and the vineleaf growing side by side on a single ridge each to sip, separately, only the minerals that would turn their leaves dull gold, or blood red? And who told the neighboring firs never to die for the sake of a change of season? And who told the vineleaf and alder always to do so, but only for the sake of the change men call October? What the botanists never tell is why each tree, leaf, and needle obey. Not that botanists are at fault in this—for mustn’t it be that same who they failed to tell of who decreed what a botanist would and would not know? Decreed for example that they would know the phylum/genus/species of any plant a man might hope to see; decreed for example that they would not know why the dying leaves of the tree called “vineleaf maple” must turn the same blood red as the once-silver salmon that journey up the Tamanawis to give birth and die—and at the same time of change: October; decreed for a final example that they would extend their analysis no deeper than to discuss the effects of water on the mineral Iron to explain why leaf skin, salmon skin, palm-of-hand skin must be made scarlet in order to reach the ends they must reach. Nor may a botanist wonder, within the confines of his discipline, what those ends are, or why they seem to be reached only by those who suffer, who know pain, and who learn in pain that it is this scarlet end and only this scarlet end that can free us from pain. “So is it Iron?” I asked my Friend as we walked, “is it Iron that gives the blood its beautiful color? And to learn to love that color will I somehow be wounded as Nick was wounded, and so come to know what hooks are, what they are, what they really are?”

  I walked slower (there was sun
now for warmth) but stayed quiet, and over the heel/toe crunch of gravel came the speech of the river, the rustle and rasp of deciduous leaves, the water-shush of conifers, the sudden cries of bright birds you only see flushed and flying, and the quiet calls of dark birds you hear but never see, since they never fly, only flit through the shadows of the deepest thickets. I still believed the one I’d called “Friend” walked somewhere near me, but still caught nothing I could keep hold of. I just walked, watching as the sun made and melted prisms over the stairs of white water.

  Twelve miles, fifteen miles, the gravel road branching into untraveled, weedy fire roads, the river dwindling, the air turning heavy with heat. My body, too, grew heavy. First my feet, then my mind began to lurch. I thought of turning home. I looked at my watch. It had stopped. It lay dead on my wrist…

  and there was my hand—tanned on the back, pale on the palm, its few small scratches not scar enough to guide me. So I made my fatigue into a scar: I kept moving upstream, thinking of the relentlessness of salmon. And in time a fisherman’s patience crept up from behind, tramped past the fatigue, gave me heart, led me forward.

  At about twenty miles I sat down on a log and emptied my coat pockets: two oranges, two apples, some cold folded pancakes; I ate them all, smoked a pipe, resumed walking. I passed the middle fork when the sun was just past zenith, later the south fork: this left me climbing the north fork, which was the longest and carried the most water—and when I tried to think why this should matter to me I realized I’d had a vague goal from the moment I set out in the dark: I was heading for the source.

  The source of the Tamanawis. No banks or mock Liberty Bells this time. I’d never been there, knew no one who had. I’d heard it lay ten miles past the last fire-road; I’d heard it was reachable only by deer and elk trails; I’d looked at it on maps: they showed a marsh, then beaver ponds, and at last a mountain at whose foot the river ended. Must be a spring there. What would happen if I reached that spring and drank? Would it quench my thirst? I walked on, my feet grumbling to the weeds and gravel.

  Passing a hemlock grove I was lured by a bed of moss; I lay down.…

  When I awoke the sun had turned toward evening. The air began to cool. At thirty-some miles the fire-road branched: a well-worn fork turned northeast, but the disused needle-strewn way that paralleled the Tamanawis headed due east. I stepped onto the needles.

  My footfalls fell silent. It struck me, then, how far I’d come. I was a long day from home, bound to be spending a night in the wilds without food, shelter, sleeping bag; there would be frost, and the October nights are long. I started feeling hollow and weak, and loneliness began to gnaw—but I tried to make these feelings into another scar. I walked on, and on, and on.

  At about forty miles the last fire-road ended. In a clay cul-de-sac, sun-hardened deer and elk tracks funneled into a gap between trees, narrowing to a hoof-cut trail, meandering but sure. I followed it. Maybe ten miles to go.

  On the deer trail the evergreens joined over my head. They made it dark, though the sun still shone on their tops; it weakened me to think how close the night was, and how long it would last. Two miles up the trail I came to a clearing full of late huckleberries. They were small and red and bitter, but I nibbled them for an hour—because where they grew sunlight still fell. When the sun sank the sky turned pink and the air golden. In that light my hands turned the red of fresh-cut cedar: I could almost see the blood, streaming like groundwater under the pale earth of my flesh. I could almost see the scar.

  When the sun set I continued on the trail, the forest nothing but silhouettes now. There was no wind. The air was cold, and full of the spiral watersongs of thrushes: they sifted through hazel clumps, watching me with prayer bead eyes. Why had I come so far, carrying so little, the cold and the night coming on? I didn’t know. I kept walking as the trail grew too dark to follow. I lost it once—had to feel for the cloven tracks with my hands—and as I crawled along, groping, I began to laugh: I laughed louder and louder; I was insane! Crawling through black brush forty miles from mankind, carrying nothing, heading nowhere… but the thickets ate my laughter as the sea eats a stream. I got a grip on myself. I crept on.

  An Indian could have walked this trail at night. Clatsops, Nehalems, Tillamooks, Chinooks—they had lived here once, walked here, eaten the bitter huckleberries, hunted and fished. Now they were gone. How was it they had vanished so quickly? Perhaps to be red-skinned in this country—like the vineleaf sprays that white-skinned women pluck for decoration, like the spawning salmon that white men club for their eggs alone—is to come soon to an end. I remembered my own hands in the last sun of the clearing; I felt my way faster, wanting a camp.

  I found a grove of cedars more by smell than by sight. I gathered wood beneath them by crawling and groping till my hands hit on fallen branches. They were red cedars—like the ones around my cabin. Their fragrance made me homesick, and cedars were saddening trees—doomed, most of them—each worth an easy five thousand of the man-made leaves called dollars. Five hundred years to grow, five minutes to be felled.

  The Indians, too, had cherished them. They used the biggest for whaling boats and totem poles, the smaller for dugout canoes. Each tree took weeks to fell: they worried the wood with stone blades and hatchets, let fire and time do the rest. Each vessel took years to build: stone adzes and small fires to hollow and temper the wood; stone axes and chisels to shape and sculpt body and bow. Each bow was given a totem head and face, all the long length of body a bright winged design; each vessel was given good food, was instilled with charms, was spoken to as man speaks to man, and when the whalers and fishermen set out to sea the boats came to life: they helped find, follow, and catch the quarry.

  I lit my fire of dead cedar branches. The encircling trunks glowed red by its light, the boughs an eerie green. Birth-green and dying-red, the Christmas colors. The Indians carved and painted heads and wings and bodies on boats to catch the fish; I wound feathers and thread into wings and heads and bodies on hooks to do the same. Maybe on the Tamanawis things hadn’t changed so much. My work was old work, good work: if only I could find the old reasons for it, the good reasons.…

  When a young Tillamook was ready for manhood, he was led to a fire by the elders. He was made naked. His boyhood name was taken and burned. The people of his village then closed round him like trees round a clearing. He was given a blanket, a knife, and a pine knot. The pine knot was lit. He took the knot and departed; his people sang him away.

  The nameless boy carried his knot into the mountains. He walked slowly, protecting the flame from wind or rain as if it were his soul, shielding it with the blanket, moving inland for as long as it burned. The knot burned long; he had to walk far. When the knot burned low he found the nearest stream. He made a camp, gathered wood, lit a fire before the knot could die.…

  I used a Diamond match. I built my fire high, and by its light found more wood—lots of it: it was going to be cold. With my pocketknife I cut ferns and fresh cedar boughs to cover myself with and to lie on. Then there was nothing more to do. No food. No one to talk to. What was I doing here? Why had I come? Something to do with hooks, scars, hands, glimmerings; something to do with a Friend who by the way where was he? He’d been gone for hours. If he’d ever been there. Christ it was cold. I threw on more wood.

  The Tillamook lit his fire and huddled down beside it. Then he waited. The night came on. He paid it no heed. He knew he’d be waiting a long time. He’d nothing to eat. He’d no clothes but a blanket. He felt the cold, the hunger, the loneliness. He knew he’d be feeling these things. These things were not important now. He had come to meet them, to journey past them. So, as each came in turn, the Tillamook greeted them: Ah, hunger! You have come. Good. Sit down by the fire. Sit down in my belly. Twist and writhe, make awful faces! Good. But how my belly growls at you! How it complains! Go ahead, belly, go ahead, hunger: fight! To fight each other is your work. Me, I am not hungry. To fight with you is not my work. You will bot
h grow tired. You will leave me in peace.…

  The October night closed down. I found a short, thick log and dragged it close to the flames to reflect heat and rest my back. I shivered a little, but not from cold. I heard an owl, and maybe a coyote. Thought of Bill Bob and Ma, owl and coyote. Musical chairs? What had they been doing? Didn’t matter. I thought of Titus slumped in his easy chair, Descartes nodding in his rocker, the warm flat, the walls of wonderful books, far, far away. And Eddy. Where had she come from? Where did she go? Did she see the Fishing Dutchman notice? What if this very night she came to my cabin and I was—don’t be ridiculous. I thought of my friends down the river—Steve and Satyavati, Arjuna and his machete, Rama and Whitey, Hemingway, Charles the Second. Nick. All far away now. I’d walked a hell of a long way. How come? God I was tired. But the hook, the hand, the dark water inside me—what did they mean? If they had no meaning, why did they keep floating up in front of me? If this walk into these woods had no meaning, how did I come to be here?

  The Tillamook stayed by his fire. Cold sneaked up behind him and gnawed his back and legs, so he turned them to the fire; then cold gnawed his face and knees. He turned first one way, then the other, but it gnawed his shadowed side, whichever way he turned. He built up his fire and spun slowly, like a planet, but cold stayed. The Tillamook grew tired of turning. He said, Ah, Cold! You are here. Good. Sit down by the fire. Sit down in my shadow and make awful faces. Gnaw at my skin and bones. But how my skin and bones fight you! Go ahead cold, go ahead bones: fight! You will grow tired. But I am not cold; I am not bones or skin; I am not tired, and to fight you is not my work. You will leave me in peace. You will leave me in peace.…