The River Why

by David James Duncan

  “Shitaree, Eddy,” she said. “Looks like we married us a couple o’ saltwater drinkin’ fountains. Anybody thirsty?” And she stepped up to H2O and licked his face.

  People often don’t know what they’re talking about, but when they talk about love they really don’t know what they’re talking about. The one sure thing you can say about love is that there isn’t much you can say about it. Not that you shouldn’t try. You can make analogies; love is like lots of things. One thing it’s like is a trout stream: try to capture a trout stream with a dam and you get a lake; try to catch it in a bucket and you get a bucket of water; try to stick some under a microscope and you get a close-up look at some writhing amorphous microcooties. A trout stream is only a trout stream when it’s flowing between its own two banks, at its own pace, in its own sweet way.

  Love is also like poison oak. You can’t explain poison-oak itch to somebody who’s never had it. And you can’t explain love to somebody who’s never had poison oak… ha! just kidding. What I started to say is that love really is like poison oak: it’s highly contagious. Scratch it, it gets worse. Touch other people with it, they catch it too. What love is not like is your average fish; if love was a fish it would be suicidal: it wants to get caught.

  I don’t know where I caught it first. I suspect maybe I had it all my life but didn’t know it—maybe because of all that cool trout-water purling over it, lulling it, numbing it, hypnotizing me into not feeling it. I suspect maybe everybody is covered with it, but most everybody doesn’t know it for one reason or another. And I suspect that anybody who thinks they don’t have it and thinks they don’t want it had better be damned careful, because it can get you anytime, anyplace, anyhow, and you don’t even know you have it till you find yourself scratching, and the more you scratch the more it itches, and the more it itches the more you like it till you’re so infested with the stuff that you sit around writing crap like this when you could be out fishing! It’s scary, that love! It can make you dangerous to yourself. It can change you. It can make you do strange things. Take the thing it made me do to my draft card.

  The December before Eddy and I got married I got a draft card, practically for Christmas. It came in an envelope with a letter from the Government and I’d never gotten a letter from the Government before so I looked it over pretty carefully. It was sort of a self-conscious-looking letter; I could see it thought it was very important and it wanted me to think so too; and I might have thought so if it hadn’t been for Eddy and the chinook and the touch of a hand that really was important. Still, the letter was interesting. The Government said I had to carry the draft card around with me all the time, because it was the law; the Government didn’t say which type of law it was, like whether it was a higher law or a lower law, but it told me the number and sections and letters of the law it was, and there were quite a few: it was one of those 45-Sec. rGff 1289bdbdbd-$XK-type of laws. Necromantic stuff. Governmental Number Magic. It might have intimidated me, but you find a hell of a lot of that type of thing in the fishing-tackle industry, and in the fishing-tackle industry you learn to ignore all the numbers and letters and hyphens and you ask simple questions—questions like, “I see it’s a 45-Sec. rGff rod and a $XK reel and a 1289bdbdbd line, but what I want to know is, how will it handle? does it please the hand and eye? does it give any tinklings or inklings to the old native intelligence when you pick it up and swish it around a bit?” And if it does these things, then maybe I buy it, or try to build one like it.

  So that’s the sort of thing I tried to do while I looked over the card the Government wanted me to carry. The card wasn’t heavy or anything; it posed no problem from a physical point of view; I could easily keep it in my pocket—although it would almost certainly get wet. I read the card: it said my name; it said my age and address; it said the same thing as the letter about me having to carry it; it said I was classified “1-H”; it said other things I can’t remember. But I remember I was standing by the mailbox, and there were clouds scudding over—awesome winter storm clouds, billowing by in slow motion—and the trees whispered among themselves about those clouds; I remember there were steelhead in the river and animals in the woods, and now and then a bird veering through the sky; and there was Eddy in the cabin, and our people scattered down the valley, she and they all going about their goings-abouts; and there was a Garden Twin hidden in my shadow, and my shadow was hidden by the clouds; and there was a line I couldn’t see running from my heart up through my head, away into the Realm where the Being of Light awaited me, awaited us all…

  and then there was this draft card. It was beginning to look pretty unimportant. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be told my name or my address or my birthday or the fact that I was considered “1-H,” over and over and over. I didn’t even know what 1-H meant. It sounded like a compliment, being the first number; it sounded better than being 23-H or 135-H or something like that. But if it was a compliment, what then? I didn’t know. I took it in and showed it to Eddy.

  Eddy didn’t like the card or the letter. She didn’t like them at all. She said they meant I was eligible to be drafted by the Armed Forces and that I’d waited too long to enroll at any school and apply for a student deferment; she said that if I was drafted I would probably end up in Vietnam. She looked pretty upset. I tried to cheer her up; I told her I wouldn’t have gone to any school anyhow, unless it was to teach about fishing—but she got excited and told me I didn’t know what I was saying and did I realize what was going on in Vietnam and what I might have to do if I went there? I said No, I didn’t realize. Then I got the Atlas and opened it up to the map of the world. Eddy sat down by me and we looked at Vietnam over there and at Oregon over here and it hit me that whatever else Vietnam was, it was a hell of a long way away; and I said so. Eddy called me her fool and hugged me and almost cried. I asked how long I’d have to stay if I had to go. She said the better part of two years. Then I asked if she would go if she were me. She said No. I said, “Well, we’re one flesh, aren’t we?” She said Yes. I said, “And it’s not a law that makes us one flesh: it’s a sacred vow, right?” She said Right. I said, “Well, in Titus’s books, when laws tell people to break sacred vows, the people don’t do it. I guess I won’t do it either.” And I got an empty wine bottle, put the draft card and letter in it, corked it, took it down and threw it into the middle of the Tamanawis. I never saw it again. I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe it crashed on a rock and sank. Maybe it drifted out to sea. Maybe it drifted clear to Vietnam, I don’t know. It was up to the river, not me.

  A few weeks later I got another letter from the Government. This one said there was going to be a lottery; it said that this lottery would decide whether or not I would be drafted, and if not me, then who; it said that this would be done by putting everybody’s birthday into a kind of vat or barrel or something, then they would shake the vat around, then somebody named General Louis B. Hershey would reach into the vat and pull out everybody’s birthdays one by one, and the order in which General Louis B. Hershey pulled them out was the order in which the people whose birthdays they were would be drafted and sent to Vietnam or wherever. This was the letter that proved to me that not everyone who worked in the Government was entirely sane. It was an incredible arrangement. It must have taken a number of not-very-sane people quite a while to work it all out. But I wasn’t sure why the Government was telling me all this since they’d decided on it without even asking me about it; I wasn’t sure why they sent me letters in the first place; I didn’t know anything about Vietnam, or why some of us should go there, or who we should kill when we got there, or why we should kill them. I guessed maybe it was my right as a taxpayer to get to go there and kill some people, but since I didn’t know which people to kill or why, I figured I’d just as soon stay home and let the ones who knew go. I figured the whole thing was none of my business. In fact, I figured it was so absolutely none of my business that I went for another wine bottle.…

  Then I started worrying. Who
knew how many letters the Government might see fit to send me? They might keep it up for years. I couldn’t just sail them all off in wine bottles. In the first place, I might run out of bottles. In the second place, the bottles might wash into rocks and break and people might cut their feet on them; stupid little fish might eat the shards; seagulls might choke on the corks. Or maybe the bottles wouldn’t break: maybe whales would swallow them whole, thinking they were little green Jonahs, and maybe they’d break inside the whales and hurt them; or maybe seals would play with them and cut their mouths; or maybe pelicans would mistake them for fish; or maybe Japanese or Scandinavian or Russian or Peruvian commercial fishermen would catch the bottles in their nets and be confused and depressed by the messages in them because they couldn’t read or speak English and maybe neither could anyone else on the whole boat. Who knows? I didn’t. I burned the letter instead.

  I got one more letter from the Government. It said, in a very roundabout way, that General Louis B. Hershey had picked my born-date—May 22—three-hundred-and-first out of three hundred and sixty-five. I showed it to Eddy and she was happy because it meant I wouldn’t be going to jail or Vietnam or anywhere else I didn’t want to go. But it didn’t make me happy. It pissed me off. Think of it! I could have gone to jail, just like that, just for having a birthday, just for opening my lousy mail!

  But I didn’t go to jail. Why? Because General Louis B. Hershey had a line of light running from his heart away into the Realm of Light, and the Fisherman who waited at the end of the line worked that line like a puppet string so that General Louis B. Hershey pulled the birthdays out of the vat in an order that was meant to be. And it was meant to be that some people whose birthdays were pulled from the vat were led by their lines of light to jail, and others were led to Canada, and others to Vietnam, and others stayed where they were, like me. What a strange world! Sometimes I wish it was more like a line of thousand-pound-test monofilament than a line of light and love. Sometimes I wish the line of light was a bloody steel cable. Because when the line is so fine and the equilibrium in the Fisher’s hand so great, it’s awfully easy for the trash fish of the human race to think and act as if the line of love weren’t there, and to do stupid and nonsensical and terrible things to other people like put their birthdays in a vat and pick some of them to go kill other people. When things like that go on I can’t help wishing He’d yank hard on the line—give some jerks some jerks. But that’s all in my head. In my heart I know the Man-fisher knows best: river-armed and ocean-handed, He tends his lines with infinite patience, gracious to those who love Him, a mirage to those who don’t.

  In the end it all rides on how you look at things. And how you look at things depends on how His line leads you to look. Lately I’ve been led to try and look at things as much as I can like a man named Hu:

  There was an old Taoist who lived in a village in ancient China, named Master Hu. Hu loved God and God loved Hu, and whatever God did was fine with Hu, and whatever Hu did was fine with God. They were friends. They were such good friends that they kidded around. Hu would do stuff to God like call him “The Great Clod.” That’s how he kidded. That was fine with God. God would turn around and do stuff to Hu like give him warts on his face, wens on his head, arthritis in his hands, a hunch in his back, canker sores in his mouth, and gout in his feet. That’s how He kidded. That God. What a kidder! But it was fine with Hu.

  Master Hu grew lumpy as a toad; he grew crooked as cherry wood; he became a human pretzel. “You Clod!” he’d shout at God, laughing. That was fine with God. He’d send Hu a right leg ten inches shorter than the left to show He was listening. And Hu would laugh some more and walk around in little circles, showing off his short leg, saying to the villagers, “Haha! See how the Great Clod listens! How lumpy and crookedy and ugly He is making me! He makes me laugh and laugh! That’s what a Friend is for!” And the people of the village would look at him and wag their heads: sure enough, old Hu looked like an owl’s nest; he looked like a swamp; he looked like something the dog rolled in. And he winked at his people and looked up at God and shouted, “Hey Clod! What next?” And splot! Out popped a fresh wart.

  The people wagged their heads till their tongues wagged too. They said, “Poor Master Hu has gone crazy.” And maybe he had. Maybe God sent down craziness along with the warts and wens and hunch and gout. What did Hu care? It was fine with him. He loved God and God loved Hu, and Hu was the crookedest, ugliest, happiest old man in all the empire till the day he whispered,

  Hey Clod! What now?

  and God took his line in hand and drew him right into Himself. That was fine with Hu. That’s what a Friend is for.

  Afterword

  Three Reflections in the Key of Gratitude

  I. Gus Envy

  I am frequently asked just how similar my life was to that of The River Why’s protagonist, Gus Orviston, when I was Gus’s age. The truth is, we were each a major influence on the life of the other, but were very different even so. Flash back with me to one remarkable day in March 1979, and I’ll show you how that chemistry worked.

  I, David, was twenty-seven years old, living in a $100-a-month shack on the banks of Portland’s poor, polluted Johnson Creek, aspiring and perspiring to become a writer. That effort had me happily mired in a meandering manuscript about a confused young fishing prodigy, Gus, trying to find his way in life. Regarding the mire: I’m stupid when I hurry my writing but needed to hurry it because I was destitute. I mowed lawns for a living under the nom de mower The Lawn Ranger. I had mowed eleven lawns the previous day to earn a day off for my writing. On the eleventh lawn, my mower struck a brick hidden in tall grass, totaling the mower. I made $140 on the eleven lawns, then spent $350 on a new mower.

  Desperate to forget my negative $210 earnings and the fourteen lawns I’d have to start mowing the next day, I sat down to my old Royal manual and sent my imagination swimming into the world of my protagonist. He was living in a beautiful riverside cabin, fishing gorgeous coastal streams I would love to have been plying in his place, but all Gus had been doing of late, besides fishing, was philosophizing, and complaining, and getting drunk and whining into the night about the shortcomings of a life of nonstop fishing. Oppressed by my penury, and soon jangled as hell from trying to buck myself up with multiple espressos, I placed my unwashably grass-stained fingers on the old typewriter’s keys and sent Gus dutifully forth on another adventure. But we were not in sync. All I could think was: Why does this navel-gazing melancholiac gripe so much? And why does he end up with the beautiful Eddy? If Gus finds the mesmerizing river and regal stand of cedars and pleasingly quirky neighbors and lovely cabin I built for him depressing, why doesn’t he move the hell out and let me take his place?

  Another problem on this particular March day: the creeks and rivers all over northwest Oregon had dropped after several weeks of rain, and even poor Johnson Creek had turned the magically suggestive color that Gus calls “anadromous green.” I knew there were fresh steelhead in the Sandy and Clackamas Rivers forty miles from my shack. But I also knew my penury could not be solved by my own fishing, so clackety clack whack went the typewriter as Gus went fishing. To aggravate matters, Gus fished with exquisite split-cane bamboo rods and beautiful custom graphites he built for himself, whereas I had broken my one and only cheesy Army-Navy surplus flyrod on a fall chinook four months previous, then spent the money I was saving for a new rod on the new lawn mower. Yet, down in my manuscript, it was Gus who kept complaining about his life! I couldn’t believe my future depended upon this fucking guy!

  Bent over the typewriter, resisting the temptation to whip up a sudden windstorm, drop a tree limb on my protagonist’s head, write THE END, and go fishing myself, I sent Gus back to the Tamanawis, where he caught a bunch of beautiful fish. Typing him back to his cabin, I fed him a T-bone steak I couldn’t afford, the bone of which I considered splintering and lodging sideways in his throat. You can’t off me, Lawn Boy! Gus laughed up out of the page. I’m your one chance
at getting out of the lawn business. Pour me another drink, why don’t you, then put me to bed. But grab my journal for me first—I feel like doing some more philosophical whining! Then, in the morning when you go mowing, remember, I’m going fishing again. Hup-hup! Get typing, asshole!

  MAN had I had too much coffee! Leaving my desk, I strolled outside, found a light drizzle falling, and walked through the rain to the banks of my tragic home water: twenty-six miles of suburb-draining semisewer, originating in onomatopoeic Boring, Oregon. I heaved a sigh. A mallard and a few plastic ziplock bags floated by in bizarre formation.

  You know what? a voice piped up. You’re the whiner! I only whine because you’re the one doing the typing. Look at this gorgeous anadromous green water right in front of you. Face the fact that you don’t have to mow lawns today, stop complaining, and go fishing. To catch something out of this semisewer with whatever wrecked rod and reel you own would be epic! Where’s your prowess? Your imagination? Your spine?

  Not only did I realize that my protagonist was now writing my life, I realized he was right.

  I darted to my toolshed, rummaged behind the plywood, found a little fiberglass trout pole saved since boyhood, and inspected it. Only two guides missing. A hundred or so yards of decrepit six-pound test monofilament on the Mitchell 300 reel with the handle so bent the bail banged the skin off my knuckles when I reeled it. Perfect! Gus shouted.