The River Why

by David James Duncan

  I grabbed a shovel, rushed to the garden, overturned a spadeful of earth, and found a nightcrawler. More perfect! Gus hollered. Now we need weight.

  “Piece o’ cake!” I said, and raided my fly gear for the plastic tube of split shot I used to sink nymphs when I went whitefish fishin’. Now a hook, Gus urged.

  “Hmm. Been a while since I bait fished,” I admitted. “Your mother’s ruthless fish slaughtering has me so grossed-out I’ve sworn off barbed steel bait hooks for life.”

  But that anadromous green water! Gus sighed. Think of something.

  I did. I grabbed my $1.99 circular, cracked-plastic, nonwaterproof piece-of-crap steelhead fly box, pulled out a Green Butt Skunk, attacked it with a nail clipper, and renamed it the Dog Butt Skunk, as it came to resemble the half-bald skin-diseased Labrador who lived across the creek. Excellent work! Gus cried. Let’s go fishing!

  I tied the Dog Butt onto the six-pound test, apologized to the nightcrawler, severed it with my thumbnail, skewered the light-colored half upon the Dog Butt, and crimped a couple of split shot onto the line two feet up from the defiled fly.

  Go! Gus cried, and I sprinted, as shamelessly gleeful as Ma Orviston, to the deep green glide on the bend in the two-acre cornfield that half encircled my shack.

  Johnson Creek, not that long ago, was a fine little salmon and steelhead stream. Then came my species. Its twenty-six-mile length now drained the petroleum-stained streets and chemicalized lawns of some quarter-million suburbanites, and its salmon had long since disappeared. Fish kills were an annual summer event. It was a pitiable place to be pursuing fishermanly adventure. But that, according to Gus, was what made the situation potentially epic. And for once it was me, not Gus, gazing at a creek’s promising greenness, me who’d heard a few sea-run cutts still migrated up this sad little stream in early spring, me feeling the sudden rush of old-fashioned hope. Have at it! Gus advised.

  Feeling embarrassed satisfaction at the sight of the Dog Butt Skunk ’n’ Crawler, I flipped it into the top of the anadromous green run before me. It sank and began drifting past me. Not five seconds later something shockingly substantial seized the Dog Butt. I struck. What then exploded up out of the greenness, cartwheeling three feet in the air and eight feet in front of my face, was as unlikely as anything I’ve ever seen: a mint-bright female steelhead shared my troubled home waters!

  Her cartwheel, it turned out, was reconnaissance. She liked the look of my tough Portland hood so little that she bolted downstream faster than I could run, shooting under an overhanging tunnel of Himalayan briars, making my dorked Mitchell scream. I was wearing the “writer clothes” I don when my prose needs formal encouragement: leather shoes; a little wool vest with brass buttons, made in Nepal; a white thrift-store dress shirt. But I was also a lifelong Willamette Valley creek rat who’d hooked many a giant carp that made the same kind of downstream charge. I did what I’d always done: leapt into the center of the creek, landing in waist-deep water, somehow staying on my feet. I then ducked into the overhanging briar tunnel and took off after the fish.

  The steelhead was heroic. Aren’t they all? Her reverse migration didn’t end till she’d run a quarter mile, all the way down under, and past, the Southeast 55th Street Bridge. Then came the kind of seemingly canned comedic moment that no fiction writer would dare set on a page:

  Just as I slid the steelhead onto a garbage-strewn gravel bar, a Chevy van pulled into the driveway of the house across the creek from me. On the van’s roof rack: three giant Eagle Claw steelheading rods sporting expensive Ambassadeur reels. Jammed against the steamy glass side windows of the van: the hirsute faces of three steelhead fishermen, gawking at a long-haired guy in street shoes and soaked writer clothes sliding an absurdly beautiful steelhead onto the banks of the near sewer that ran through their side yard.

  The front and back windows came down simultaneously.

  “We’re just back from three days on the Coquille River,” said the driver.

  “Where we got skunked,” added the man in back.

  “What’d it hit?” asked a third man, leaning in between the other two.

  “Green Butt Skunk,” I said, leaving out the Dog Butt ’n’ Crawler details.

  “Who on earth uses a fly for bait and a dinky trout rod for steelhead?” asked the driver.

  Tell ’em, said Gus.

  “An angler named Gus Orviston suggested I try it,” I said.

  By the time I’d waded the quarter mile back upstream to my shack, the three steelheaders were shoulder-to-shoulder on the 55th Street Bridge, wielding their big Eagle Claws, strafing the ten-inch-deep riffle beneath them with the four-inch-long plugs that had understandably skunked them on the Coquille.

  Green water then proved magic in more ways. After I showered, lunched, and bent back to my writing, I discovered the Johnson Creek steelhead had left me in total harmony with Gus. It was early March on Johnson Creek and late October on the Tamanawis, but we spent the afternoon and evening fused, pouring out two of the funnier scenes in the book.

  The rest, whether or not it’s literary history, is my history. Several thousand lawns and one more totaled lawn mower later, The River Why launched my exodus to the rivers and streams beside which I have lived ever since.

  Thanks, Gus.

  II. Salmon Worship: Is It Wrong?

  A migration I see humanity dying to make is not geographical: it’s a journey from lives governed by the head to lives governed by the heart. “The way forward,” Lao-tzu observed twenty-five centuries ago, “often looks as if it went back.”

  Consider the Haida people, seven hundred miles northwest of my Upper Columbia/Snake watershed. They were decimated so fast by the smallpox and measles spread by European contact that we’re only now learning, from the restoration work of Canadian poet-scholar Robert Bringhurst and the recovering Haida themselves, that they have a verb, qing, which means to watch or to see. And for the Haida, anything that possesses eyes can qing, and not all eyes are visible. That’s why their totem carvings electrify: they depict the very eyes of the Unseen. Among the living beings who possess eyes and qing all things within their view: the Earth; her oceans, forests, mountains, skies; and every creature that lives therein. And the Haida are not unique. Faith in widespread sightedness has inspired indigenous people worldwide to revere creation because it is alive and sentient and inseparable from our own life and sentience. And that indigenousness includes my forebears, the River Tay Duncan clans of Scotland; and the likes of Eihei Dōgen, father of Soto Zen (Mountains and waters right now are the actualization of the ancient Buddha way); and the great German mystic Meister Eckhart (All creatures in their preexisting forms have been divine life forever); and the great American pagan Jim Harrison (There’s an invisible world out there—and we’re living in it).

  Ask a mainstream Christian theologian whether Earth is our mother and the sun and moon see us and the rivers talk and mountains walk and oceans sing and salmon qing us, and you’re likely to be told that you’re courting heresy via the P words: Paganism, Polytheism, and Pantheism. But to that theologian I have to say, Wait just a cotton-pickin’, tube-light-and-Bible-school-blinded, letter-of-the-law-deifying minute:

  In a cutting-edge science book based on years of painstaking research, Flotsametrics and the Floating World, oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer reveals that there are eleven great oceanic “gyres”—flow patterns—that turn out to be arranged in octaves, each spinning twice as fast as a smaller gyre alongside. And these gyres and subgyres make music. Literally. Earth’s oceans together comprise what this internationally respected scientist has demonstrated to be “a global musical instrument of prodigious range and power,” audible to devices that can translate it for our ears. The question theologians might then want to ponder is, Who is playing this prodigious instrument? Who’s got the subtlety, range, power, ability, to blow such a mighty ax? For a professed Christian, I would guess the player to be the Being whose “Spirit moved upon the face of the waters” o
n the Bible’s first page.

  A few facts for the musical-ocean-resistant theologian to ponder:

  • The word theology occurs nowhere in my King James Bible. There are two references to a Theophilus, who I believe was a Muppet on Sesame Street, but no references to theology, unless you consider it implied by the code words scribe and Pharisee.

  • In that same Bible, the words fish and rivers occur 160 times, and references to waters—from tiny wilderness springs, to the Sea of Galilee, to the oceans, to the living waters that flow from our bellies when we qing with our invisible Eye of Faith—occur many hundreds of times.

  • The primary realm of the gods in Pacific Northwest tribal and many pre-Christian European mythologies is not celestial: it is submarine. Pre-Christian Finnish and Celtic peoples, like contemporary Pacific Northwest lovers of wild salmon, didn’t yearn for a heaven: they yearned for an eternal ocean hidden inside Earth’s literally musical seas and our fathomless selves.

  When the Ocean comes to you as a lover,

  marry at once, for God’s sake!

  —Jalal al-Din Rumi

  • Every drop of rain or fresh melted snow that drips off your roof or head, all your life, shares the same yearning and music, and acts upon it, traveling oceanward.

  Why do the salmon-egg potbellies of wild alevins glow like the sun? Why did the Haida people believe the sun could see us? Why do feelings of love make human faces glow? Why do human fetuses, right after conception, look more like alevins than humans? Why does Wendell Berry say to atomic physicists, fish hatchery biologists, human clone researchers, Monsanto, “Stay out of the nuclei!”? Is the soul or heart or DNA of humans a kind of inner alevin? Is something wondrous and unidentified swimming under the surface of all of us? Is there anything we should be doing to help awaken it, if so?

  Salmon worship. Is it wrong? Is it somehow unchristian? Or on a planet where the musical oceans and rivers can’t help but starve us when our industrial spew and fossil-fueled heat assault the countless lives the waters sustain, is it crucial that all faiths revere the seas and rivers, the qinging fishes, the Buddhist mountains, the seeing skies?

  Centuries before the birth of Christ, Amergin, one of the Milesian princes who colonized Ireland, sang of a world and a way I sense nudging once more against the birth membrane. A taste of it, close to the original:

  Am gáeth i mmuir. ar domni.

  Am tond trethan i tír.

  Am fúaim mara.

  Am dam secht ndírend.

  Am séig i n-aill.

  Am dér gréne.g

  Am caín.…

  Or, as our own tongue has it:

  I am the wind on the sea,

  I am the ocean wave.

  I am the sound of the billows.

  I am the seven-horned stag.

  I am the hawk on the cliff.

  I am the dewdrop in sunlight.

  I am the fairest of flowers.

  I am the raging boar.

  I am the salmon in the deep pool.

  I am the lake on the plain.

  I am the meaning of the poem.

  I am the point of the spear.

  I am the god that makes fire in the head.

  Who levels the mountain?

  Who speaks the age of the moon?

  Who has been where the sun sleeps?

  Who, if not I?

  III. Unconditional

  On a recent river walk, rod in hand as always, I slipped across the Montana border into Idaho. I’d been casting to West Slope cutthroat, and the fishing was good, the trout big, beautiful, strong. As I strolled through a glide of water clear as air, my fisherman’s heart did a sudden somersault when I sighted, not twenty feet away, two fish easily thirty times the size of the trout I’d been happily catching and releasing.

  They were hard to accept as real. One moment the translucent river held no life-forms larger than cutthroats, sculpins, clusters of caddis flies. The next it housed two beings the size of human kids. Where had they come from? The answer sounds like a fairy tale: the far reaches of the sea. How had they arrived? Another fairy tale: by swimming 650 miles, against one of the most powerful rivers on Earth and past eight deadly dams, all the way from the Pacific. Why had they made this insanely dangerous journey? Another wonder: these colored stones and clear currents, so high above and far from the sea, once gave them life, so—though they possessed no legs, no hooves, no wings—they’d become mountain climbers, surging their way up into the Rockies, at the certain cost of their lives, to the pebbles of their birth stream.

  What does it mean to truly love one’s place upon the Earth? Is it still possible for even a wild creature—in an age as glib and sped-up and divorced from life-giving origins as ours—to form a hallowed bond to a tiny piece of stone streambed, sever that bond in an outward-bound youth, but later elect to fight, with an utter expenditure of eros and bodily might, to reclaim that bed of stone? I knelt low in the water behind two wild salmon to try and find out.

  The current swirled round half of me and all of the chinook, coming in small, uneven surges that rocked my body. It felt like riding a quiet horse. The salmon moved in rhythm with the same horse. Since they faced upstream, I did too. Mountains veed down toward the river, the shaded north-facing ridges still pocked by a little of last spring’s snow. The sun glowed red in the canyon haze before us. I saw discolored rips in the female’s tail; saw the fresh-dug excavation beneath her: the redd. Mythically far from the ocean that built and protected her, she had turned her body into a flesh-and-bone shovel and dug, in the granite spine of our continent, a home for offspring she would not live long enough to see. She laid eggs so tender the touch of a small child’s fingertip would crush them, eggs the color of setting suns. More weather front than lover, the dark, fierce-kyped male passed over those suns, raining milt down through their chosen bed of pebbles, their particular-flavored melting banks of snow. We were held, we three water creatures, in the rhythm of a lovemaking. Yet as I studied the chinooks circling, probing, tending the redd, but only incidentally brushing by each other, I realized they weren’t making love to one another: they were making love to the very land and water—to broken bits of specific mountains, flowing flakes of melted snow.

  I knew as we communed that they would soon die, their clutch of eggs orphaned in a frigid gravel womb. Winter would snap down hard, and this stream would freeze half solid. But in the ice-protected, pebble-domed sanctuary the pair had built and guarded with their last few strokes of life, the tiny eyes of alevins would appear in each sun-colored sphere. I repeat: what does it mean to truly love one’s place upon the Earth? I couldn’t stop watching, couldn’t get unhooked from the improbable plot. Till darkness fell I watched as, to 650 miles of river, to an ocean, and to the particular mountain slopes towering over each shore, they continued to give and guard their love. There is a fire in water. There is an invisible flame, hidden in water, that creates not heat but life. I felt this flame running through and past us. And I was fed, I was sated, I’d had all the fire and fish I needed when I at last rose from the water, thanked the prayer wheels that rivers are, thanked these prayerlike creatures that still somehow traverse the great wheels, and set out for my own little redd; little streamside bed; little stretch of mountain-sculpted, ocean-bound flow.

  Lolo, Montana, October 2015

  Acknowledgments

  I first published this novel thirty-four years ago. For an inanimate object to not just survive but thrive that long, it needs some odd friends—and this book for some reason continues to make them. I thank everyone who’s ever handed The River Why around till it fell to pieces, or nailed it to riverside alders on the Deschutes, or abandoned it under urban bridges for the next homeless person to find, or tied it to a cord and passed it up to the activist woman perched in the ancient spruce hoping to fend off the chainsaw, or dropped it in a river, then asked me to sign a copy that looked like baklava. At the extreme opposite end of the stewardship-of-books spectrum, I thank Barry Lopez an
d James Sowell for the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World at Texas Tech University, a remarkable collection of personal papers and manuscripts of writers who see the natural world, and the grace that sustains it, as the crucial determinants in spiritual and societal wholeness. The papers I am honored to house there include early drafts, excised chapters, and riverly and fishermanly relics from the years before and after The River Why was created.

  Mirabile dictu, the most enduring friend this novel has had is none other than Michael Pietsch. As an associate editor at Scribner’s in 1981, he set out to publish TRW but was vetoed by his director. What a hereafter in the here, thirty-five years later, to be able to present the book to Michael afresh, with little chance of veto now that he is Hachette’s CEO! And what a pleasure working with Carina Guiterman, Michael’s extremely gifted, charmingly self-deprecating assistant on this project, and the first person besides Michael to make me think it might be okay having to be a CEO!

  First, last, and forever, I thank the wild salmon and steelhead who owned our rivers first, and who conveyed this book to me, river to rod to hand to heart to Royal manual to page. W. H. Auden said, A culture is no better than its woods. I say Pacific Northwest culture is no better than the wild salmon runs that first deposited the marine nitrogen that created our woods, supporting some two hundred species of flora and fauna ranging from wildflowers and insects to orcas via that endless self-sacrifice. Salmon are the Eucharist of the tribes, the exemplars par excellence for people who experience Nature as Gift, and the living antidote to Congress and the so-called Corporate Person. We can’t know the soul-stirring company of creatures that migrate up from the ocean to enter the extreme state of vulnerability that is spawning in shallow water unless the people and governments of each watershed greet that creature with extreme compassion and sensitivity. I thank every person in possession of such compassion, and want to name a few who have touched my life: