The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Dombrowski is the author of The River You Touch. He is also the author of Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Elusive Fish, and of three acclaimed collections of poems. Currently the Assistant Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana, he lives with his family in Missoula.

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Boat Made of Words:

A Preface

In its singular liquid tongue a river converses with the earth it shapes and is shaped by, and more subtly with the creatures it houses and helps flourish. If coaxed, I might maintain that a river will upon occasion speak directly to the human creatures that traffic its currents. This is the kind of talk that causes my rational friends to duck me at parties, I realize, and my own family to groan a collective here-we-go-again at the dinner table.  During my twenty-four seasons as a river guide, though, I’ve witnessed a passel of uncanny occurrences and keep a journal of sorts, a chronicle of what I call river kismet, examples of a connectivity that is likely constant, but which tends to evade someone like me who is overly attuned to his inner landscape.

I have spent thousands of days on moving water, as much of my adult life there as on solid ground, yet have ascertained relatively little of the language that rivers speak.

One crude translation of the currents’ mantra: Now and here and now and here and now and here

Another: this just this just this just this just this…(I WOULD LIKE THE INK TO FADE OUT HERE)

At its uppermost source, this book began as a love song to rivers and the land they pulse through like veins. “Land” here means everything from the cloud-hung peaks down to our toenails, antlers, and beaks made of reconstituted earth; means the ever-evolving relationships between these things; means us. As the songwriter Jeffrey Foucault once told me, “A true love song succeeds on the element of doubt.” Per Foucault’s prerequisite this oarsman’s ode is rife with apprehension: a young father’s fear of ushering children into a periled world, his awareness of his own complicity in the destruction of that which he claims to adore, as well as that pervading sense of dread that seems a preexisting condition in our overinformed epoch. 

But as a wise elder once remarked, our doubts are our traitors. It is of course easier to nestle beneath the goose down comforter of irony in our age of complicity than to entertain the hard questions. “What does a meaningful, mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the Anthropocene?” is no longer an academic question but rather a necessary qualifier to each step we take. For answers, we who have proven ourselves such untrustworthy stewards of our home might look to what Barry Lopez called “myriad enduring relationships of the landscape” – to our predecessors, in other words, whose voices are the bells that must sound before any gritty ceremony of community can truly begin. Whether we accept it or not, the land itself is our earliest predecessor, the main character of all our stories, and listening to it, after all, is not a one-time undertaking but a practice.

Lest I imply the use of shoddy metaphysics here: by “listening,” I refer to direct contact, engagement, what the forager Jenna Rozelle calls the “primacy of immediate experience.” The callouses on palms formed by friction between human skin and oar handle; shoulder and abdominal muscles straining to pull oar blade through current; the oar stroke negotiating with the wave train’s brute liquid force. After years of such physical dialogue, I have come to know a single Montana watershed—four rivers that join to form a larger fifth—better than I know most of my human acquaintances, which is to say I am intimate with this watershed’s daily and seasonal rhythms, and altered by the way it has moved around and through me.

Despite the non-traditional lifestyle that my occupation affords, however, I have lately fallen prey to the plague of screens and a generic brand of informed cynicism, to an existence that appears rife with concentration, but is in truth fragmented, and increasingly scarce in profound impression. I live among the homogenized throngs chained to the assumption that our moment-to-moment ability to “virtually connect” literally connects us, but as our collective actions exhibit, we have failed to truly comprehend our infinite ties. What are we if not inextricably linked, and yet blind to this blunt fact? Day by day, at nearly mythic speed, our failure to face this truth issues forth bold consequences.

Pre-fatherhood, I might have blamed my succumbing to such trends on domesticity, but there is nothing as wild and vital in my life as our children: three free beings in whom flourishes an essential kind of knowing, what David Abram called “a sensorial empathy for the living land” that is contagious, if we allow it to be, and whose capacity for wonder may be the beacon by which we see ourselves through this dark epoch. The faculty of wonder—which is in this context, simply the unsentimental ability to identify with astonishment the Earth and its inhabitants as relational—is as diminishing as quickly as any endangered species. If it vanishes as an inevitable byproduct of decreased direct encounters with the physical world, so too may go the instinct to protect the very places that sustain us.

By purest chance, our family has come to live a few hundred yards from just such a place, a creek called Rattlesnake that descends from peaks and snow-fed lakes in an undeveloped wilderness, and flows, by way of the Clark Fork of the Columbia, to the Pacific. On summer days, especially these recent blowtorch-hot ones, we swim in the creek nearly every afternoon. I call it “our creek,” a phrase that I realize is rife with post-colonial complications, I realize, because it is our creek: mine and yours and whomever swam in it before, human beings of all ages and genders, trout and whitefish, deer and elk and bear, may- and caddis- and stone-flies, leeches and dragonflies, ouzels and migratory ducks, gloriously interpenetrated from time immemorial by native species and invasive ones alike.

Most evenings after guiding I walk leisurely down to the swimming hole, taking a steep tight trail on the west bank over the bulbous roots of cottonwoods, a cumbersome and shady way the kids call the “elf path”. But other days, as when I’ve been watching the news on my phone, I have to bike down, so desperate am I for a brief immersion, the icy kick of an elemental martini, what my grandmother would have called “a good belt.” This drought-racked August has been particularly choked with haze from forest fires, embers blown all the way from California or Washington: “Not our smoke,” I’m tempted to say, except that it’s all our smoke, and I refuse to indulge another foolish round of us-versus-them.   

One recent morning we took a chilly family dip in the creek, all feral five of us, then jumped into the car and followed the floodplain down Interstate 90, aimed west when the big river bent north, and wound through the beetle-blighted forests and over two steep passes, across the Palouse and parched agricultural plains, up and over another mountain pass, then finally down through sprawl, city, and more sprawl, until we eventually reached the Pacific. Good friends were there to greet us on the gravelly shore of a bay with a meal of fresh-caught Dungeness crab and...