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

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 Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana, he lives with his family in Missoula.

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Preface:

At its uppermost source, this book began as a love song to the rivers on which I’ve guided for twenty-five years and the land through which they pulse 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 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 onetime undertaking but a practice.

Lest I imply some shoddy metaphysics here: “listening,” refers to direct contact, engagement, what the forager Jenna Rozelle calls the “primacy of immediate experience.” Callouses on palms formed by friction between human skin and oar handle. Shoulder muscles straining to pull oar blade through current, the oar stroke negotiating with the wave train’s brute liquid force. After thousands of days in such physical dialogue--as much of my adult life spent on moving water as on solid ground--I have come to know a single Montana watershed better than I know most of my human acquaintances, which is to say I am intimate with the rivers’ daily and seasonal rhythms, and altered by the way the watershed has moved around and through me.

Despite the nontraditional 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 that in truth is fragmented and increasingly short on 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 brings 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”--and whose capacity for wonder may be the beacon by which we see ourselves through this dark epoch. The faculty of wonder--which, in this context, is simply the unsentimental ability to identify with astonishment the earth and its inhabitants as relational--is 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 postcolonial complications, 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, mayflies and stoneflies, 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 the 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 spot prawns. Starved as we were after nearly five hundred miles in the car, though, we found the gently breaking waves too inviting to resist, and one by one we changed into our suits and dove in. Treading breathless in the chilly waters of the sound, cooled to the core after nine hours at the wheel, I pondered a deliciously unsolvable equation: How long would it take for, say, a gallon of the creek we swam in this morning to reach the same body of water we were floating in now?

Like a child, moving water is a treatise on impermanence, a constant reminder of the ungraspable. I was in my late twenties when our firstborn arrived. Suddenly (or what seemed like it), facing the far side of my forties, I found myself wondering how to properly celebrate son’s sixteenth birthday. The answer was a midnight paddle in a borrowed sea kayak on a bay come wildly alive with bioluminescence. Above us, perched somewhere in the moss-draped cedars, a heron rasped out its frightful call, and far above bird and boat, the stars convened. Somehow on this new-moon August night we had timed our paddle with the peak light emission from trillions of marine invertebrates, and as we entered the darkest recess of a cove, our paddles stirred emerald whirlpools above scintillating creatures: fracturing schools of salmon smolt, undulating moon jellyfish, and frantic backstroking...