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The Forms and Faces of Love
My Story as Told by Water:
Confessions, Druidic rants, reflections, bird-watchings, fish-stalkings, visions, songs and prayers refracting light, from living rivers, in the age of the industrial dark
by David James Duncan
Sierra Club Books, 282 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by Brian Doyle
David James Duncan is many men. He is a novelist whose The River Why is ranked by The San Francisco Chronicle as thirty-fifth among the twentieth century’s 100 best books about the American West, and whose The Brothers K was lauded by The New York Times and the American Library Association. He is an essayist whose graceful prose appears in such journals as Harper’s and Orion. He is a literate fly fisherman in the vein of Norman Maclean and Thomas McGuane, publishing articles in such piscine periodicals as Gray’s Sporting Journal. And he is a ferocious, furious, and occasionally hilarious environmental activist, publishing bristling rants and icily reasoned articles in green venues like Sierra.
All of these personas are combined in My Story as Told by Water, a selection of his recent essays and articles in which Duncan brings all his storytelling tools to bear: his novelist’s gift for sketching a whole character in a line (the late Richard Hugo too drunk to stand and read his own work, but not too drunk to correct someone else reading it for him), his journalist’s eye for the telling fact (current mining regulations in America were signed into law by Ulysses Grant), his humorist’s ear for peculiar simile (he crawls toward a promising trout pool “with the caution of Mary Tyler Moore crawling across a floor covered with thousands of baby gerbils”), his environmentalist’s fury at the fouling of Western rivers once crammed bank to bank with salmon, the great signature fish of the Pacific slope.
The thematic unity of My Story is “living waters,” as Duncan notes again and again, and the book is in part a memoir of his love affairs with rivers, creeks, streams, rivulets, riffles, rapids, pools, and eddies -- from the homemade one he created with a garden hose as a boy in Oregon to the cold mountain waters he now wades in Montana. From early boyhood he was fishing at every chance.
Every trip was an ecstasy for me. Each time out I saw places so beautiful I lost all interest in the gold gewgaws of heaven. And the cast of characters! Raven! Meadowlark! Prairie falcon! Osprey! Eagle! Black bear! Coyote! Porcupine! Beaver! Cougar! Bullsnake! Rattlesnake! Chinook! Steelhead! Sockeye! Lamprey! Sturgeon! Desert Rainbow! Salmonfly! Grasshopper! Mayfly! Lupine! Forget-me-not! Black-eyed Susan! I caught fish so magnificent that just to touch them was a healing. . . . When my father would end these communions with a chipper “Time to head home!” I’d unashamedly weep.
So began a lifetime of fly-fishing in creeks and rivers -- a craft and art and passion that inevitably made Duncan aware of the corporate, state, and federal passion for fouling and damming those same formerly living waters. From nuclear plant leakage into the Columbia River to the damming of the Snake River so that Lewiston, Idaho (450 miles inland) could be a “seaport,” from a fish-killing dam on Nevada’s Truckee River to a horrifying prospective cyanide-leach gold mine on Montana’s Big Blackfoot River (made famous by Norman Maclean’s novel A River Runs Through It and the subsequent Robert Redford film), the story of water and the West has very often been the killing of rivers and their denizens, often for private gain and not for public good by any definition of the term.
Two of the best pieces in My Story are meticulous and angry analyses of this public/private argument, in the cases of the four Snake dams and the Blackfoot gold mine project. The Snake dams, providing only 3.5% of the Northwest’s hydropower and “of the same vintage of federal pathology that gave us . . . 3.5 trillion lethal doses of nerve agent released by the Pentagon into Mormon- and Navajo-populated deserts . . . and a present-day epidemic of cancers,” all but killed salmon runs in the Snake, prop up a “seaport” economy in Lewiston that would be bankrupt without federal and state subsidy, and prevent a recovered fishery that would generate some 20,000 local jobs and $2 billion in new money annually to the region. The Blackfoot gold mine would have poured millions of gallons of cyanide-laced water into the river, poisoning every creature for miles. The mine was defeated, in part, by a 1998 Montana ballot initiative banning cyanide mining in the state; the Snake River dams, however, still stand, and -- given the current power woes in the West -- will stand for years to come.
The prime virtue of David Duncan’s new work, though, isn’t his razor-tongued skill for journalism; it’s his eloquence and passion as an essayist of the natural world, of spiritual truth to be found outdoors, of the grace and courage of animals and human beings. For all its focused fury, My Story as Told by Water is ultimately about the many forms and faces of love, and Duncan proves himself to be an able and articulate chronicler of our species’ primary art -- how we love.
Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author of two essay collections: Credo, and with his father Jim Doyle, Two Voices. His essays are included in The Best American Essays anthologies of 1998 and 1999. He has recently written about Van Morrison in The American Scholar and Robert Louis Stevenson in The Atlantic Monthly.
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