reviews

My Story as Told by Water

Reviewed by Scott Richmond

My Story as Told by Water, by David James Duncan. Published by Sierra Club Books in 2001. 289 pages in a 6 x 9 inch format. $16.95 for the paperback edition. Available in trade book stores and online (google the title).

I'm just a storyteller, not a pundit," says David James Duncan early in My Story as Told by Water. He goes on to say, "I like Barry Lopez's borrowed Inuktitut definition of the storyteller as isumataq. The isumataq is 'the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.'"

A lot of atmosphere is created and a lot of wisdom is revealed in My Story as Told by Water, Duncan's collection of 21 essays. Also revealed is a deep and abiding passion for the West and fly fishing. And a pot load of anger and despair.

Consider this passage about The River Why, his famous 1983 novel of love, family, fly fishing, and the Oregon Coast:

"I would gladly give up The River Why and all it's given me if I could get back the waters that inspired the book in the first place. The irony of my love novel to rivers is that it bought me the freedom to live smack amid the betrayal of the very watersheds, wildlife, and rural rustics I'd just celebrated. I watched a political/corporate juggernaut steal the most beautiful temperate forests on earth from their 260 million rightful owners and convert them, at a huge financial loss, into muddy-rivered corporate welfare tree farms. I watched the five-specied cathedral groves, green-eyed streams, and tidewater towns that gave me my body, my life's work, my favorite form of worship, reduced to an unsustainable monoculture."

There are essays in this book that left me too upset to fall asleep, and if you love the West, in all its glory and diversity, you may feel the same way. Some chapters should not be read in bed; they will only disturb your rest.

This is to be expected if you read this book's subtitle: "Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark." As the subtitle promises--and the book delivers--there are rants. But there is much more: humor, pathos, political commentary, the search for a meaningful life, to name just a few. These meander, diverge, and eventually merge into one current of thought, flowing from the pen and the heart of a gifted writer.

This is Duncan's fourth book. If you've read the other three, The River Why, The Brothers K, and River Teeth, you know that Duncan mines the wisdom literature of other cultures and is likely to quote Hindu sages, Muslim holy men, native American shamans, and the Bible--maybe all in the same chapter. His genius is the ability to tie them together in a manner that makes sense and applies naturally to Western ecology and fly fishing.

My Story as Told by Water is divided into three sections. The first, Wonder Versus Loss, probes Duncan's early family life, introduction to fly fishing, and confrontation with the soulless industrial/developmental/political machine that set out to destroy all that he loved. That leads naturally into the second section, Activism. Here Duncan discusses everything from the nature of the word "native" to the fight to save Montana's Blackfoot River to the 1872 Mining Law.

He ends the second section with the essay Strategic Withdrawal, which sets up the third and final division, Fishing the Inside Passage. The title of this last section is a nice bit of triple meaning that suggests its contemplative thrust. Here the author talks about invisible fishing guides--Duncan is as comfortable with the metaphysical as most people are with the so-called "real world"--brown trout, and Maxima tippets.

On the concluding page, Duncan describes his feelings as he releases a trophy brown trout on an isolated Montana creek. "I've said it before: I must say it once more: there is a fire in water. There is a flame, hidden in water, that gives not heat, but life."

If fly fishing is your passion, if you care fervently about the West, you know what David James Duncan is talking about. You know how that flame burns and how it enriches your life. And you'll love reading this book. You'll agree with me that Duncan has created an atmosphere in which wisdom has revealed itself.

Bottom Line: Entertaining, humorous, and thought-provoking. Top quality work from one of our very best writers. Reviewer Rating: 5

Scott Richmond is Westfly's creator and Executive Director. He is the author of eight books on Oregon fly fishing, including Fishing Oregon's Deschutes River (second edition).

Uploaded 08/02/2004.

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