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

In his own words, David James Duncan was "struck by a boyhood suspicion that rivers and mountains are myself turned inside out. I'd heard at church that the kingdom of heaven is within us and thought, Yeah, sure. But the first time I walked up a trout stream, fly rod in hand, I didn't feel I was 'outside' at I was traveling further and further in." An estimated three thousand river walks later comes My Story as Told by Water , in which Duncan braids his contemplative, activist, and rhapsodic voices together into an irresistibly distinctive whole, speaking with a power and urgency that will recharge our national appreciation of the vital connections between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet.

Offering a wide-ranging, contemplative exploration of the rivers that touch his life, Duncan backs his insights with a fierce defense of the sacred cultures and fauna that living waters sustain. With a bracing blend of story, logic, science, and comedy, he dissects the hollow industrial platitudes that lead to the ruin of publicly owned rivers for private profit. Standing up for the river made famous by the pen of his neighbor, Norman Maclean, Duncan exposes America's anachronistic federal mining policy and the devastating cyanide technology to which it has led. As an advocate for the bankrupted fishing towns, Native tribes, and unraveling web of life of the Pacific Northwest, he lays bare our biological and religious obligation to breach four of the Columbia and the Snake rivers' 221 massive dams to save wild salmon. Yet Duncan centers even his darkest explorations in the joys, gratitude, and wonder that walking rivers, rod in hand, provides him.

Here is a brilliant writer revealing captivating speculations on being born lost, on the discovery of water, on wading as pilgrimage, coho as interior compass, and industrial creeks as blues tunes. Here are rivers perceived as prayer wheels, dying birds as prophets, salmon as life-givers, brown trout as role models, wilderness as our true home, wonder as true ownership, and justice as biologically and spiritually inescapable.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Essays, Memoir, Environment, Philosophy, Religion

304 pages, Hardcover

First published July 17, 2001

About the author

David James Duncan (born 1952) is an American novelist and essayist, best known for his two bestselling novels, The River Why (1983) and The Brothers K (1992). Both involve fly fishing, baseball, and family.

Both received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers award; The Brothers K was a New York Times Notable Book in 1992 and won a Best Books Award from the American Library Association.

Film adaptation
In 2008, The River Why was adapted into a "low-budget film" of the same name starring William Hurt and Amber Heard. Since April 30, 2008, the film rights to The River Why have become the subject of a lawsuit by Duncan alleging copyright infringement, among other issues.


Other works
Duncan has written a collection of short stories, River Teeth (1996), and a memoir of sorts, My Story As Told By Water (2001). His latest work is God Laughs and Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right, published in 2006.

An essay, "Bird Watching as a Blood Sport", appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1998; Duncan wrote the foreword to Thoreau on Water: Reflecting Heaven (2001).

An essay, "A Mickey Mantle koan: The obstinate grip of an autographed baseball" appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1992.

Personal life
Duncan was born in Portland, Oregon and lives in Missoula County, Montana.

Reviews

[Jonathan Hiskes · Rating 5 out of 5]

With some books, I have no idea what to say about them. Those are the ones I love the best. This one floods the heart, so it feels silly to speak about it from the mind.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

From description of the beached Western Grebe struggling for life mentioned early on, to the virile brown trout attempting to spawn but held fast between Duncan's hands on the last page -- a truly compelling clarion call for cynical, retreating nature-lovers such as myself to retain hope for survival of our world's natural wonders.

[Carson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic book. It took me a long time to read because every single essay is so evocative, so richly thought-provoking, that I could only read one at a time, set the book aside, and think about it for a while. David James Duncan is one of my new favorite writers. Funny, wise, and at times scathingly angry about the destruction of the rivers he calls home, this book is a must read for anyone who wants a reminder of how powerful words can be.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Duncan describes himself as a River Soldier working for God. This fiction writer (The River Why, one of the SF Chronicle's The 20th Century's 100 Best Books of the American West) was driven to activism and nonfiction by despair over the condition of our rivers and the plight of our fish, the Salmon in particular.

I now know about cyanide gold mining (don't buy gold, you all), river destruction and the interrupted life cycle (from mountain to ocean)and life of the salmon. I also appreciate flyfishers, now, even though I don't want to be one.

David Duncan is a river obsessed, dam hating, fish loving poet, philosopher, naturalist and eco-environmentalist.

Favorite quote: "A court in Idaho recently ruled that though the Nez Perce have a right to fish in usual and accustomed rivers, they have no right to ask white irrigators to leave water in those rivers."

[Daven · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my favorite books

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really two books of essays: beautiful vignettes of Duncan's love and passion for flyfishing, the fish and the places he has fished his whole life in the northwest; and his socio-political activism to preserve those fish and the places they need to exist, particularly including the rivers of the northwest that have been decimated by dams in the last century. My own biases are, of course, in precisely the same veins: I simply love and cherish flyfishing and the places where I fish, and I have been involved in the long-term effort to remove the dams on the Snake River, in particular, before the salmon and steelhead runs completely disappear forever (they are now 90+% gone).

Duncan's words evoke the smiles and wondrous feelings of oneness with nature that flyfishing on the northwest rivers has always brought me, and the strength of his rants (albeit with factual support) against the dams and the destruction of fish habitat (and everything in nature that the fish support) match my own feelings.

Thank you for another brilliant work of prose and poetry, Mr. Duncan!

[Kayla Heinze · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is going to ruin reading for me for a while. what spectacular, living rivers of wisdom and love exist in these stories.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was excited to read this book because I LOVED 'The River Why' and 'The Brothers K'...but I was honestly a bit disappointed. I appreciate his quest to tell the story of the dams and mining exploits that are killing waterways, but I like it better when he does it in the form of a good novel instead of a preachy memoir.

[Dave Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much liked this collection of essays, but because it was a collection, rating it is difficult. Some essays were 5+ others a 3, but a very insightful look at conservation.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everything you probably need to know about David James Duncan's collection of essays, My Story as told by Water is all there in its 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. Pretty much anything you need to know about Duncan's writing is there in that subtitle. It's wordy, flecked with humor, obsessed with a near religious fervor with fish, fishing, and rivers, and spiritual too. The only thing missing is baseball. I've loved Duncan's past writings. I love the way he wends and winds his way around and through what he wants to say. I love how he uses his full arsenal to tell a wicked story. I love that in his fiction. I loved it less in this collection of his non-fiction writing. And maybe my enthusiasm for his novels have clouded how I feel about this here. He addresses it, the tension between his fiction and non-fiction writerly self, and as he gets more caught up in "frenzy" (as he puts it) of his passions, saving the rivers and fish (all good and worthy causes), his non-fiction side has been winning (see: Rants). His clear passion starts to make his writing feel bogged down. What he can accomplish in his fiction is symphonic, and I may be selfish in this, but I would like, no, love, to see his writerly fiction side start to win again. But this book was originally published 18 years ago, with no new novel published to date. I'll wait.

[Colby Holloway · Rating 3 out of 5]

My story as told by water is a deceptive title, for that describes well the first 100 or so pages, but then the books takes a hard left and spends about another hundred pages republishing various activism articles he has written over the years, before ending with some mystical ruminations inspired by his time romping around rivers. While I enjoyed every section and found the activism section really interesting, I was fairly disappointed when the strong beginning failed to land the the title failed to materialize into a fully fleshed out story. But I suppose I may now learn my lesson and read the table of contents before I launch into my assumptions, I hate spoilers but sometimes there helpful to properly set my expectations. All in all, I can say I certainly have a greater appreciation for fish and skepticism towards the effectiveness of dams.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did you know that fishermen and hunters were the first environmentalists? Take for example Teddy Roosevelt, serious hunter, and serious conservationist. (TR's conservationism is how we got Yellowstone National Park and Yosemite National Park, for starters.) The concept of fishermen/hunters as environmentalists has often confused me, as a vegetarian, and I've often quipped, "We want to save 'em...so we can kill 'em!"

After reading My Story as Told by Water this paradox seems much more plausible. After all, without healthy habitat, wildlife would cease to be abundant. And not all fishermen aim to kill—that's not necessarily what they enjoy most about the activity. In 2010, Henry Winkler was promoting his book I've Never Met an Idiot on the River: Reflections on Family, Fishing, and Photography and when interviewed on "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" (NPR) he talked about how he always catches to release during his annual fishing trips to Montana. He is on the river for more inward reasons—complete focus on one activity, thinking like a fish, that sort of thing.

Looking for an A to B to C trajectory in your environmentalist memoirs? Nothing to see here. This book meanders around like the rivers Duncan waxes philosophic about throughout. In the beginning he's recalling his childhood, but before you know it he's including a speech given to a group of steelheaders (I'm going to assume this was Oregon Steelheaders) on the Sternwheeler while it paddled up and down the Columbia River. Then he's ranting about cyanide leach mining, in a piece that feels in many regards dated considering this book's release 15 years ago. Then he's including a piece of fiction which is a thinly veiled story (although quite amusing!) about the aforementioned method of mining. Ranting again, about damming the Snake River. Offering advice on how to get along with people who claim wildly different political views. Then recalling a dream where he helps Sherman Alexie catch an enormously large fish. Including a rejected essay about his favorite fishing guide, who happens to be invisible—framed by a conversation with the fishing magazine editor who called him to reject it.

I suppose since I was expecting a more singular story (and was quite enthralled by his discussion of his early personal life in my hometown of Portland, and why he chose to move to the place I'd like to move), the jumps around weren't really my thing. Talking about fishing wasn't really my thing, although my understanding of fishing in general has increased since reading A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Of course, now living a stone's through from Maclean's stomping grounds and sharing a passion for fishing, Duncan gets compared to Maclean an awful lot, but also uses Maclean's most famous piece as a touchstone in the book.

Since there's a LOT in the book, I'd say there's probably something for everyone, including people who may not otherwise read a book published by the Sierra Club. Personally, my favorite parts of the book were when he talks about his childhood in Portland, Oregon. He speaks of places I know, and his narrative serves as an oral history of the development of East Multnomah County in the post-war years:
I felt so panic-stricken by Fairview Creek's death that I tried—as if attempting to keep a stranded fish alive in a bucket—to transfer my need for water, whole, to the other stream in easy driving distance: Johnson Creek, source of my first glimpse of a coho and an inner realm. But a decade and fifty thousand industrious new human inhabitants had been murder on this old friend, too. I encountered none of the magic of Fairview Creek, little of the wildlife, no native fish species, few of the birds. Johnson Creek's only catchable trout were drab hatchery rainbows, planted in March by Fish and Wildlife to entertain local yokels on the April Opening Day. By May, no one fished for them because the same Fish and Wildlife people pronounced them too toxic to eat.
(I live about three blocks from Johnson Creek, and the story of the creek is the story of man attempting to interfere with nature. As I write, it continues: the City of Portland has been working to "restore" certain stretches along the creek. In the case of the stretch they're currently working on, this has required diverting the creek...which is how Fairview Creek died in the author's narrative.)

Duncan also tells of how he came to live in Montana. As a person who spent six months in Missoula and who is now convinced her hometown is just not good enough anymore, I found Duncan's words in "Who Owns the West Wrong Answer #3: The Personal Geography" to ring true for me: "...just as the Hudson is as far west as Joe can go without ceasing to be the Manhattanite he is, so the Continental Divide is as far east as I can go without ceasing to be me." And of course when Duncan calls upon Norman Mclean, he includes the universally acknowledged truth: "the world...[is] full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana."
Duncan eventually moved from Portland to Tillamook County and then settled in Lolo, which is just eight miles south of Missoula. So he knows. : )

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this author's combination of science, history, keenly-observed nature memoir, and often-hilarious self reflection. His writing is distinctly flavored by his interest in eastern religions, which I appreciate, and he knows his way around Christian metaphors, too.

As another reviewer described, it took me ages to read this (years!) because I kept having to stop... to recall my own near-religious experiences in nature, to reflect on modern man's unfortunate habit of ruining things, and/or to check the latest on various dam removal projects. I will confess that the essays that went deep into the politics and advocacy or river restoration were the hardest for me to get through; even though I know this is really importantant stuff, it just doesn't sing the way his other writing does.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I fell in love with The River Why, and it will always hold a special place in my part. Since then I've also enjoyed quite a few of Duncan's other books and collections. I'd previously read some of the essays here (or maybe all?), and while there were certainly plenty of bright spots, the truth is I've read an awful lot of naturalist writing, and as such, my definition of success continues to evolve into something more and more difficult to attain.

This was fine, I guess is what I'm saying. Plenty of great moments, but mostly, just fine. If you need naturalist recommendations, I can think of better work.

[3 stars for adequacy combined with the aforementioned bright spots.]

[Bryan Kahlen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Duncan's writing has a conversational flow and energy that not many other writers have. His appreciation of the Northwest and anti-industrial opinions are admirable. I hope he publishes his next novel soon. It would be interesting to read what he has to say in fictional form since his last novel nearly 30 years ago.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to believe that a 20+ year old selection of essays would touch me this much, but I suppose it's because Duncan is so passionate about things I care about as well: conservation, specifically rivers, and even more specifically salmon and fly fishing. Plus he is an amazing (if occcasionally over-the-top) writer.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book after visiting and falling in love with the Pacific Northwest, especially the water. I absolutely loved the essays in the first half of this book, many of them about nature and wonder and all the complicated things humans think and feel. Towards the end of the book there were too many essays about fishing that were harder for me to relate to.

[Steve Congdon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not his best but still quite enjoyable; an impassioned reverence for salmon, trout and steelhead who (can't use the reflexive pronoun 'that' here cuz Duncan sees these as fellow travelers of the planet) are watching their rivers and lakes being destroyed by corporate America.

[Mossy Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike the novels, this work is much more specifically geared to fly fishers- soulful fly fishers at that. ( With every pun intended) Duncan sets the hook in that particular reader. Intense connection.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are books you read that, even in your later years, you feel you have known all your life. This is such a book. I ached reading every page. DJD has such a remarkable way of stirring the deepest reverence for life with the most irreverent prose.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fly fishing, environmental advocacy, childhood memories, and philosophy combine for an enjoyable read.

[Darren Hawkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

His life reflection pieces are great. His "non-fiction" (most of the book) consists of pissed-off populist screeds.

[Ronald Mackay]

T

[Kai Morse Plies · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read about 2/3 of this and had to stop because it was too depressing. The writing and stories are excellent. I will pick it up again someday.

[James Worth · Rating 4 out of 5]

deeply resonant. funny, hearty, moving, still-ing. i’ll be sitting with this one for a long time.

[Kestrel · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[smellyhank · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think about this book almost on the daily.

If there was a best part of grad school, it was this!!

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

God-tier literature of place, a beacon in the industrial dark.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Story as Told by Water covers a varied terrain ranging from environmental activism to the virtues of fly-fishing without a hired guide. The book is really a collection of essays (many published in other books and periodicals) about rivers in the Northwestern United States. Duncan shares much of his early life growing up in neighborhoods just beyond the growing tentacles of Portland, Oregon. He writes openly about this family, including his bitter confrontation over the war in Vietnam with his dad, and the loss of his brother. Given such a backdrop, it's easy to understand how Duncan turned to the solitude of fishing local streams to deal with the pain of his youth.

Later in the book, Duncan finds his stride writing about the not-so-bright outlook facing wild salmon along the Columbia and Snake Rivers. You can almost feel the tears welling up in his eyes as he describes their near exit from his world. He sums up the disaster of the salmon run on the Snake River this way: "The babble of `salmon management' rhetoric has taken a river of prayful human yearning, diverted it into a thousand word-filled ditches, and run it over alkali. When migratory creatures are prevented from migrating, they are no longer migratory creatures: they're kidnap victims. The name of the living vessel in which wild salmon evolved and still thrive is not `fish bypass system,' `smolt-deflecting diversionary strobe light,' or `barge.' It is River."

Duncan opens his heart to the connections he has to rivers and wild fish. But more importantly, he gives us inspiration for making our own connections to those wild places.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

"At its worst, a big move like mine is a kind of death. At its best, though, such a move is a rebirth. I have tried to keep quiet about this second discovery, for the same reason that those of us who believe in marriage try, around strained, married friends, to keep quiet about the joy of divorce. At times, though - seeing the strained or grief-stricken or irate expressions of Montanans who know what's happening to their place from a perspective of decades or of generations - I feel as though my non sense of place is one of the most valuable things I own. As a forty-four-year-old man but only a three-year-old Montanan, my experience of Montana is as much like that of a three-year-old as it is like that of a grown man." pp. 49-50

"True home places are like true loves. I imagine a lucky individual could experience three or four such places. I imagine a lucky individual could experience three or four such places." p. 50

"...I feel this bowl is the most accurate gift I've managed to give her. I loved giving her a bowl because bowls are beautiful but also as humble, utilitarian, handmade, and breakable as a marriage. I loved giving her a bowl because now both of us, our two daughters, and even our dog eat out of it, as if out of the marriage." p. 74

"Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love, and I sometimes wonder whether there's a difference; maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved." p. 88