In this remarkable collection of essays, acclaimed author David James Duncan braids his contemplative, rhapsodic, and activist voices together into a potently distinctive whole, speaking with power and urgency about the vital connections between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet. All twenty-two pieces in this collection swirl and eddy around his early-forged bond with the rivers of the Pacific Northwest and their endangered native salmon. With a bracing blend of story, science, and comedy, Duncan relates mystical, life-changing adventures; draws incisive portraits of the humans and wild creatures who shaped his destiny; rips the corporate greed and political folly that have brought whole ecosystems to ruin; and meditates on the spiritual and practical necessity of acknowledging our dependence on water in its primal state.
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When David James Duncan was growing up in suburban Portland, Oregon, he had no river to call his own, so he would routinely create one by flooding his mother's garden with a hose. He would then revel in his creation until he received the inevitable scolding. The poor kid couldn't help himself: "Running water ... felt as necessary to me as food, sleep, parents, and air," he explains. In time, he exchanged his nozzle for a fly rod and went in search of grander gardens, eventually developing an "interior coho compass" which he has traveled by ever since.
As any reader of The River Why knows, Duncan is a master of the art of writing about fishing--which is also to say life, since the two for him are indelibly linked. But these essays deal with far more than leaky waders and rising trout. Part memoir, part activist treatise, My Story As Told by Water is Duncan's love song to wild places and the creatures which inhabit them. The book's highlight is his powerfully convincing essay "A Prayer for the Salmon's Second Coming," in which he argues that saving salmon is crucial to both man and fish alike: "A 'modern Northwest' that cannot support salmon is unlikely to support 'modern Northwesterners' for long," he writes. In this elegant demand for the removal of four Snake River dams (out of 221 on the Snake/Columbia system), Duncan declares the wild salmon "a holiness, a divine gift," a role model rather than a resource: "Salmon are a light darting not just through water, but through the human mind and heart. Salmon help shield us from fear of death by showing us how to follow our course without fear, and how to give ourselves for the sake of things greater than ourselves."
He also ruminates on the true meanings of "place" and "home"; offers a fable on the 1872 Mining Act, "the most anachronistic and devastating piece of 'corporate welfare' in the world"; and details how Montanans rallied to prevent a giant mining company from extracting gold near the Blackfoot River, the setting of the Norman Maclean classic A River Runs Through It. All in all, My Story As Told by Water is a moving collection by an exquisite writer endowed with wit, compassion, and the rare ability to appeal to both emotion and reason in equal measures. --Shawn Carkonen --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
For a book that's cobbled together from essays that have appeared in such engagingly eclectic sources as the Patagonia clothing catalogue, Harper's, Gray's Sporting Journal and the New York Times, there's an engaging coherence to Duncan's 22 angry, heartbroken, yet hopeful and often quite comic nature essays. The author, whose 1983 debut novel, The River Why, became an enduring fly-fishing classic, holds the reader with the power of his unabashed passion for America's watersheds, particularly in the north and west. It's a lifelong appreciation that dates back to the days when, as a boy, he built his own wee rivers in the backyard. Sounding a clarion call to conservation activism, Duncan eloquently explains why clean, free-running water matters: just as we die without good water, so does the earth. Yet his unabashed polemic is nicely cushioned by rhapsody; he's the ranter as poet. "The War for Norman's River" (i.e., the Blackfoot River, central to Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It) is both a searing indictment of mining company predation and a celebration of citizens' power. In other chapters, he damns dams, lovingly eulogizes philosopher Henry Bugbee, acidly parodies the "anachronistic and devastating" 1872 Mining Act and, in a set of essays closing out the book, "Fishing the Inside Passage," makes the connection between the spirit of the land and the spirit of humankind. The sum of these many pieces is a vital whole.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Duncan's "Water" runs deep.,
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This review is from: My Story as Told by Water (Hardcover)
"I am haunted by water" (p. 132), David James Duncan writes in this collection of 21 essays. I discovered Duncan when two of his essays included here, "Who Owns the West?" and "god," appeared in The Sun magazine. It is no surprise that this book is a finalist for the National Book Award. Part memoir, part contemplative, wilderness love story, Duncan's STORY AS TOLD BY WATER runs deep. For Duncan, "trees and mountains are holy. Rain and rivers are holy. Salmon are holy. For this reason alone I will fight with all my might to keep them alive" (p. 107).Duncan suspected, as a boy, "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 all; I was traveling further and further in." The wonders of his boyhood world, he writes, "the things that filled me at first sight with awe and yearning--were, in order of preference, (1) Rivers, (2) Mountains, (3) Ancient Forest, (4) the Ocean, and (5) Cute Girls (p. 9). In these essays, Duncan follows his "interior coho compass" (p. 13) through countless river walks, from Portland to Montana. Along the way, he discovers rivers are his "prayer wheels," and his "true home is wilderness" (p. 93). "Capitalist fundamentalism," he believes, "is the perfect Techno-Industrial religion, its goal being a planet upon which we've nothing left to worship, worry about, read, eat or love but dollar bills and Bibles" (p. 8). This is a book that moves with spiritual, passionate, insightful, and humorous currents, pulling its reader through calm, reflective moments to thrilling, white-water rants along the way. Duncan writes with the colors and sounds of nature. His STORY AS TOLD BY WATER is a story that will not only move you, it just might baptise you. G. Merritt
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
He's Done it Again,
By
This review is from: My Story as Told by Water (Hardcover)
Once again, David James Duncan captures most eloquently the inherent spirituality of nature. This collection of essays, speeches, and 1 song has moved me just as much as "The River Why", perhaps even more so, as this book is set in beautiful, raw, besieged reality. I dare you to read this book and not be inspired to make your corner of the world a little better, and a little more hospitable to every living thing. Duncan writes that he "became a nonfiction writer--after no apprenticeship whatever--at the age of 40. I did so not out of a sense of calling, but out of a sense of betrayal, out of rage over natural systems violated, out of grief for a loved world raped, and out of a craving for justice." This is the passion that forms this book, a book created in love for the rivers his writing sings for, and anger for the desecration of those same rivers. BUY THIS BOOK!
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Duncan writes with heart.,
By
This review is from: 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 (Paperback)
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.
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