The River You Touch
by Chris Dombrowski
Milkweed Editions
321 pages
I knew I was in for a rewarding literary adventure when I came across a question in the Preface to Chris Dombrowski’s The River You Touch: ‘What does a mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the Anthropocene?’ This isn’t the kind of question Trout Bum scribes ask; it’s a query poets ponder.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that Dombrowski was a poet before he wrote his first fishing book—Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker and the World’s Most Elusive Fish—which cast angling biography from a new mold. It stands to reason, then, that his second offering would expand the conventions of the memoir. The closest angling memoir to The River You Touch I know of is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected, written by Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy, not to mention an ardent fly fisherman, who views the universe through the eyes of wild trout.
Before leaving the wrong impression that Dombrowski’s memoir is a turgid metaphysical treatise on the meaning of angling, let me backtrack. Tracing the paths of Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane, both of whom have written eloquently about rivers, fish and fishing, Dombrowki left Michigan for Montana ‘in search of wild trout [and] vast systems of unfettered freestone water.’ He acknowledges his debt by writing insightfully and tenderly about Harrison—who was celebrated as a fiction writer, poet, essayist, gourmand and outdoorsman before his death in the spring of 2016—based on a friendship that deepened over time both on and off the water.
After guiding and augmenting his income through odd jobs for more than two decades, Dombrowski made his way to the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana, where he now serves as assistant director. All the while, he has lived in Missoula with his schoolteacher wife, Mary, and three children. Each plays a prominent role in the memoir.
The River You Touch is essentially a meditation on place which, in turn, shapes character and defines personality. The place in question is the Columbia watershed which Dombrowski comes to know intimately as a sacred ‘covenant’ and which encompasses his home and family, his small-footprint lifestyle and ‘river-hewn’ friends including guides, conservationists and wildlife biologists. All are circumscribed by his love and concern for our beleaguered planet.
With a poet’s sympathetic eye and felicity with words, Dombrowski gives tactile, sensuous expression to Montana in all its manifold colours, tones, textures and moods. This is ‘the grace of landscape’ writ with passion, understanding and appreciation. His insights into the material world often springboard to lofter observations. For example: ‘While I’m stimulated to no apparent end by the sight of rivers, it is their audible reverberations that strike the deepest chords. This must be what a monk feels when he hears the temple bell . . . this is the note the earth is ever sounding, calling me back to my wildest name.’
Like a skilful drift-boat oarsman, Dombrowski navigates variegated currents: courting and marriage; his wife’s pregnancies and his anxiety about fatherhood oscillating between mania and depression; planting roots in a welcoming community boasting eccentric denizens; and balancing subsistence living, including hunting for the table, with environmental activism triggered by an ignominious legacy of rapacious natural resource extraction.
He escorts readers on the state’s famous waters, acknowledging that ‘to learn the language of rivers is the task of many lifetimes.’ Until reading Dombrowski I had never thought of trout as ‘emissaries . . . finger pointing to the river,’ but the notion is appealing. I admire writers who compel me to see what I most cherish in new and fresh ways. This distinguishes vision from looking.
Dombrowski doesn’t spend superfluous words on landing trophy fish, choosing instead to filter his accounts through the lens of lyricism: ‘The inevitable elation that follows catching the year’s first fish is often coupled with instant, distinctly sexual melancholy. Some elan of expectation has been erased, a mystery, something previously imagined, made manifest.’
The River You Touch doesn’t unfold chronologically. Rather it meanders and wanders like a river flowing between past and present, memory and experience. We are introduced to those closest to Dombrowski including the high school English teacher who gave him the copy of A River Runs Through It that inspired him to ‘light out’ for Montana with visions of guiding dancing in his head.
We meet the clients he recalls most affectionately because of their noble character and passion for wild trout. Recollections of those now casting lines on the rivers of Paradise are washed in an elegiac patina devoid of maudlin sentimentality. It’s nearly impossible for anglers to wade rivers during insect hatches without being reminded of mortality’s tenacious grip on time. This awareness colours his account of the death of his friend, Spurgeon, an outdoorsman who ‘maintained a raw relationship with the landscape.’
Although reading water is second nature to Dombrowski, we accompany him as he learns about the flora and fauna that comes from ‘carnal contact with the earth.’ When he joins a friend morel hunting, we get a full description of the fungi (which he calls ‘thumbprints of the gods’) including its role in ‘the dead understory of the forest.’ He tells us how to prepare and cook it and how it tastes in a sauce of butter, cream, shallots, salt and pepper ‘drizzled over charred sockeye’—in a word, ‘heavenly.’
Most of the memoir is set in Montana; however, Dombrowski writes of his return to Michigan to teach at the Interlochen Centre for there Arts before heading back to Big Sky country. His account of befriending Michael Delp—a legendary Michigan poet who’s as ‘crazy’ about nature and fishing as he is poetry—is pure delight. Had William Blake been a fisherman, it’s likely he would have written visionary poetry resembling Delp’s.
Dombrowski presents himself as a self-deprecating, shaggy dog Everyman trying his best to make sense of how he fits into a universe bursting with awe, wonder and mystery. Any reader would feel at ease chatting him up at a coffeeshop counter, in a tavern with a jukebox cycling country ballads or on a riverbank after a long day on the water, with its piscatorial victories and defeats as green and vital as a cutthroat netted and released.
He resists the reflex of cynicism in ‘an epoch of irony’ by unabashedly celebrating hope and doubt, joy and sorrow, while affirming deep, sustained gratitude. Like fishing, this conviction doesn’t come easy but remains essential and necessary. Dombrowski sums it up in sentences that resemble poetry written in prose: ‘We are matter and long to be received by an earth that conceived us, which accepts and reconstitutes us, its children . . . The journey is long, and then we start homeward, fathomless as to what home might make of us.’
This book review was written originally for Classic Angling, Great Britain’s premium fishing journal.