One of my favorite reads so far this year is a book that I'm surprised I liked and that I never would have picked up if it weren't for seeing it on lists of books to read for my nature writing class.
The River Why, by David James Duncan (author of
The Brothers K, now on my TBR list) is a book about fishing and much, much more. In addition to being something of a riff on
Walden, and a love story about fishing and the Oregon woods, it's a coming of age story, a comedy, and a conversion account. It contains excerpts from writers like Dylan Thomas, Charles Williams, Norman Maclean, Isaak Walton, and Jim Harrison. It's one of those books that is hard to categorize because it has a little bit of everything in it, but Duncan does it all well. I actually laughed out loud while reading it. It doesn't follow any of the suggestions about plot in
Wired for Story, but it works.
On the one hand, I'm not sure every reader would enjoy it because it does contain a lot of fishing lore. While technically a novel, it's heavy on description and philosophizing and short on plot and action. Duncan was in his 20s when he wrote it. It was published in 1983 by the Sierra Club, apparently after many rejections according to an article I read about it, but it's not a book aimed at environmental action, but rather at living in right relationship with nature and other human beings.
When I went to look up the publication date, I noticed there was a movie made in 2010. I would bet a million dollars it doesn't capture the humor and depth of the book, although I'd love to be proved wrong. However, I have no desire to see the movie because I don't want to change the way I see the colorful cast of characters in my mind.
The basic story line is this: Gus Hale-Orviston is the son of a snooty British fly fisherman (Hennington Hale-Orviston, or H2O) famous for his book about fly fishing and a mother ("Ma" - which is another word for water in another language) who is a back country redneck who fishes with bait and poles. At age 20, done with schooling and no career plans because he only loves fishing, he decides to head for the woods to escape his bickering parents and to test his plan to fish for 14.5 hours a day following his "perfect schedule." He rents a small cabin near the Tamanawis River's edge, not too far from the Oregon coast, and proceeds to spend his days perfecting his already maestro level fishing skills. He channels Thoreau with a chapter called "Where I lived and What I lived for," but the answer is not practical details on building a home, but rather a catalog of how much and how he fishes.
Of course, he doesn't end up spending his life fishing as much as humanly possible. His self-imposed solitude starts to get to him, much as my students assert would happen to them if they lived like Thoreau - forgetting or failing to read the sections about all of Thoreau's visitors and neighbors. For days, he meditates only on fishing, but also on his purpose in life - which he thinks is the same thing, fishing. At one point, he climbs up a mountain and sees that the river apparently spells out the word "Why." This realization, and more importantly, a confrontation with death along with a confrontation with a philosopher become the catalysts to his conversion. His own death becomes a reality after a sickness makes him realize his own mortality:
"If my heart still beat I didn't know it. I was aware of one thing only: next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, all I felt conveyed nothing. This was no passing thought. It was a gnawing, palpable emptiness more real than the cold. I was a hollow, meaningless nothing, entranced on a rock in a fog. From the moment I was haunted by the drifting corpse no longer. I didn't need to be haunted by it any longer: it had done its work."
The work of the corpse is to call Gus out of his fishing bubble and back into the world. Gus begins to socialize with his own neighbors, a colorful cast of characters who each teaches him something about life and living, as he learns the gifts of generosity and belonging to a community. He also revisits his family, saves the life of the last trout in a polluted stream, and is inspired to seek meaning and truth, especially after his much younger brother, Bill Bob, tells him a story about a garden world that is something of a metaphor for the afterlife. Bill Bob is not a part of the family fishing dynasty. Instead, he is something of a young sage, who is always doing multiple things at once and making observations beyond his years.
With the help of Titus (and Bill Bob and the dog Descartes), who is the philosopher Gus met by the river bank after his near death experience, Gus begins an education in classics of philosophy and world religions. He rereads the Bible, which he had a poor opinion of when he read it as a teen in a desire to know more about God. Isaak Walton's classic
The Compleat Angler also was something of a Bible for his family, and his parents quote from it generously, proving how a book could be read and used as a weapon in very different ways by people of different ideologies.
Ma seems to represent the common sense, native intelligence way of knowing while H2O is the proponent of education and scientific knowledge. Gus comes to understand there is a third way of knowing, although this isn't spelled out - perhaps it might be called the way of love. On one occasion, he watches an old Native American fishing beside two young men and the old man tells him a story about the difference between need and greed and sacrifice. In addition to that story, he meditates on the stories of Christ fishing and the sacramental understanding of being thankful without being greedy becomes clearer to him. "
If Christ didn't know then what a fish was for, who did? And according to him, you caught fish, you cooked them, you ate them, you thanked his Father from your heart, and that heartfelt thanks made the deaths of fish acceptable, made it a sacrament. My father's arguments against the killing of fish were based on an inability to understand Sacrifice." He realizes he has been an ungrateful fisherman, so consequently, becomes generous with his catches and his fishing know-how, and takes only what he needs.
One day, Gus comes across a beautiful young girl fishing in an unusual manner out of a tree. He spies on her for awhile, like a young Greek spying on Artemis as she baths, but eventually reveals his presence. Unfortunately, his tongue is somewhat cursed by his vision of her, and he can only speak in odd quotes from Walton's book, but he does learn that her name is Eddy. For a good part of the rest of the book, he seeks a way to find this beautiful young naiad, or perhaps she is his Beatrice, helping him to understanding a beatific vision.
While always keeping an eye out for Eddy, Gus continues to learn from Titus and what he reads. For instance from the Tao, he learns about the "Ten Thousand Things" - "a phrase that that implies that one cannot seek while forever counting; it is a phrase the implies that the Tao will finally be found in the nature and not in the Number of things? He also learns about grace from an old man, Nick the Convert, who comes to help him in his business of selling hand-tied flies and poles. Nick tells him the story of how he was almost drowned when a ship he was on in WW2 hit a mine, and all aboard were thrown into the sea. A Norwegian trawler finds him near death and pulls him aboard by tossing him a lifeline that says "Jesus Christ" on it. Nick is too tired to hold the line, so he hooks the fishhook into his hand and is pulled aboard that way, and realizes God has saved him when he didn't deserve it. His scar is a reminder of this grace, a "good hurt."
After Nick returns to his family, Gus decides to hike to the source of the Tamanawis, a trek like a coming of age ritual for the Tillamook Indians., who must learn that the source is everywhere. Retells myths and legends. He walks all night long to get home after fasting for several days. In delirium, he begins to understand the river's question as an answer. "Stated, as it is created, in a language so simple, so pure, so primordial, that it is not accessible to our inspection or understanding; not at the mind's disposal, nor at the tongue's. All that can be said of it in English is that it is... yet thanks to the raven you have glimpsed it. You have seen that the answer to the why was the word itself: the Tamanawis was not questioning. It was sculpting and painting and humming seaward with all it touched and fed and carried and concealed, singing, "This - all of this- is why." Beauty, not disorder, is the river's answer.
Inspired by this understanding, he returns to his cabin and to his search for Eddy. Of course, SPOILER -- Eddy and Gus find each other again, after Gus has continue to learn about how to be a good neighbor and about what the river and the nearby mountain have to tell him in response to its question, "why." He first had to be open to understanding the mysteries of life and to see beyond both his native intelligence and scientific observations, to come to a new understanding about what gave meaning to life.
"Why shouldn't love be the forceless force running from heart to hand, down the line to the hook, from the hook through the wound and into the fish? Couldn't love create that sacred balance? Wouldn't love dissolve all stress? And from my depths came a wavelike rush of certainty: love could sustain the frailest of lines!" In between his love for Eddy, his conversations with Nick, Titus, Bill Bob, and other mentors, and his observations of the natural world, Gus learns about the incarnational aspects of love, and, in a moment of ecstatic joy, has a mystical encounter with God. A line of light anoints him, and he comes to realize that Love is both what gives life meaning as well as a Being that draws His people near: "And I knew that the line of light led not to a realm but to a Being, and that the light and the hook were his, and that they were made of love alone."
The last chapter begins with an epigram from Meister Eckhart: "God lies in wait for us with nothing so much as love, and love is like a fisherman's hook: without it he could never catch a fish, but once the hook is taken, and the fisherman is sure of the fish. .. whatever he does, who is caught by this hook, love does it, and love alone. . ."
And in the fashion of classical comedy, the ending swirls around a happy reunion and a celebration of life. I set the book down with reluctance as I closed the back cover, wishing to remain in that world and to keep fishing with Eddy and Gus. And now I want to go to the Oregon woods, too.
