The River Why

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  BOOK ONE

  THE COMPLEAT ANGLER 1. “Gus the Fish”

  2. The Rogue River Fishing War

  3a. Concerning Statistics

  3b. Some Biographical Statistics

  4. Statistical Improbabilities

  5a. The Great Izaak Walton Controversy: The Parental Version

  5b. The Great Izaak Walton Controversy: My Own Rendition

  6. Excerpts from the God-notebook

  7. Being “Educated” and “Gittin’ Brung Up”

  8. The “Ideal Schedule”

  9. Voiding My Rheum

  BOOK TWO

  THE UNDOING OF A SCIENTIFIC ANGLER 1. Where I Lived and What I Lived For

  2. Water on the Brain

  3. Anvil Abe and the Phantom Fisherman

  4. Fainting Before the Duel

  5. I Reckon

  6. Anamnesis

  BOOK THREE

  CHARACTERS IN NATURE 1. The River Writes

  2. Neighbors

  3. The Warble of the Water Owl

  4. Eddy

  5. Jesus Keeps Fishing

  6. Descartes

  7. Philosophizing

  8. Little, But Strong

  9. Closing the Door

  BOOK FOUR

  THE LINE OF LIGHT 1. Hemingway

  2. Dutch

  3. Nick the Convert

  4. The Trek

  5. The Raven and the Why

  6. Googler and Mangler

  7. Trick or Treat

  8. The Line of Light

  BOOK FIVE

  AT THE END OF THE LINE Last Chapter

  Afterword: Three Reflections in the Key of Gratitude

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by David James Duncan

  Praise for David James Duncan’s The River Why

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Newsletters

  Copyright Page

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  BOOK ONE

  THE COMPLEAT ANGLER

  My birthday began with the water.

  —Dylan Thomas

  What house is this? here’s neither coal nor candle,

  Where I no thing but guts of fishes handle…

  —Zachary Boyd, “Jonah”

  1

  “Gus the Fish”

  “It is a doubt if my body is flesh or fish,” he sang in his grief; “hapless the woman who loves me.…”

  —Charles Williams, Taliessin through Logres

  Having harbored two sons in the waters of her womb, my mother considers herself something of an authority on human fetuses. The normal fetus, she says, is no swimmer; it is not fish-, seal-, eel-, or even turtlelike: it is an awkward alien in the liquid environment—a groping land creature confused by its immersion and anxious to escape. My brother, she says, was such a fetus. I was not. My swimming style was no humanoid butterfly-, crawl-, back-, or breaststroking: mine were the sure, swift dartings of a deformed but hefty trout at home with the water, finning and hovering in its warm black pool.

  Having harbored no one anywhere in his body and lacking a womb, my father knows almost nothing about human fetuses. This did not stop him from penning and publishing a grotesque article about a human birth. My father is a writer secondarily and a famous flyfisherman primarily, and his stories, books, and lectures on the latter art—not to mention his ruddy face and dumpy, wader-swathed figure—are renowned throughout the flyfishing world. One of his favorite articles was published in a 1954 Field and Stream under the title “Gus the Fish.” Written in a painfully contrived and uncharacteristic Doc-And-Me-Went-Fishin’ style, “Gus the Fish” treats of the angling adventure of a certain obstetrician who finally succeeded in hooking and landing “a chubby eight-pounder” who had “eluded all anglers for over nine months” despite being trapped in “a small pool in a river only five feet, five inches long”; then in the concluding paragraph my father spills the beans all over his little allegory with the forgettable intimation that “Ol’ Gus is not some wily brown trout lurking in the waters of a Letort, Beaverkill, or Firehole. Oh no. Ol’ Gus is nothing less than my new little lunker son, my first-born fish and flyfisherman to be!”

  The fisherman’s is an inexplicably privileged place in this hard world: there are people wearing straitjackets and living under lock and key for innocuous crimes such as dressing or speaking like Sherlock Holmes, Caesar, or Armstrong Custer, yet there goes my dad—famed and respected in his twenty-five-pound vest, hat full of phony insects, rubber trousertops flapping about his nipples—trudging scot free along the world’s trout streams armed with dangerous hooks and fish knives, whipping the flesh of innocent bodies of water while amusing himself with such mental marvels as his wife the dwarfish river, and his son, Gus the Fish.

  My father’s name is Henning Hale-Orviston. His parents were English aristocrats, and his speech and manners derive from them. He carefully maintains his distinguished accent; he drinks Glenfiddich Single Malt Scotch; he smokes Rattray’s Highland Targe and Balkan Sobranie in meerschaums and briar perfects; he drives a Rover in the city and a Winnebago on the road; he lectures in white shirt and tie, fishes in tweeds, and sleeps in silk pajamas; his flies are constructed with a scrupulousness rivaling the Creator’s; his handwriting is like calligraphy, and when he autographs a book he writes the entire name. He is, to my chagrin, the one person in the world who calls me by my legal name, Augustine,

  so to his chagrin I call him H2O.

  To his greater chagrin, Ma calls him “Hen.” To her way of thinking, Hen is a rough-and-ready handle on her man. To H2O’s way of thinking, Hen is a ludicrous and unwarranted insult. To my way of thinking, Hen is a nickname with several features of interest: among Northwest fishermen, a hen is a female steelhead; according to H2O, Ma is a river; if these designations are accurate, it is obvious which of my parents would contain, sustain, and determine the fate of the other—and through observation of our family the truth of the symbology is apparent. Under the Orviston roof it’s Ma who calls the shots.

  That’s not all she does. If ever a man’s wife was his nemesis, his antagonist, his antithesis, Ma is H2O’s. In those rarefied circles of purist anglers among whom Henning Hale-Orviston is considered the last word, Ma Orviston is considered the last laugh—for though she has never published a word on fishing, and though H2O has struggled to keep her existence under wraps, Ma has, through the medium of fish-gossip, attained to an infamy rivaling H2O’s fame. The reason? O Heresy! Lower than Low Church, lower than pariah, lower than poacher, predator, or polluter, Ma is the Flyfisherman’s Antipode: she is a bait fisherman. A fundamentalist. A plunker of worms.

  One of my father’s least favorite stories was diluted, distorted, and published in a 1954 Sports Afield under the unlikely title “Nijinsky”—an artifact not worth a glance apart from the color glossies. The story’s uncut version lacks color glossies; it has never seen print; it is hard to believe despite its historicity; it is never told when H2O is around. But once a year it is recited at the Carper Clan Gathering (the Carpers being Ma’s kin) by my bardic uncle, Zeke, who calls it “The Deschutes River Episode.” Zeke tells it in two installments, pausing
to chug a beer between: the first part is a pretty fair imitation of my father’s accent and Literary Sportsman writing style—but after the beer the story transmogrifies into a Zeke-yarn delivered in his most exaggerated, overcooked Eastern Oregon drawl. It goes like this:

  ’Twas early in the autumn of nineteen hundred and fifty-three that the then-unmarried Henning Hale-Orviston endured the most extraordinary adventure of his already illustrious angling career. Beneath a brilliant brass sky and enclosed by canyon walls rendered ovenlike by the relentless desert sun, Orviston had spent an entire day plying the glistening green waters of Oregon’s famed Deschutes River for summer-run steelhead. But despite his unflagging efforts and unrivaled skill, he had nothing to show for his labors but the memory of a few small trout caught and, of course, carefully released. Worn to exhaustion by heat, glare, and the constant drag of waist-deep current, Orviston elected to make the proverbial “one last cast” before undertaking the toilsome return to his car and small mobile home. His day of frustration was complete when, near the tail of that last drift, his masterfully tied bucktail streamer ceased its oceanward journey with that inexorable dull pull that can only signify a snag. Hoping for nothing but an end to his day of thwarted efforts, Orviston reefed disgustedly at his line, attempting to snap the 2x tippet. To his great good fortune, he failed even in this—for the instant he raised the rod the once-serene river exploded with the heart-stopping leap of the mightiest steelhead he had ever seen! No sooner did the magnificent fish shatter the water into glassy splinters than it was airborne again, and so again, continuing with literally scores of impossible, soaring, twisting leaps till its mortal enemy was inspired to dub it “Nijinsky,” after the famed supernatural hero of the ballet. Thus commenced a battle between wily fisherman and godlike fish worthy of comparison to some savage encounter of knight and dragon in Legends of Yore.…

  Seeming to realize that this was no mere worm-dangler with which he was dealing, Nijinsky soon ceased his mad leaping. Applying his wiles—and his brutish strength—the monster turned toward the long rapids downstream and set off at a calculated, untiring pace that the 2x tippet could not possibly thwart. Running, plunging, clambering through brush and water, Orviston followed, holding his rod high, increasing his pace when the line-backing grew dangerously thin, easing the pace and taking up slack when Nijinsky would allow it. Relentlessly, craftily, he pursued his silver leviathan with the determination of Ahab.

  Two miles downstream and an hour and a half into the battle, Nijinsky retreated to the depths of an eerie, ink black pool. Here he remained as the daylight first reddened, then fled; here he entrenched himself as the sinking sun’s shafts ascended the tortured rimrock, suffusing juniper, sage, and canyon wall with a last liquid light. Exhausted himself, Orviston could only hope the mighty fish was also tiring. With stout heart and reptilian patience, he applied all the pressure the feeble but faithful tippet could sustain. Inch by painstaking inch, he worked Nijinsky toward him through the seething depths of the ebony pool.…

  Here’s where Uncle Zeke chugs his beer—a fact especially worth noting because it’s a thirty-two-ouncer! And if you could see the look in Zeke’s carbonated eyes afterward, if you knew how vast the gap between H2O’s published climax and the true tale he was about to tell, then you would know that the story of Nijinsky’s End is offered here at the risk of my being disowned—if not drowned.

  Zeke quiets his listeners with a six-second belch. Then—

  High over the rimrock the Milky Way come poppin’ out like God’s false teeth—but ol’ Hen Orviston never seen it. He never seen neither that it weren’t him that had no fish on, but a fish that had on him: while he was thinkin’ he was workin’ his lunker in, the lunker was eyeballin’ Hen’s submerged shins, sniffin’ the blood in the water from the fresh dings in ’em, thinkin’ how he’d swallered crawdads big as what they was, fightin’ off a nasty pair o’ pinchers into the bargain. So it was lucky fer Hen a rockslide come rattlin’ down the canyonside just then, spookin’ Nijersey back to the deeps.

  Hen turned one bloodshot eye to the hill t’see what was comin’, his brains thinkin’ somethin’ mercenary an’ Englishy, like, “By Jorj! Behaps the Very Gods residing in Heavenabove are sending some soul to witness my artful captuation of this noteable bloody fishe here by means of naught more than an artificial fly and frailest of 2x whippets. Jolly Ho! Now I’ll have positivistic veracification of my performance, thereby enabling me to enhance the thickness of my wallet with scads of bloody endorsements from the makers of my rod and reel and line and boots and hat and creel and undershorts!”

  An’ sure nuff, through the dollar signs in his eyes Hen made out a handsome young cowpoke scramblin’ down the scree, fitted out in Levis, Pen’lt’n shirt, sheepskin vest, ratty Stetson, J. C. Penney cowboy boots an’ red bandana. He was slim, whiskerless, smokin’ a Hump,* an’ he packed a saddlebag an’ a Sears Roebuck castin’ rod’n’reel with ropy thick line, baseball-size sinker, an’ three squirmin’ nightcrawlers on a treblehook wishin’ they was somewheres else. When H. H. made out this fishin’ perfernailey, he thought somethin’ more along these lines: “Zounds, Drat and Bother the Bleeding Fates! This is no gentleman! This young brute is a Neanderthal, come here to practice the illegeale bloody art of bait fishing after dark!”

  He wasn’t far off. But witnesses is witnesses an’ money’s money, so Hen held his peace an’ his pole, played Stravinski, an’ calmed his nerves with dreams ’bout the sweet shitload o’ fat endorsement checks sure to stuff his mailbox, once he nailed his whale. But what was this? With his gizzard in his gorge, Hen saw the cowpoke fixin’ t’cast dead into the pool where Nijinskivoffnev was hidin’! In a unEnglishmanly vocabulary reserved fer emergencies, H. H. Orviston Esquire hollered, “Hey! Gitcher young ass outta there! Can’t you see I got a huge fish on!?”

  The plunker held up’n took a gander at Hen’s rod, but Nigursky was layin’ low sinch the averlanch so the flyrod was just bent, not throbbin’ or twitchin’ at all. Never havin’ laid eyes on a fly outfit, the cowpoke didn’t know ’bout 2x tipplers made o’ catgut an’ all that class of equipment. He only seen Hen’s fly-line, which he judged heavy enough t’horse in a wild bull, an’ the Fancy Dan fishin’ duds, camera purse, silly hat an’ all. That made his mind up. In a boyish, friendly voice he hollered, “Hells bells, Cityslick, yer hung on the bottom! How long you been standin’ there that way you rascal? Just bust that thang off’n come on over here—I got worms enough fer both of us.”

  At the thought of hisself usin’ worms (he’d ruther been offered leprosy), H. H. Orviston was struck dumb. It was a piss-poor time to be struck so: he only smarted up enough t’howl out one terrible word ’fore the cowpuncher let fly with his lead baseball.… The splash o’ the lead spurred Bozinski back into action. The sinker plummeted down, the steelhead plummeted up, the two lines crossed, and Henning Hale-Orviston’s 2x nipplet snapped like a cobweb: Nijerkov leaped one last time an’ was seen no more.…

  H. H. took his three-piece nine-foot eighty-dollar flyrod an’ busted it over his knee four times. He threw the splinters as far as he could, which was maybe six, eight feet. Then he picked up a waterlogged tree branch an’ advanced on the young cowpoke in a manner that was s’posed t’look menacin’ but which really looked sorta surly an’ pitiful, considerin’ the size o’ his white-meaty little English-man muscles. At least his voice sounded good: “You had best refrain from that pole and defend yourself!” he boomed, “because one of the bloody twain of us is going to journey perforce into that river to search for my fish, by jorj!”

  “So be it, Slicker,” said the cowpoke coolly. “An’ I’ll guaran-goddamn-tee ya it ain’t gonna be me!” Settin’ down the castin’ pole an’ steppin’ away from the water, he took off his vest and ratty Stetson…

  an’ a long braid o’ pretty blond hair fell from under the hat an’ down acrosst a chest that even ol’ Hen could see was far from flat. By Bleedin’ Jorj! The cowpoke was a girl!
<
br />   Henning Hale-Orviston hunkered down on a rock an’ started to laugh. So he says. The cowgirl says he was cryin’. “Well, come on,” says she. “Come on an’ fight me!” (Bein’ used to her brothers and unused to British Chivalrousness, she waited fer action, holdin’ up a small but damned efficient pair o’ dukes.) Hen just kept on laughin’—the high, hysterical squeals of a man whose brains rode on down the trail an’ left him all alone on the nightwide prairie.

  Then, forgotten among the rocks, the Sears Roebuck started screamin’ like it was alive. “Wellp,” says the girl. “If you’re only gonna set there, I’m gonna man my pole, ’cause it’s plain as pee there’s a fish on it.” She pulled a bowie knife an’ stuck it in a handy log, addin’ “Try an’ jump me an’ I’ll gut ya!”

  Hen’s weird caterwaulin’ got berserker an’ berserker while he watched the girl pick up the Roebuck, set the hook into somethin’ damn heavy, an’—in a unsightly tug-a-war that didn’ last five minutes—haul a thirty-pound ballet-dancin’ steelhead onto the bank… an H. H. Orviston bucktail streamer still stickin’ in the corner of its jaw!

  Poor Hen’s lunatic laughter floated out over the swirlin’ eddy an’ up the black rimrock walls; it ricocheted an’ spilled undimmed outta that canyon an’ onto the scrub plains where a pack o’ maraudin’ coyotes took it up in glass-smashin’ unison dissonance—with cadenzas. From coyote to coyote it carried out over the desert an’ jackpine country, givin’ cowboys an’ ranchwives an’ loggers the willies an’ their kids creamed jeans from Mosier clear east to Ukiah, an’ north on up the Columbia River Basin to the Seven Devils Mountains, where it belonged. The followin’ Sunday there was a rash o’ new faces in the region’s Houses of Worship, an’ every hymn was sung fortissimoso in hopes a drowndin’ out all recollection o’ that godawful laugh still boundin’ from bone to bone inside the troubled skulls o’ the faithful.…