The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water

by Chris Dombrowski Narrated by Jeffrey Foucault

Overview

“We are matter and long to be received by an Earth that conceived us, which accepts and reconstitutes us, its children, each of us, without exception, every one. The journey is long, and then we start homeward, fathomless as to what home might make of us.”

When Chris Dombrowski burst onto the literary scene with Body of Water, the book was acclaimed as “a classic” (Jim Harrison) and its author compared with John McPhee. Dombrowski begins the highly anticipated The River You Touch with a question as timely as it is profound: “What does a meaningful, mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the anthropocene?”

He answers this fundamental question of our time initially by listening lovingly to rivers and the land they pulse through in his adopted home of Montana. Transplants from the post-industrial Midwest, he and his partner, Mary, assemble a life based precariously on her income as a schoolteacher, his as a poet and fly-fishing guide. Before long, their first child arrives, followed soon after by two more, all “free beings in whom flourishes an essential kind of knowing [...], whose capacity for wonder may be the beacon by which we see ourselves through this dark epoch.” And around the young family circles a community of friends-river-rafting guides and conservationists, climbers and wildlife biologists-who seek to cultivate a way of living in place that moves beyond the mythologized West of appropriation and extraction.

Moving seamlessly from the quotidian-diapers, the mortgage, a threadbare bank account-to the metaphysical-time, memory, how to live a life of integrity-Dombrowski illuminates the experience of fatherhood with intimacy and grace. Spending time in wild places with their children, he learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way-wisdom that is essential for the possibility of transformation.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for The River You Touch

“[The River You Touch] explores what it takes to live a meaningful life in a rapidly changing environment. Dombrowski’s work offers a fresh take on Montana, not just as a playground for sport but as a nurturing home.”—Debra Magpie Earling, The New York Times 

"In prose you could sharpen a knife on, Dombrowski has followed his masterful Body of Water with a brilliant memoir. I can't do justice to a book as perfect in tone as this, so generous in pace and written with the inviting but dangerous intensity of rivers."—Christopher Camuto, Gray’s Sporting Journal 

“A poignant rumination on marriage, parenthood, friendship and what it means to connect with nature.”—USA Today

“Montana-based poet and fly-fishing guide Chris Dombrowski tells a deeply personal story about his life on rivers, raising a family in a wild place with wild yearnings to live on the edge. A lyrical memoir and ode to trout and riparian ecosystems, every sentence of this book sings.”—Outside Magazine

“There’s enjoying nature, and then there’s the ability to write well about it. The River You Touch is a love song that readers with the same musical taste are sure to admire.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The River You Touch is an excellent memoir about family, fatherhood and fishing from the wordsmith, Chris Dombrowski.”—Forbes

“A heartfelt memoir of life and fatherhood in Big Sky country . . . Through a collection of vignettes, the author shares his concerns for the environment, the effects of the appropriation of land from Native inhabitants, and the emotions the landscape stirs in him. ‘The angler standing in the river is not so much absolved of time as disburdened of it, able to shirk its weight’ . . . Nature lovers will be captivated by Dombrowski’s lyrical descriptions of the land and its wildlife, while parents are sure to relate to his familial challenges and sacrifice. A beautifully and poignantly written tribute to a beloved landscape and its spirit.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“The River You Touch, Chris Dombrowski’s second nonfiction book, will change the way people see the world. . . . Equally weighted in this admirably woven memoir by a poet, teacher, river and fly-fishing guide, is the quotidian struggle of staying afloat in fast moving streams of financial hardship, environmental concern and creative ambition . . . Dombrowski raises the bar for all of us by casting light on maternal-male instincts. He torches the narrative of the single solitary man, gritting it out by himself, conquering the mountain, killing prey or whatever. He rightfully acknowledges the vital power of community that makes a great man toughened by his own vulnerability.”—BOMB Magazine

“The River You Touch is a personal guide like no other . . . a lyrical, visually rich, once-in-a-lifetime river trip. . . . Packed with thought-provoking narrative that may guide you to being a better human.”—Montana Quarterly

“A lyrical exploration of a beloved place and lifestyle steeped in the natural world, by a writer for whom quality of life supersedes the need for financial security. Will appeal to readers who relish memoirs that skillfully intertwine nature, the American West, and fishing.”—Library Journal

“Dombrowski’s prose is familiar and inviting… it’s a subtle craft, this translation of outdoor commitment onto the page, extending leaves of solidarity to audiences unknown.”—Christopher Schaberg, Flyfish Journal

“Heartfelt, moving, and gorgeously written, The River You Touch is a love song to the rivers of Montana, a love song to a way of life. Dombrowski writes with tenderness and insight and with a deep, personal gratitude to the rivers that have taught him who he is—a husband, a father, a fisherman, a poet, a person who loves the earth as well as mourns it. What a tremendous achievement.”—Emily Ruskovitch, author of Idaho 

“Midway through The River You Touch, poet and naturalist Chris Dombrowski tells us, ‘To truly fathom a river, is to know it from its headwaters to its mouth…’ To truly fathom a life—one’s place, community, family, history, purpose on earth—is the sacred pursuit of this moving and beautifully written memoir. Here is the story of a man attempting to reckon with his cultural inheritance, his vocation, his past, and his responsibilities to family, land, and history. Along the route, he continuously encounters reminders of his own mortal smallness and, simultaneously, the numinous interconnection of all beings.” —Lisa Wells, author of Believers

“You won’t soon read a more beautiful book, nor one so earthy, wise, delicious, and alive. This is not a book about fish or rivers or Montana or parenting. This is a book, to paraphrase another poet, plain and simple, to break open the frozen sea within.”—Rick Bass

“In the way a fable points us toward rightness, so The River You Touch leads us to a necessary truth: that deep knowledge and love of a place shapes us in all the ways we will need to survive. With poetry, vulnerability, and crisp storytelling, Dombrowski takes us into a wild, river-thrummed Montana, and into the stormswept territory of marriage and family. It’s a journey with a guide who knows the country at a cellular level, and whose bafflement and wonder renews our own. The magic of the book is that I came away convinced that learning to love a trout, or an autumn snowfall, or a wolf crossing a river, would teach me to love a friend or a partner in pain—and so to love and be connected to all beings. Damn.”—Peter Heller, bestselling author of The Dog Stars, The River, and The Guide

“With The River You Touch, Chris Dombrowski has established himself at the forefront of American writers of place. This beautiful, clear-eyed, tender memoir is as intimate as a love letter, brimming with wise observations on family, parenthood, home, duty, and passion. The Montana within these pages is wild and rugged, yes. But it is also as gentle as a cold stream running through your fingers or a child sleeping in your arms. I loved this book.”—Nickolas Butler, bestselling author of Godspeed and Shotgun Lovesongs 

 

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2022-07-30
A heartfelt memoir of life and fatherhood in Big Sky country.

Born in Lansing, Michigan, Dombrowski, author of the acclaimed Body of Water, was “pointed the way west” when a teacher suggested he read A River Runs Through It. Seeking “the promise of a life less bound by convention, less dictated by status quo and occupational demands than by one’s passions,” he and his would-be wife, Mary, moved to Missoula, Montana. Dombrowski found work as a writer and fly-fishing guide, and Mary became a kindergarten teacher. Over time, they amassed a group of like-minded friends who shared their respect for the abundant flora and fauna in Montana. Through a collection of vignettes, the author shares his concerns for the environment, the effects of the appropriation of land from Native inhabitants, and the emotions the landscape stirs in him. “The angler standing in the river is not so much absolved of time as disburdened of it, able to shirk its weight—for some moments anyway—before with a dull thud a trout strikes his swinging fly, and he returns to pretending that he set himself in this cliff-shadowed stretch in search of a fish.” With the arrival of their first child, Dombrowski was determined to pass on his passion for the land, but his thoughts soon turned to his family’s financial situation. Adding to his concerns was the “inevitable environmental impact our growing family is likely to have on our planet.” After the arrival of his third child, the author accepted a teaching position at a boarding school in order to provide his family more financial stability. However, the move took him and his family away from their beloved Montana. (They are now back, and the author teaches creative writing at the University of Montana.) Nature lovers will be captivated by Dombrowski’s lyrical descriptions of the land and its wildlife, while parents are sure to relate to his familial challenges and sacrifices.

A beautifully and poignantly written tribute to a beloved landscape and its spirit.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178405659
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Preface:

 

At its uppermost source, this book began as a love song to the rivers on which I’ve guided for twenty-five years and the land through which they pulse like veins. “Land” here means everything from the cloud-hung peaks down to our toenails, antlers, and beaks made of reconstituted earth; means the ever-evolving relationships between these things; means us. As the songwriter Jeffrey Foucault once told me, “a true love song succeeds on the element of doubt.” Per Foucault’s prerequisite, this oarsman’s ode is rife with apprehension: a young father’s fear of ushering children into a periled world, his awareness of his own complicity in the destruction of that which he claims to adore, as well as that pervading sense of dread that seems a preexisting condition in our overinformed epoch.

But as a wise elder once remarked, our doubts are our traitors. It is of course easier to nestle beneath the goose down comforter of irony in our age of complicity than to entertain the hard questions. “What does a mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the Anthropocene?” is no longer an academic question but rather a necessary qualifier to each step we take. For answers, we who have proven ourselves such untrustworthy stewards of our home might look to what Barry Lopez called “myriad enduring relationships of the landscape,” to our predecessors, in other words, whose voices are the bells that must sound before any gritty ceremony of community can truly begin. Whether we accept it or not, the land itself is our earliest predecessor, the main character of all our stories, and listening to it, after all, is not a onetime undertaking but a practice.

Lest I imply some shoddy metaphysics here: “listening,” refers to direct contact, engagement, what the forager Jenna Rozelle calls the “primacy of immediate experience.” Callouses on palms formed by friction between human skin and oar handle. Shoulder muscles straining to pull oar blade through current, the oar stroke negotiating with the wave train’s brute liquid force. After thousands of days in such physical dialogue—as much of my adult life spent on moving water as on solid ground—I have come to know a single Montana watershed better than I know most of my human acquaintances, which is to say I am intimate with the rivers’ daily and seasonal rhythms, and altered by the way the watershed has moved around and through me.

Despite the nontraditional lifestyle that my occupation affords, however, I have lately fallen prey to the plague of screens and a generic brand of informed cynicism, to an existence that appears rife with concentration but that in truth is fragmented and increasingly short on profound impression. I live among the homogenized throngs chained to the assumption that our moment-to-moment ability to “virtually connect” literally connects us, but as our collective actions exhibit, we have failed to truly comprehend our infinite ties. What are we if not inextricably linked, and yet blind to this blunt fact? Day by day, at nearly mythic speed, our failure to face this truth brings forth bold consequences.

Pre-fatherhood, I might have blamed my succumbing to such trends on domesticity, but there is nothing as wild and vital in my life as our children: three free beings in whom flourishes an essential kind of knowing—what David Abram called “a sensorial empathy for the living land”—and whose capacity for wonder may be the beacon by which we see ourselves through this dark epoch. The faculty of wonder—which, in this context, is simply the unsentimental ability to identify with astonishment the earth and its inhabitants as relational—is diminishing as quickly as any endangered species. If it vanishes as an inevitable byproduct of decreased direct encounters with the physical world, so, too, may go the instinct to protect the very places that sustain us.

By purest chance, our family has come to live a few hundred yards from just such a place, a creek called Rattlesnake that descends from peaks and snow-fed lakes in an undeveloped wilderness and flows, by way of the Clark Fork of the Columbia, to the Pacific. On summer days, especially these recent blowtorch-hot ones, we swim in the creek nearly every afternoon. I call it “our creek,” a phrase that I realize is rife with postcolonial complications, because it is our creek: mine and yours and whomever swam in it before, human beings of all ages and genders, trout and whitefish, deer and elk and bear, mayflies and stoneflies, leeches and dragonflies, ouzels and migratory ducks, gloriously interpenetrated from time immemorial by native species and invasive ones alike.

Most evenings after guiding, I walk leisurely down to the swimming hole, taking a steep, tight trail on the west bank over the bulbous roots of cottonwoods, a cumbersome and shady way the kids call the “elf path.” But other days, as when I’ve been watching the news on my phone, I have to bike down, so desperate am I for a brief immersion, the icy kick of an elemental martini, what my grandmother would have called “a good belt.” This drought-racked August has been particularly choked with haze from forest fires, embers blown all the way from California or Washington: “not our smoke,” I’m tempted to say, except that it’s all our smoke, and I refuse to indulge another foolish round of us-versus-them.

One recent morning, we took a chilly family dip in the creek, all feral five of us, then jumped into the car and followed the floodplain down Interstate 90, aimed west when the big river bent north, and wound through the beetle-blighted forests and over two steep passes, across the Palouse and the parched agricultural plains, up and over another mountain pass, then finally down through sprawl, city, and more sprawl, until we eventually reached the Pacific. Good friends were there to greet us on the gravelly shore of a bay with a meal of fresh-caught Dungeness crab and spot prawns. Starved as we were after nearly five hundred miles in the car, though, we found the gently breaking waves too inviting to resist, and one by one we changed into our suits and dove in. Treading breathless in the chilly waters of the sound, cooled to the core after nine hours at the wheel, I pondered a deliciously unsolvable equation: How long would it take for, say, a gallon of the creek we swam in this morning to reach the same body of water we were floating in now?

Like a child, moving water is a treatise on impermanence, a constant reminder of the ungraspable. I was in my late twenties when our firstborn arrived. Suddenly (or what seemed like it), facing the far side of my forties, I found myself wondering how to properly celebrate son’s sixteenth birthday. The answer was a midnight paddle in a borrowed sea kayak on a bay come wildly alive with bioluminescence. Above us, perched somewhere in the moss-draped cedars, a heron rasped out its frightful call, and far above bird and boat, the stars convened. Somehow on this new-moon August night we had timed our paddle with the peak light emission from trillions of marine invertebrates, and as we entered the darkest recess of a cove, our paddles stirred emerald whirlpools above scintillating creatures: fracturing schools of salmon smolt, undulating moon jellyfish, and frantic backstroking crabs.

“Liquid phosphorus,” Darwin had called the spectacle while aboard the HMS Beagle in the Strait of Magellan, but I read on my smartphone’s blinding screen that the unicellular organisms’ emission of light was actually a seven-chemical reaction that produced oxidized luciferin, and that organisms from dinoflagellates to giant squids use the process for attraction, defense, warning, even mimicry. I was of a mind to share some of my research with Luca when there was a thunk on the bottom of the boat.

Raw fright struck the body first. Then the adrenaline-quickened brain calculated known dangers (very rare orcas, even rarer blue whales, and scantly aggressive seals) in relation to my makeshift weapon (a small paddle to be wielded against ocean-borne tooth and muscle) versus possibility of flight. We had life vests and the distance from shore was a swimmable seventy yards, though the fifty-eight-degree water would make muscles seize. Then rational thought nudged in. As a tingling wash of nerves receded, I guessed harbor seal: we’d seen several basking at sunset on a nearby island. Apparently curious, the mysterious creature circled us with a fish’s fluidity, disappeared again, and, after a moment in hiding, popped its head up to regard us, its bristled whiskers gleaming like a lathered moustache.

Sea otter! 

I doubted my cell phone’s camera could capture an image of the endangered species at such a low aperture, but I was determined to commemorate the encounter, a birthday visitation of sorts. Holding the paddle in one hand, I defiled the night with the phone’s flash and with my thumb snapped the shot.

To reconstitute an old haiku: Cold ocean, phone falls in: the sound of water.

The kayak tipped precariously starboard as I reached for the phone.

“Dad,” Luca gasped, as he steadied the rocking craft with his hands. Together we watched a spiraling line of light afford a momentary visual connection to the plummeting device.  

“Well, that’s that,” I said, surprised at my instantaneous detachment, considering how tightly I usually clung to the device. The pang of material loss and self-chiding would arrive in the morning when, at dead-low tide, we’d find the phone comically lodged in a purple urchin’s spines, the saltwater having already corroded volume buttons and rendered the system unusable despite the device’s protective case. But for the moment, watching our craft push a pale wake, I felt pleasantly unmoored.

How might it have felt, I wondered, to encounter this phenomenon millennia ago, before science explained it, and epochs before I’d access some scant understanding of it via costly feed from a billion-dollar satellite? Could a man steering a small cedar dugout across a coastal bay have paused from his paddling, reached down, turned the rippling water to a ghostly flame, and not felt himself a holy part of the living world, the animate universe?

I scanned our ambit for further sign of the otter, weighing the value of what I’d beamed in on 4G versus the salt drying on the hand Luca had dragged through the water. I sensed the latter would form a more lasting kind of knowing.

And sudden as the otter’s tail-thwack against our boat, I stopped paddling, gobsmacked. What hubris! Sixteen years a parent, and I had just now arrived at the notion that our three children have served as my guides, and not the other way around? Momentarily, as the bow of the kayak slowed and stalled against the shoreline, I saw with clarity how they have—progressing meander by meander, discovery by discovery—sustained me, often sparing me from my own mind. Once ashore, Luca knelt, ran his fingers through the wave-worn pebbles, the stones sparking and crackling, and dug out a skipper stone. As a yearling his first word was “light,” and long before he could speak, before he was a bright form tumbling weightlessly through the galaxy of Mary’s womb, our frantic bodies making him made light.

Slung out, the stone hopped several times across the water and, glowing as it fell, left a pale, unspooling thread in its wake.

In pursuit of that thread, I launched this boat made of words: a chronicle of wonder at the place we humbly call home and an attempt to preserve the quality of attention that our children, those messengers of a hopeful reality, so often emit, without which we will find ourselves mortally far out at sea.

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