The Duncan Bros Are Back Again
Winter 2002, Volume 19.ii
Chat
David Thomas Sumner
Activism, Fly Line-fishing, and Fiction—A Conversation with David James Duncan
David Thomas Sumner (Ph.D., University of Oregon) teaches in the English language Department at Weber Country Academy. His essays have appeared in Ecocomposition (SUNY Press, 2001) and In Our Own Vocalization (Allyn & Salary, 1999). He is also contributing editor for The Shape of Reason (Allyn & Salary, 2000). Sumner is currently working on a rhetorical study of American nature writing and its connection to ecology ideals.
David James Duncan grew up wandering the clear streams and fecund forests of western Oregon. In many ways, his deep honey of rivers and landscapes unites his writing. Mr. Duncan's first volume, The River Why, later on beingness "rejected by nevertheless publishers equally [Norman Maclean'southward] A River Runs Through Information technology," was finally published past the Sierra Club and holds the stardom as the offset work of fiction published by that press. Duncan feels a neat bail with Maclean: "We hate some of the same editors," he jokes.
Duncan's other novel, The Brothers K, is almost a northwestern family that is torn apart by religion and the sixties, merely united past filial honey and baseball game. He has as well published numerous articles and stories and ii other books: River Teeth: Stories and Writings, a collection of fiction and nonfiction, and My Story as Told by H2o: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watching, Fishstalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Historic period of the Industrial Dark, a drove of nonfiction.
Duncan had non notwithstanding published My Story as Told by Water (August 1999) when this interview took place. He had been securely involved in activist work to protect Montana's Blackfoot River and restore salmon and steelhead to the Snake River. In this interview, he laments that he is spending his time doing this "not profitable, anti-career, impractical, serial of writings" because of a "gut" need to salvage Norman Maclean's river. Many of these writings found their way into My Story as Told by Water, and despite Duncan's angst, the drove has received critical acclamation. Jim Harrison calls it "the Desert Solitaire of rivers," and the book was nominated for a National Book Award in 2001 where the judges praised it as "an educational activity." "Duncan's reflections" they write, "spill off the page with wit, wisdom, and occasional fury." Duncan currently lives, writes, and fishes in western Montana.
Read an essay by David James Duncan published in Weber Studies.
What brings you to Montana subsequently having Oregon roots?
Well, my father, granddaddy and great-gramps were all Montanans. The Oregon roots for me felt pretty much pulled out as they clear-cut the Cascades and the Declension Range. I really like to fish, and in 1986, later living on the declension for five years and visiting the coast constantly for my anadromous fish fix, I caught a Coho—every autumn when living on the coast we would kill a couple of salmon and have a big charcoal-broil and pick some chanterelles and accept a soufflé. I killed a Coho and found out it was 1 of seven spawning pairs in the river where I killed it. Kind of ruins the barbecue to know that you are committing species genocide.
So, I was pretty much prepare to leave so. I hung on in Portland for awhile, just that was just an interim move. The whole fourth dimension my married woman Adrian and I were in Portland, we were looking around the West trying to discover a new identify. We looked hard in New Mexico. I looked in Bend and Corvallis. Bend strikes me as the northernmost city in the Bay area at this point, the manner the community has gone. I don't have any great complaints most those places; nosotros just happened to detect a niche here that actually suited u.s.a. both. My wife's a ceramic artist and there is a stiff grouping of women artists here, and of course at that place're writers up the wazoo. They tend to be a pretty damn friendly agglomeration. I've really enjoyed living here the concluding half-dozen years. I am writing a novel set in Portland, hoping that I will finally be able to go out for adept. I've left Portland six times and moved back for
various reasons.
I read your piece in Headwaters, and I know you were disappointed because they edited information technology down so small.
Yep, the full piece is much longer. It is in that Nature Conservancy volume Off the Beaten Path.
I volition await it upward. What I read in Headwaters, I really liked. An set on on cyanide heap-leach gold mining in parable form.
It actually gets pretty amusing when the parable starts. Information technology's got this corporation coming in to claim the mineral deposits growing in this rancher'south knees. And they besides have the mineral rights to his children's knees. And so they come in and rip the minerals out of your knees, and they pay you a tiny compensation, similar fifty bucks. (Laughter)
I was fighting for the life of Norman Maclean's river, the Large Blackfoot.
My first piece was a rage slice. And so I wrote an essay for Sierra, trying to do something that wasn't merely a spiral downer, so to speak—not just depressing. Information technology took some doing. When I wrote the piece for Sierra, I really didn't know how information technology was going to turn out.
I laughed out loud when they were lying on the trail and Kafka comes by.
The real life threat to the river feels then surreal. Y'all know, it's hard to come up with a metaphor for how weird information technology feels when a corporation the size of Phelps-Dodge comes into your world and tells yous that they're going to trash it for your edification.
I didn't desire to exist doing this work, but I reached a point were I just couldn't slumber at night. I depict the process in the long essay in Sierra. (He opens the magazine). They really did a overnice job. That's where you were today [the upper Blackfoot]. And nice illustrations— at that place is the mine proposal. And there is how they await after they work `em for awhile. Sierra as well let me talk virtually boycotting gold, which is something the New York Times wouldn't practice.
Yous mentioned your involvement with the Snake River dams and what's going on in the campaign to remove them. Tell me a picayune about that.
Four dams on the lower Ophidian River were built to turn Lewiston, Idaho, into a "seaport." They were not built as hydroelectric dams—they generate very little hydro. What they do is allow the so-chosen "Port of Lewiston" to run wheat barges—some of information technology's Montana wheat, some of it'due south Idaho wheat—from Lewiston downwardly to Portland, where it is transferred on to ships. Almost all of information technology ends upwards in the Orient. It'due south a huge shipping route, something like 11,000 miles. At present, Idaho has tens of thousands of miles of perfect salmon and steelhead habitat. But the only way every one of those fish can attain Idaho is through this gauntlet of Snake River dams. And so if you think about it, for the smolt to become to the ocean and and so dorsum over again to spawn, the fish take to run a gauntlet of sixteen dams. I just ran the gauntlet myself with a fisheries biologist concluding month, and the caste to which those fish are dittled, sorted, counted, trashed—information technology'southward really shocking to me that there is still a salmon left in Idaho. Meanwhile, Idaho politicians are quoting biologists who have been hired by, for short hand I volition only call them the "Dark Side," who are saying that the migration from Idaho to the Pacific has never been as prophylactic as it is at present. Nevertheless 90 percent of the fish are gone. It's a total crock.
Responsible scientists hold that if the four dams stay, the salmon will go extinct. But if you just listen to them speak, you realize the Republican politicians of Idaho want the salmon gone. The Columbia is on the verge of becoming one of those rivers like the Colorado, which has been changed from a river into a serial of slot machines. The fact that as recently as the seventy's information technology supported a multimillion dollar sport line-fishing and commercial angling industry doesn't interest people whose slot machines are working on different sorts of revenue similar barging wheat, correct alongside a railroad line, from Lewiston to the sea. The railroads have already tested what it would cost for them to send all the wheat, and they could take all these barges off the river tomorrow for an increase of pennies per bushel.
The politics are and so ugly information technology's kind of difficult to talk about it. One time once again I'm in the position, every bit I was with this Blackfoot piece, of trying to write a piece for Sierra that's not only a spiral downer. To assistance me do that, I'm going to the west coast of Vancouver Isle side by side week to fly-fish for Coho and Chinook and try to remember what a salmon culture is. I haven't caught a salmon since the one I described to you, and that was in `86. That was ane of a dying species. I'm going to go and exist in a place where they still come in vital numbers and be in rivers that take all the same bug equally our lower twoscore-eight rivers, with 1 exception—no dams. I could tell y'all more than about it if I wasn't being taped.
Well, we will go the taped part out of the way. Let's talk about the connexion betwixt the art of writing and writing—writing that y'all feel skilful about aesthetically and otherwise—and the writing that promotes values or issues you care virtually. Is at that place a difference in what you do when yous concentrate on these dam removals, for instance, and the work that y'all do when you sit down down and write a novel.
There is a difference. It's a very tough paradox The vocation I really felt called to was every bit a novelist; but the first novel that I was able to write was this sort of comic quest assail the Oregon declension. Information technology had all to practise with my love for rivers and for those littoral streams and fantastic runs of anadromous fish—The River Why.
By the fashion, that's one of a scattering of books that I requite away a lot.
Thanks. (Laughter). I feel gratitude for what those rivers taught me. I feel gratitude for what they've taught me to feel. The pulse of a Chinook salmon; the pulse of a Chinook's tail transmitted downwardly the line into my hands, it's like a heart beat. To feel that in your easily teaches you something. I bonded with that experience when I was really immature. I feel that the kind of writing that—well, I recall a skillful example is Rick Bass. His first collection, The Sentinel, is one of the nigh admired collections of short stories to come out in awhile. And his falling in beloved with the Yaak has really cost him.
I remember a guy I met, mode dorsum in the belatedly seventy'south or maybe 80. I think Reagan had just been elected. It must have been `fourscore. He worked for the ONRC [Oregon Natural Resource Council]. I don't remember his name anymore. His whole love was biology, and all his training was in biology. I call up he might have fifty-fifty had a Ph.D. And all of the sudden he realized that to written report his science in a rigorous scientific manner had no pregnant because the things he was studying were vanishing earlier his eyes. And the last affair this man wanted, this homo whose gift was for dash and extremely detailed observation, the last thing he wanted was to become an activist, but he felt he had no choice.
I have tried to limit the amount I give to activist writing because I feel a deep calling to be a novelist. I dear writing novels. And in order, at least for me, to write a novel, I take to give myself to it completely. I can't be doing anything else. All the activist projects that I have taken on come at a price. And it kind of escalated. Because of the popularity of the River Why, and so a collection of stories I wrote, River Teeth, I became known as some kind of, I don't know what, Mr. River. And I have done a lot of public speaking and talked to a lot of fly angling groups and conservation groups. For a long time I couldn't effigy out how to say no to a adept cause. Just at this point I feel like the only involvement, the but reason people had {C}{C}{C}{C} any interest in hearing me speak, was because of my fiction. At this point I feel that, if I'm still going to take a muse, I owe it to the muse to close all these pulls off and try my damnedest to write a couple of novels earlier I'thou as well old to remember how.
So fiction and activist writing tend to go in two different directions for you?
Yes, I feel that the two kinds of writing are pretty much opposed. Others may not feel that manner; but for me, they feel diametrically opposed. I exercise the activist work when there is something bothering me and so much that it burns. I mean, salmon don't have a phonation. Salmon—the baby summer Chinook salmon that dorsum all the mode downwards the Columbia river system from Stanley, Idaho, to the ocean—they go backwards and let the river carry them. Right now it carries them into a series of 8 turbines and 15 percent of them are killed in every turbine. Information technology and then carries them through warm water reservoirs that are teaming with walleye, small rima oris bass, squawfish, all these species of fish that wouldn't fifty-fifty be at that place if it wasn't for this inane series of dams. I never even finished describing how it's a corporate welfare scam; how the electric rate-payers finance these Republican politicians that own the "Port of Lewiston." I always use quotes considering it'south really a trucking depot. The water in that location is only nine feet deep.
That these incredibly heroic, symbolic fish, the sacred fish of the Nez Perce people, the same Nez Perce who, when Lewis and Clark were starving on their return journey, gave them horses, fed them, saved their asses. Chief Joseph and his family and their tribe on their last flight came right through hither [Lolo, Montana]. They probably came correct through my yard, and made it as far every bit the Big Pigsty when his wife was murdered before dawn by General Howard's troops. That was our first give thanks you lot to the Nez Perce for helping Lewis and Clark. Then we gave them a reservation, and in a few years aureate was discovered and, immediately, "bam!" (He hits the table.) it shrank to, you know, 20 percent of its erstwhile size. And at present nosotros are thanking them with the viii dams that completely remove this fish that is central to their belief organization, to their life-ways, to everything they know and are and have been for x,000 years, or yet long they've been here.
At some point, it's but 1 of those things that goes all the mode back to the founding fathers and the fact that nosotros phone call ourselves a free people—you know, pursuit of happiness based on genocide and slavery. It eats right into those questions, and in the current corporate drive toward a global mono-culture I feel the same forces at work in a new grade. Then there's a constant pull between the urge to brand art, to write literature that stands with the literature of all time, or the urge to write in defence force of species and watersheds that brand the history of the novel wait like simply a speck. The Columbia River has been here for a really long fourth dimension. The novel is 500 years old. I think possibly the reason why I'm only kind of muttering on here is that you tin tell it's not resolved in me. You tin tell it's a tension that I feel painfully all the time.
When yous say it cost Rick Bass, what practice you mean?
Well, his love for the Yaak and the articulate-cutting of the Yaak, bleeds just like blood throughout the pages; it'southward in all his books now. The ruin of your home infects your story telling. Here's that 1 woodland caribou again. (Laughter). And here's the concluding eight grizzlies or any it is, and here is Rick once again, trying to tell a story but at the same fourth dimension he is haemorrhage for his identify which has received no protection; it'southward just dying. It's a sacrifice zone in the timber wars. Having lived in such a zone myself, and having fled for my life—there are then many of usa whose hearts actually go out to Rick. He lives in a really tough identify.
I wait at something like The River Why, for example, and I wouldn't consider that an activist novel, but I do think that to read information technology correctly you lot must come away from the reading with an understanding of an underlying environmental ethic. I of the things that seems to be resolved in that volume is this tension between the protagonist's love of fishing and his honey of the identify. He realizes information technology's bigger than just catching fish all twenty-four hours and tying flies all night. And within that realization is an ethic that includes the more-than-human world. So my question is: Do you think that kind of work performs an activist purpose?
I retrieve it is more effective. I think the novel is a greater grade than activist writing, just the novel has its own rules; it has its ain muse. And yous can't make a novel into a political tract. Dickens wrote social novels and political novels. He made novels back up the concerns; in some ways it seems a writer similar Charles Dickens or maybe Marking Twain didn't have to carve up their artful standards from any their causes were. I hateful, the things that Twain was able to do with slavery in Blueberry Finn, for example, or well-nigh all of Dickens's tardily novels have some kind of political ax they are grinding. But I think that in the twentieth century, literature has inverse. When yous are grinding an ax, people know, and y'all better be a damn good writer.
This tension seems to be really like to what Stegner describes in his work.
Oh, there is no doubt almost what it toll him.
But at the same time, just like in The River Why, in Stegner's work there is an ethic that tin can be translated into what is going on with the Western landscape and a type of environmental ethic.
It's a strange time for me to be talking about these things considering I'm in the process of finishing the research and writing this Sierra salmon slice, and so I plan on retiring into my novel hole and not be seen or heard from for several years. I often say that I'll requite myself to one cause a year, merely what I'grand finding is that when I say i cause a year it dovetails and mushrooms. There are 30 different activist groups fighting for Snake River dam removal and the survival of Idaho salmon, and when they hear that a guy similar me is in their corner, I get all these smashing invitations to do good things. Merely the muses are jealous. However what about salmon? They were my first muse! The champions of salmon recovery may come from the East coast, where they have really felt the cost of the consummate loss of Atlantic salmon runs, and and so much of the habitat nevertheless accept rivers total of PCBs thank you to the incredible success of Full general Electric then on. Maybe some of those people will see the West and the Columbia River as one of the concluding places where these huge trends can be reversed. The Columbia is not nevertheless the Colorado, and it doesn't have to become the Colorado.
Then yous say it'south not notwithstanding the Colorado, even with all the lower dams?
Yep, the Columbia still supports astonishing life. Ane of the lynchpins of any argument trying to aid the salmon is the Hanford Reach. Thanks to the nuclear wastes that brand information technology incommunicable to dam, the Hanford Reach is the ane department of the lower river that is still wild and scenic. It has amazing wild life and astonishing fish life. Despite incredible abuses by the Priest Rapids Dam, the Reach is the one identify where the salmon runs are on the increment.
An amazing irony.
Yeah, its incredibly ironic. Similar the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. It's a two mile strip full of near a billion state mines which is just teeming with wild life, and all the rest of Korea is completely denuded.
Do you think we are going to exit of this? You lot've got kids; I've got kids. Practice you remember our grandkids are going to exist able to catch a salmon?
Aye. I as well recall that we don't have to worry virtually the rivers. What nosotros have to worry about is humanity. Information technology's ourselves that we're destroying. Nature takes intendance of itself. Nature could become all the way dorsum to insects and reptiles and fungi and lichens and recreate itself; but I like human being beings. We're interesting creatures, and nosotros're the ones that are threatened.
Our reproductive systems are incredibly threatened right now. All this business organization with the decreasing testosterone levels in male mammals all over the world. I can run across that being a cause of great promise because when these entrenched white male CEO's and politicians discover that they aren't going to exist able to reproduce, I think they'll really take that seriously—their infertility. And everything they're doing is creating their own sterility. Some other pretty dainty irony.
I estimate I'm hopeful also because the rivers are then ancient, and because of the things they accept already recovered from. You know about the Missoula floods? Actually catastrophic events! At this point they are saying that humans are proving to exist more than catastrophic, at least to anadromous fish runs, than the Missoula floods. That's really something to recollect near when you consider what those floods did.
That was when there was the swell glacial lake and the dam broke?
Yeah, multiple times. Behemothic walls of h2o and ice that flooded and scoured clean thousands of square miles of what is at present Oregon and Washington, depositing tons of Montana droppings up the Willamette as far as Corvallis and a hundred miles upward the Dechutes. I mean, these walls of water carried where I live down to where you lot live in Eugene. That'southward amazing. And the devastation of wild life and fish life must have been incredible. But I approximate the present time has outdone that.
What is the obligation of a author to a culture?
To be a penultimate pessimist but an ultimate optimist. I feel there'south a spark in our children that can't be killed, and I'm optimistic considering of that. But I'm pessimistic about the ruin of their earth.
To be more than specific, you lot say you lot are going to hole up in your novel place and write.
Well, all things are negotiable. Who knows what tomorrow volition bring. With the right kind of crisis, I'd be out of my hole in a second. I didn't know it, merely the Blackfoot River for me was i of those crises. The River Why was rejected by however publishers as A River Runs Through It. And so I feel this bail to Norman Maclean. We hate some of the same editors. (Laughter).
When I heard his river was going to swallow it, I had just come here from 40 years in Oregon, watching all of my rivers swallow it. So I just couldn't stand it. I gave six months of my life to this incredibly non-profitable, anti-career, impractical, series of writings. But I
had to practise information technology. I wrote because I love my kids. I wrote because I burned. I wouldn't desire to expound a theory well-nigh what the writer owes. The author owes the civilization allegiance to those inner burnings, rather than some manifesto-like statement. Some things are only intolerable. Who knows what information technology will be. Maybe for some writers information technology will be that Ford's outselling Chevy and y'all've only gotta defend Chevys for a while, I don't know. My kids and I alive in these watersheds.
What did you exercise this morning time?
Well, I was feeling a footling raggedy afterward grinding out a slice that I owe a newspaper nearly salmon. I had forgotten a borderline. I accept to write tomorrow, all day. It's a newspaper, what the hell. (Laughter). So I went back in the creek and caught twelve trout in an hr, and some of them were large. Information technology's just function of my almost daily data arrangement.
I know what you lot mean.
Yeah, information technology's been feeding me my whole life. A few times it's gone expressionless. I remember i time that I was and so total of despair that I defenseless a twenty-five pound Chinook on a fly and an incredibly light leader so a thirty-5 pound Chinook and was able to experience nothing considering I'd been turned to cement by things going on around me. But that's rare and I don't retrieve y'all can spend much time in the natural world without some kind of, I don't know if it's ever a healing, but certain sensitivities. Epiphanies.
I have a lot of friends, eco-friends, who are good people but who give me a hard fourth dimension about my line-fishing addiction, telling me I am just torturing the fish. But I argue that there is a certain ethic constitute through that habit. How practise yous see it?
I wouldn't call information technology an ethic; I would call it a spiritual truth. It'southward sacrifice that feeds all of us. 50-v pounds of toxic waste generated by the construction of a goggle box. Something slightly lower, just most that, to build a prissy reckoner monitor. You bulldoze up to the PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] coming together and the grill of your machine is covered with dead insects. You go a Jain where yous only walk outside during the daylight so you don't crush insects, but you start to get sick and you've gotta take antibiotics and there is a holocaust that goes on inside you lot. You're killing these innocent organisms. I hateful, there is no way to define anything as large and clumsy as a man that doesn't involve an animal that is eating other animals the same as the balance of nature. We practice a beautiful traditional craft where you and I stand on state, and l anxiety abroad this creature from another realm is very quietly taking part in the nutrient chain and through a work of deceit—a kind of depression-level fiction—and through some incredible technology, we insinuate ourselves into that nutrient concatenation, and we betray the sincerity of that brute. Only in its struggle for life we experience its life in our easily. And that is important. Because we do hold other lives in our hands. Fly-fishing, in this sense, is an avenue to understanding gospel truth.
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