The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 13.4
TO CATCH A THUNDERHEAD: A Conversation with David James Duncan
Words: Jimmy Watts 2022-06-24 10:07:20
David James Duncan caught in the act of talking story on Jimmy Watts’ back porch in Bellingham, WA. Photos: Carson Artac
It’s midafternoon in Bellingham, WA, and a bonfire is burning behind my house—split timber from last winter’s tree fall is towered high and bright, and an October breeze is gently feeding the flames. There’s a break after weeks of rain and the wind has blown even the grass dry, begging us to sit outside.
With me is David James Duncan—the revered author, storied activist and a deep spiritual and ecological mind. He’s just finished the forthcoming novel Sun House, a sweeping 1,100-page odyssey through the American West portraying what he calls “our biological and spiritually inescapable realities and the love and justice they demand.”
“I tried to stick to a more practical length,” Duncan says, “but the state of a world in which problems are no longer political, but epic, overwhelming, mythical, left me pining to pen an epic in what the praise poet Anne Porter called ‘an altogether different language.’ I wanted this read to feel like walking El Camino in Spain, or the Pacific Crest Trail, or taking a monthlong spiritual retreat in a place far from the nearest asphalt and fumes. I’m hoping Sun House found that different language, and it’s my best and most timely work. It’s certainly been the most costly.”
How my audience with Duncan came to be is a separate story, begun around a much earlier fire—or an earlier reverberation of this same fire warming us today, friendships being no different than flames, the way lightning strikes for millennia have been carried from one hearth fire to light another.
Huddled behind us—as if they too were a fire—12 tamaracks rain amber needles into our laps, as a towering broadleaf maple drifts down leaves the color of the sun. It’s cold and we’re sitting snug to the flames. Even my retriever reclines toward the heat, his back against the warm firepit stone-and-mortar walls. Nearby is a small and nearly dry spring-fed creek named Lost Creek, its water diminished by four summer months without rain. Duncan wears two long-sleeve collared shirts with a craft knitted blue scarf horseshoed around his neck like a hug. “My daughter Celia made it,” he says.
“Scattered on the acre behind you,” I tell him, “hidden under the salmonberry and sword fern, are five sequoia starts Ellie [David’s other daughter] gave me a couple years ago. A few hundred years from now they may be the only conifers still here.”
Eyeing Ellie’s sequoias, David remarks that he loves sitting in the backseat while his daughters choose the destination and drive. He says he wrote Sun House as a gift to them and all the generations facing the epic and the overwhelming. Our challenges, he says, have moved far beyond the political. “The world situation is darkly mythic now. Epic. And requires a collectively mythic and epic response.”
“‘Nothing, having arrived, will stay,’” I remark, quoting Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Slip.” “‘…and yet this nothing / is the seed of all—the clear eye / of Heaven, where all the worlds appear.’”
“One of the most unusual things about my life,” Duncan continues, “from the time I was 20 I’ve had many friendships with wise old women, and a preference for the feminine expressions of wisdom, ongoing to this day. I drew on the saint Julian of Norwich in The River Why and visited her home city when I was just 17. I draw on Julian again in Sun House, saying, ‘Just as God is our Father, so God is our Mother.’ Toxic masculinity has for centuries driven our engagement with Mother Earth in exactly the wrong directions; I heed wise women facing the direction of life, not money. As our Muscogee Nation U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo wrote: ‘Remember the earth whose skin you are.’”
For the better part of my life, Duncan has been a treasured companion, for years now in person, far longer in his body of work. Like every Pacific Northwest river kid Huck Finn wannabe, at age 16 I wanted to be Gus, the protagonist in The River Why.
Finished in 1979 when he was just 27, and published in 1983, Duncan was mowing lawns for a living in Portland, OR, and driving a Dodge Coronet with two smashed quarter panels and a door that wouldn’t open, “but it got me to the Deschutes in two hours,” he says, “and to my favorite coast streams in an hour 45.” Living in a $100-per-month cabin on an urban creek, finger-pecking at a typewriter and without an agent to his name, numerous publishers rejected his unsolicited manuscript before Sierra Club Books changed their “nonfiction only” policy and made The River Why their first novel. Nearly 40 years later it’s still in print and widely considered a coming-of-age classic.
He followed up in 1992 with The Brothers K, an 800-page effort he spent seven years writing, portraying a Vietnam-era American family, broken for the same reason families break today, pieced back together with deep understanding and heroic acts of forgiveness. The Brothers K earned Duncan widespread acclaim and international attention, and ever relevant, it too remains in print.
To say Duncan has been prolific in the three decades since is an understatement, but much of his work has taken the form of public speaking and activism. During those decades, he published three collections of essays—including the National Book Award-nominated My Story as Told by Water—and co-authored two activist-response books—Citizen’s Dissent with Wendell Berry and Heart of the Monster with Rick Bass—while also giving some 50 talks in close to as many cities.
Citizen’s Dissent was published in 2003, Duncan says, in protest “of the de facto political party embodied by the so-called ‘Christian-right’ which betrays the words and example of the very Jesus it claims to love…Jesus scorned riches and embraced the poor, blessed peacemakers not war-makers, celebrated creation, diversity, empathy, beauty and insisted that compassion is literally compassionate!”
In 2010, Heart of the Monster was conceived, written and published in a span of less than three months in a heroic attempt to stop ExxonMobil from turning 1,100 miles of Montana’s scenic byways into a primary transportation corridor for the Alberta tar sands, via river-routed roads—including the road that passed directly in front of Duncan’s house and home water. The proposed transportation corridor was to pass articulating trucks so massive as to almost be unbelievable (both larger and heavier than the Statue of Liberty), alongside five iconic Western rivers. The book required tremendous personal courage from both Bass and Duncan, and in the end their cause prevailed.
“We went head-to-head with ExxonMobil at the time of their greatest power,” Duncan says, “and thousands of local heroes share the credit for stopping them. With our book, Rick and I were, so to speak, the Paul Revere figures yelling, ‘The Monster is Coming! The Monster is Coming!’ It’s still hard to fathom how our side won this fight to protect the Clearwater, Big Blackfoot, Nez Perce Trail of Tears and other national treasures from being turned into tar sands’ tentacles. But when I drive along those rivers today, by damn, I don’t see a trace of Exxon’s ‘high and wide industrial corridor.’”
Barry Lopez described their effort best: “What David Duncan, Rick Bass, and their colleagues have done with The Heart of the Monster knocked me across the room,” he said. “They have breathed fire into a worldwide effort to make Big Oil, Big Ore and Big Government accountable, to bring them to bay. And they have set a standard here—for citizenship, integrity and courage.”
All the while, amid these writing and activist efforts, Duncan continued to produce stand-alone essays, published in scores of magazines, journals and over 40 anthologies, including Best American Essays, Best American Spiritual Writing (appearing five times) and Best American Sports Writing. He also appeared in numerous documentaries, and both The River Why and The Brothers K were adapted and performed live onstage to sold-out audiences at the acclaimed Book-It Repertory Theater beneath Seattle’s landmark Space Needle.
Most recently, Duncan curated and edited One Long River of Song, a vast and heartfelt collection of writings by his close friend, and much-loved Portland-based writer, the late Brian Doyle. Published in 2019 by Little, Brown and Company, One Long River of Song is already in its second printing. Of the collection, the poet Mary Oliver wrote: “Doyle’s writing is driven by his passion for the human, touchable, daily life, and equally for the untouchable mystery of all else.”
Yet, for the past 14 years, beyond that body of work, Duncan has primarily been seated in Montana at the table of Sun House, putting in six-to-12-hour writing days, taking breaks only for birds, mountain walks and an occasional cast when the fishing is good (a privilege reserved for those who live on trout rivers, whose fly rods are always against the wall strung up and at the ready).
The vast, multigenerational novel is a fusion of Eastern and Western traditions with a chorus of blues, folk and gospel music. Set against the mountains and rivers of the West, and told through the perspective of multiple narrators, it’s the contemporary story of rural Montanans on a twice-failed cattle ranch joining forces with a few urban refugees who swallow their city mouse vs. country mouse stereotypes. Duncan tells me, “I’ve seen countless op-eds calling for a change of consciousness if humanity is to survive. I’ve seen zero op-ed descriptions of what this consciousness looks, feels, tastes, sounds and lives like from day to day. That’s the void Sun House sets out to fill, because that’s the void plaguing countless human lives.”
While the community and characters in the novel are fictional, the implications of their viability are pertinent, pressing, based on the very best things David has seen, and in that sense, are very real. “I’ve come to believe only love and justice can work this mess out,” Duncan says, “and will, as slowly and damagingly as selfish and cynical tricksters force it to. But I still see a path forward.” He’s written of this path with the urgency of a fireman entering a house ablaze, and with the calm wisdom of one who’s entered conflagrations before.
“Needed changes of consciousness is the through-line in my fiction, from The River Why to The Brothers K, and on to Sun House,” Duncan says, “and it will remain a through-line. An activist I admire, Charles Eisenstein, recently said why in an essay titled ‘On the Great Green Wall, and Being Useful’:
To heal the world, people must no longer be treated as standardized producers, functionaries, or medical objects in a global industrial system. Not only does this alienate them from the local knowledge and relationship needed to heal the places where they live, it creates legions of superfluous human beings.
“Beginning with those wise, older women befriended when I was young…most of the couple hundred people I’m closest to lead lives that are not only not superfluous, they’re heroic,” David adds. “I reference scores of these people in the epigraphs that open each chapter of Sun House, like these words from Meister Eckhart: ‘When the soul wants to experience something, she throws an image out in front of her, then steps into it.’ This reminds me of the way you and your firehouse brothers step into a fire, Jimmy, ‘soul first,’ and I so admire that.”
Adding logs to the fire, I mention a paradox I’m well acquainted with as a fireman: the way water is taken in the darkness toward flames, where the light hides. “Inside a house on fire,” I say, “it’s complete darkness…ink black.” Duncan listens with eyes the color of a coastal river. “So, we navigate by feel and sound, searching for life and for the seat of the flames, both felt well before they’re seen, inching toward them until a sun appears. We don’t put water on the fire until we’re nearly on top of it, where it’s the hottest. The only way this is accomplished is with love, and it can’t be accomplished alone. Firefighters can only navigate here in unison, with literal, physical contact with each other; and with a complete change of consciousness, turning entirely away from the self.”
As dusk arrives, and the shadows from the sun have all but disappeared to shade, we move closer yet to the fire, and I remember something Barry Lopez wrote before passing: “There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
This Duncan has done his whole life. Even now, surrounded by darkness save for the glow of this fire and its reflection against his face, his heartfelt truths and compassion are physically felt and visibly radiant. I can see it. The trees see it, as do the lost creeks. As do the hundred-billion suns in the night stream above us. Listening to him talk, it strikes me that Duncan, now 70, has become an elder—a guide—one comfortable both in this world and the other, the inner. His stories read like gospels—where the word is the water, “where all worlds appear,” and Duncan is carrying it with cupped hands.
“We’re here for a little window,” Brian Doyle said, “and to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.”
“What’s next?” I ask. Duncan replies with the expected itinerary of an author with a completed book—the back and forth with the publisher, book tours, readings, etc. He has other works on the back burner. But that’s not what I’m asking about, and he knows it.
“In response to Barry’s insight that the great questions have no answers,” he says, “I find the Unanswerable to be a reminder that I was born lost, but in creeks and rivers began to be found. Watersheds remain a place of pilgrimage, wild salmon an interior compass, rivers prayer wheels, industrialized rivers blues tunes, dying birds prophets and guides, wild places as small as weeds blooming in the cracks of city sidewalks a momentary home.”
Before retiring for the night, I try to describe to Duncan an experience I hold dear but can’t very well express. “Either I don’t have the words,” I tell him, “or by putting words to it I’ll diminish the experience. I’m not sure which. It’s both.” David encourages me by saying what his late friend William Kitteridge said, that “secret” and “sacred” are basically synonymous.
“I see a woman,” I try to explain, “sometimes in dreams, sometimes awake. I once even saw her in a house on fire. But most often she appears on the far banks of rivers, ankle deep, holding a fistful of field daisies, smiling beneath chestnut eyes and long brown hair. It’s silly,” I admit. “It’s an image or an imagination, an apparition or an angel. I just know that I love her, and always I drop my fly at her feet with the hope she’ll pick it up.”
“One of the heroines of Sun House might tell you,” David answers, “that words aimed at such an event are trying to catch a thunderhead in the gopher trap of American English. From your long, sometimes impossibly intense friendship with fire and water, Jimmy, you know as well as anyone that the greatest love de-selfs us, making of us itself…So the storytelling problem you face here is wonderful: There are mysteries far greater than words or stories can contain.”
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