The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water
by Chris Dombrowski
Milkweed Editions, 2022. $25.00
Reviewed by Glen Young
Chris Dombrowski calls his new book an “oarsman’s ode”(1), but The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water (Milkweed Editions) is more than this. Part ode to the rivers where he guides trout anglers and part love letter to his family, Dombrowski’s book is more than anything a realization of how the life we seek can buoy us through calm and turbulent waters.
A longtime Montana river guide as well as Assistant Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana in Missoula, Dombrowski brings a water-wise sensibility to his observations and his understanding of parenthood as well as the many ways that our passions are not just who we are, but what we are, even in light of shifting and widening responsibilities.
Dombrowski’s meanders take him from his Michigan upbringing, where he chased big brown trout on the famed Au Sable River, to his early days in the mountain West eeking out a living as a guide while his wobbling writing career unfolded, and from itinerant laborer and wannabe-guide to veteran waterman and accomplished writer.
In passages that move from season to season and mountain top to river bottom, Dombrowski shows how a life spent on water is a solid rubric for assessing the constant ebb and flow of work and family. He acknowledges it took him years to learn and understand “that a trout is a finger pointing to the river, an emissary” (78) of something more than itself, in the same way a child is an emissary, pointing to a more fulfilling life.
As a poet and teacher, Dombrowski’s language is by turns lyrical and introspective. In his preface, he explains that “moving water is a treatise on impermanence, a constant reminder of the ungraspable” (4), a truth seasoned anglers understand but something a new parent might resist. Though, he knows too: “It’s a floodlit epiphany, realizing that one’s vocation doesn’t double as a lucrative occupation” (159). Writing, particularly writing poems, requires wagering more on happiness than on any bottom line.
Dombrowski understands too that raising a family—he and wife Mary are parents to Luca, Molly Keats, and Lily Mae—can be an exercise in rationalizing. He writes, “The mindful parent knows that adding a child to the earth’s ledger is consequential; that this act adds challenge, pressure, and acknowledged complicity to the everyday, sometimes driving the stakes straight through our faltering ozone” (217).
His hope had always been “not only to scratch a life in the most demanding of paradises, but to somehow, one day, come to speak of it from a place of authenticity, to render it in such a way that the land, for the listener, might come alive with the story” (16-17).
Certainly, angling as epiphany can be hackneyed, though in The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water, Chris Dombrowski combines his poet’s ear for the unknowable with his angler’s eternal optimism. What follows is that sought-after authenticity.
Glen Young is a teacher, writer, kayak guide, and house painter. His poetry has appeared in The Walloon Writers Review and the anthologies Beneath the Lilac Canopy and Thoreau at Mackinac. He is a founding member of the Foundation for Teaching and Learning, as well as the Little Traverse Literary Guild. He serves on the board of the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book and the Mackinac Arts Council. He divides his time between Petoskey and Mackinac Island in northern Michigan.