David James Duncan - The River Why

My birthday began with the water.

Dylan Thomas

What house is this? heres neither coal nor candle,

Where I no thing but guts of fishes handle

Zachary Boyd, Jonah

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 environmenta 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 artnot to mention his ruddy face and dumpy, wader-swathed figureare 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 fishermans 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 dadfamed and respected in his twenty-five-pound vest, hat full of phony insects, rubber trousertops flapping about his nipplestrudging scot free along the worlds 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 fathers 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 Rattrays 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 Creators; 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,