The River You Touch: Learning the Language of Wonder and Home: Learning the Language of Wonder and Home

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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. from The River You Touch

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 Touchwith 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 friendsriver-rafting guides and conservationists, climbers and wildlife biologistswho seek to cultivate a way of living in place that moves beyond the mythologized West of appropriation and extraction.

Moving seamlessly from the quotidiandiapers, the mortgage, a threadbare bank accountto the metaphysicaltime, memory, how to live a life of integrityDombrowski 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 waywisdom that is essential for the possibility of transformation.

Reviews

Praise for The River You Touch

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.Nicholas Triolo, Outside Magazine

Theres enjoying nature, and then theres 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.Monte Burke, Forbes

A sparkling, passionate ode . . . Dombrowski opens doors to his work and life. Pass through any and its unlikely youll emerge unchanged.Shelf Awareness, starred review

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 Dombrowskis 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

This treasure of a memoir is a poignant exploration of fatherhood and friendship, fly fishing and hunting, and how to mindfully make ones way in a noisy, sometimes messy world, navigating births and deaths, almost always within a shady walk of a refreshing river pool or the solace grasped on a stretch of trout water.Bill Bryant, Inlander

"Dombrowski writes with fresh sensitivity about his life...The River You Touch chronicles the possibilities for an artistic, healthy, balanced, family-integrated existencerecognizing that 'there is nothing as wild and vital' as their company."Henry Hughes, Harvard Review

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

Buy this book for yourself. And another for any friend who seeks to live a mindful and creative life in the throes of responsibility to family, self, community and a little plot of land on the planet.Contemplify

Eloquent . . . [Dombrowski] captures the seasons of this singular, wild countrynetting the first fish of early spring, gathering morels, harvesting pheasant and elk for holiday meals with friendsaround the frame of raising three children . . . All of this entails a combination of the chaotic and the monastic, as he explains, from sleepless nights to endless diaper changes, bedtime reading, making meals and washing dishes. Hold fast to their wonder, a voice inside him utters as encouragement, which could also be a reminder that there is nothing as wild and vital as our children.Taos News

"An intimate collection of related vignettes that ruminate on an outdoor life along Montana's stunning rivers and [Dombrowski's] challenging interior struggle over providing a dependable living for his growing family . . . Populated by a panoply of gorgeous images'I was nineteenthe Yellowstone flowing around my hips swept quicksilver-streaked beneath the vast moonlit snowfields of the Crazy Mountains'this is a complex, candid meditation on parenting, fishing, writing, and living in a manner that will stir the blood and fire the intellect."Booklist

Nature writer Dombrowski evokes both wilderness splendor and the hardscrabble effort of living paycheck to paycheck in this exquisite work. In lyrical language replete with vivid imagery, Dombrowski reflects on his 25 years as a fly-fishing guide, his uncertainty over writing and poetry, his impending fatherhood and fear of ushering children into a periled world . . . he renders his love of the natural world in incandescent prose: the land itself . . . a blessing, yes, but also a kind of passage, a shaft of fall light shone down on a trace path that leads out of a previously impenetrable wood. Punctuated by the frank candor of a writer weighing sacrifice and art, this introspective memoir will hook fans of A River Runs Through It.Publishers Weekly

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

In slow, eddying prose, [The River You Touch] mines an ordinary life for evocative reflections on family, friendship, and the meaning found in a rugged landscape . . . Suggesting that, like a river, a life well lived includes headlong shots through roaring box canyons in addition to the hypnotic, elliptical movement of water running back on itself, The River You Touch is a profound, moving memoir that contemplates the earth, family, and community in its tributes to the intimate beauty of western Montana.Foreword Reviews

Dombrowskis prose is familiar and inviting its a subtle craft, this translation of outdoor commitment onto the page, extending leaves of solidarity to audiences unknown.Christopher Schaberg, Flyfish Journal

Lyrical and complex, The River You Touch keeps you grounded in the wonder of nature and place as the author navigates through life as a parent, writer, and partner. Dombrowski, a poet, writer, and fishing guide, seamlessly weaves together new and interesting perspectives on fatherhood while painting moving scenes of the American West and allowing glimpses into the many challenges of parenthood and the writing life.Aurora Bonner, Hippocampus Magazine

"A touching and moving story about a family that chooses to live in the wild and call a river home. I absolutely love this memoir and I think you will, to especially if youre a fan of water.Linda Bond, Aunties Bookstore, Spokane, WA

"A naturalist memoir with rich language and reflections on parenting, economic survival, and mental health. Striving to achieve a more sustainable lifestyle with his family, the author becomes anchored to his home ground in Montana. He focuses on his wife and children, the lure of wild game, fishing, and his love of writing. His interactions with authors Jim Harrison and Debra Magpie Eraling provide an added and unique perspective. It may often be the artists curse to live economically disadvantaged, but Dombrowski turns the experience into blissful prose.Todd Miller, Arcadia Books, Spring Green, WI

This is a touching tribute to nature and fatherhood. A poet and fly-fishing guide in love with the wilds of Montana, Detroit transplant Chris Dombrowskis sensitive treatise on the birth and raising of his three children and being a good citizen to the planet is a lesson on paying attention to the natural world in which we reside.Vicki Honeyman, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI

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 isa 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 lifeones place, community, family, history, purpose on earthis 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. Like the river, Dombrowskis story is complicated and enlivened by all it touches, an extension of everything upstream and downfrom the joys, doubts, and terrors of parenthood; to the precarity of making a life in art; to the rivers and mountains that are both his source of sustenance and place of worship; and the fraught layers of histories that map over it all. By the end, Id fallen hopelessly in love with Dombrowskis Montana, not just its rivers and mou

Author Bio

Chris Dombrowski is the author of The River You Touch. He is also the author of Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the Worlds Most Elusive Fish, and of three acclaimed collections of poems. Currently the Assistant Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana, he lives with his family in Missoula.