Powell's Books Q & A with David James Duncan

With filming starting soon on The River Why, this Q & A with D.J.D. from back in 2001 is still relevant today. You can read the entire interview here. LINK

This respons to a question about a favorite pair of shoes is vintage Duncan,

What makes your favorite pair of shoes different from the rest?

My Patagonia wading shoes are different from my others in that they have felt soles and fit over waders, and so allow me to walk comfortably for hours in and out of cold moving water. What this does to a walk is pretty amazing. Two days ago, for instance, I crossed a muddy channel that no one in regular shoes could possibly have crossed without getting their shoes sucked off. This brought me, still warm and dry, to a magic island. I then walked miles up through this island, which reminds me of some glorious deer park where the Buddha would hang out — herds of literally a hundred or more whitetail deer fleeing in the distance. Wild turkeys. Moose. Many many kinds of birds. Big serene Ponderosa pines. Great horned owls and bald eagles in the cottonwoods. Aspen groves with white bark, growing in "fairy rings" because the entire grove is a single organism that encloses you as you enter.

At the upper end of this walk I reached a favorite stretch of river where I hooked and after a long time landed a twenty-four-inch brown trout. This is a rare fish. A one in a ten thousand fish, maybe. A trout this big and powerful, in fast water, remains invisible for the longest time as you play it. On the end of a sensitive rod, this invisible life feels as though the kingdom of heaven is hidden inside the river and you have hooked into the kingdom and it's electrocuting you with a strange feeling that enters your hand and shoots up your arm and soon fills your whole body. It is indescribable to finally capture and briefly hold such a wild, shining creature in your hands, then quell its fear by returning it to its kingdom.

Combining such walks with my love for contemplative literature, I trudge along in my favorite shoes, on the way back to my little truck with the Live Aloha bumpersticker, thinking about the saints and mystics. Catherine of Siena, for example, said, "All the way to heaven is heaven." On the face of it, I was thinking the other day, this is an insanely optimistic statement that flies in the face of a ton of our grimmest experiences. Yet Catherine of Siena was no fool. Nor was she sheltered. She lived in a time of hatred, and she made her outrageous statement even though half of Italy and beloved members of her family were killed, during her early childhood, by the Black Death.

Catherine owned no felt-soled wading shoes, I was thinking, and so maybe took no Magic Island walks. But my theory is that she walked around feeling as though she was playing a fish like my Magic Island Brown Trout anyway. Catherine of Siena, it seemed to me in my favorite shoes the other day, somehow hooked an invisible and interior fish that somehow connected her to kingdom and electrocuted her daily with joy.

And you know what? I believe what I was thinking in my best shoes on my magic island the other day. I believe Catherine was playing such a fish. I believe we are, too. And hope we grow ever more vividly aware of it.  

Comments

[Teeg Stouffer]

YEEEIKES! That is a freak-out fer shure! Permanent heebie jeebies.

[Dory]

Thanks for writing this.