In this remarkable collection of essays, acclaimed author David James Duncan braids his contemplative, rhapsodic, and activist voices together into a potently distinctive whole, speaking with power and urgency about the vital connections between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet. All twenty-two pieces in this collection swirl and eddy around his early-forged bond with the rivers of the Pacific Northwest and their endangered native salmon. With a bracing blend of story, science, and comedy, Duncan relates mystical, life-changing adventures; draws incisive portraits of the humans and wild creatures who shaped his destiny; rips the corporate greed and political folly that have brought whole ecosystems to ruin; and meditates on the spiritual and practical necessity of acknowledging our dependence on water in its primal state. "Refreshing as a glass of cold water on a scorching day. . . . Duncan invites, includes, intrigues, and inculcates his readers so that they will never think of the Pacific Northwest, salmon, Montana, or Nevada gold mines as they did before."--"Library Journal" "This book is the Desert Solitaire of water."--Jim Harrison "Original, skillful, and funny as hell."--Ian Frazier " My Story as told by Water is the real McCoy, vivid and important, full of urgent news about living on earth."--Thomas McGuane "This book is the Desert Solitaire of water."--Jim Harrison "Original, skillful, and funny as hell."--Ian Frazier " My Story as told by Water is the real McCoy, vivid and important, full of urgent news about living on earth."--Thomas McGuane David James Duncan is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and is a National Book Award finalist for My Story as Told by Water . Best known for his two best-selling novels, The River Why and The Brothers K --both received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers award. The Brothers K was a New York Times Notable Book in 1992 and won a Best Books Award from the American Library Association. Excerpt Adoration of a Hose I was born in a hospital located on the flanks of a volcanic cone. This cone,named Mount Taber, looks as innocent as an overturned teacup as it rises over adensely populated section of Southeast Portland, Oregon. Decades before mybirth, scientists had of course declared the cone to be unimpeachably extinct.The hospital, however, afforded a nice view of another cone, thirty-five milesaway in the same volcanic system, also declared extinct in those days: Mount St.Helens. Forgive my suspicion of certain unimpeachable declarations of science. My birth-cone's slopes were drained by tiny seasonal streams, which, like mostof the creeks in that industrialized quadrant of Portland, were buried inunderground pipes long before I arrived on the scene. There were also threesmall reservoirs on Mount Taber's slopes, containing the water that bathed me atbirth, water I would drink for eighteen years, water that gave me life. But thiswater didn't come from Mount Taber, or from the surrounding hills, or even fromthe aquifer beneath: it came, via concrete and iron flumes, from the Bull RunRiver, which drains the slopes of the Cascade Mountains forty miles away. I was born, then, without a watershed. On a planet held together by gravity andfed by rain, a planet whose every creature depends on water and whose everyslope works full-time, for eternity, to create creeks and rivers, I was bornwith neither. The creeks of my birth-cone were invisible, the river fromsomewhere else entirely. Of course millions of Americans are now born this way.And many of them grow up without creeks, live lives lacking intimacy withrivers, and become well-adjusted, productive citizens even so. Not me. The dehydrated suburbs of my boyhood felt as alien to me as Mars. Thearid industrial life into which I was being prodded looked to me like the lifeof a Martian. What is a Martian? Does Mars support intelligent life? I had noidea. My early impression of the burgeoning burbs and urbs around me was ofinternally-combusting hordes of dehydrated beings manufacturing and movingunnecessary objects from one place to another in order to finance the rapidmanufacture and transport of more unnecessary objects. Running water, on theother hand, felt as necessary to me as food, sleep, parents, and air. And on thecone of my birth, all such waters had been eliminated. I didn't rebel against the situation. Little kids don't rebel. That comes later,along with the hormones. What I did was hand-build my own rivers-breaking allneighborhood records, in the process, for amount of time spent running a gardenhose. In the beginning, in Southeast Portland, there was nothing much there atall. Dehydrated Martians seemed to cover the place completely. So I would fastenthe family hose to an azalea bush at the uphill end of one of my mother'ssloping flower beds, turn the faucet on as hard as Mom would allow, and watchhijacked Bull Run River water spring forth in an arc and start cutti