#davidjamesduncan

There are moments when my soul feels at peace.  Sometimes it is when I’m sitting in a quiet office by myself listening to Ryan Adams.  Other times I’m sitting on a log around a fire with a glass of Talisker and a cigar contemplating the stars and what lies behind them.  Many times it is sitting with a close friend, sometimes talking while we fish, others silently watching basketball.  Once it was in the middle of Texas in the worst lightning storm I’ve ever seen as I drove a 17 foot metal trailer and blasted country music and sang (yelled) at the top of my lungs hoping I didn’t get struck.  These moments haunt me. At the time, of course, it is outstanding. However, afterwards I always feel a little like Kincaid in David James Duncan’s book The Brothers K who, when having a dream that he is in some sort of heaven, then realizes he is about to be forced to go back home (wake up) begins to feel “cheated and more than a little miffed…(it) suddenly struck me as a cruel joke”. These glimpses of what I think the world (i.e., my daily life) should feel like only give me the feeling that I’m missing something.  That somehow I’ve been let in on a secret that I now have to pretend I don’t know, and somehow trick myself into believing I don’t know. Ignorance sometimes truly is bliss.

  But then I listen to songs like Peace like a River by Paul Simon.  This commonly used simile helps me understand the world just a little bit more. If you know the song you know the slight discord of it. You’d think Paul Simon would have put a song like that to a tune like Kathy’s Song, or Duncan.  A tune that makes you feel like life is good, and easy.  But Simon, like most good writers, knows that would be a farce.  Life isn’t that way.  Rivers aren’t that way.

I love rivers.  I played in them as a kid, built dams, forts, and hiked up them whenever possible, camped next to them, and when I grew up, kayaked and fished them. Several of my favorite books are about rivers.

When I tell stories about my favorite experiences in rivers there are a few about sitting next to a still river peacefully casting while not catching any fish, but often they aren’t so peaceful.  Often they are about the time our boats tipped over in rapids soaking our sleeping bags, and with a lightning storm approaching we had to hit the beach so we could light a fire and crawl into a raccoon hole to get warm and catch some sleep. Or the time I was caught under a logjam and Mark Flaiz spent two hours trying to get my boat out (I was too busy kissing the ground to help)(sidebar: notice there aren’t any exciting stories about me catching big fish.  That’s because there aren’t any exciting stories about me catching big fish).   The point is, the times that I look back on and get excited about, are the times of trial. Chaos even. The times when it looked like we might not make it.  The times that strengthened friendships, the times we’d go to bars and tell girls about.  I’m starting to believe life is the same way.  It’s when life is chaos that we’ll look back on and talk about.  Usually I’m not happy about it while it’s happening, much like I’m usually not real excited when I tip over and I’m freezing my ass off floating down a river head first.  But those are the experiences that build friendships, start relationships, help us realize our capacity for faith, and show us how tough we really are.  Moments when our basic humanity shines through.