The River You Touch

Making a Life on Moving Water

By: Chris Dombrowski

Narrated by: Jeffrey Foucault

“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.”

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 Touch with 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 friends—river-rafting guides and conservationists, climbers and wildlife biologists—who seek to cultivate a way of living in place that moves beyond the mythologized West of appropriation and extraction.

Moving seamlessly from the quotidian—diapers, the mortgage, a threadbare bank account—to the metaphysical—time, memory, how to live a life of integrity—Dombrowski 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 way—wisdom that is essential for the possibility of transformation.

©2022 Chris Dombrowski (P)2023 Milkweed Editions

Critic reviews

“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

“There’s enjoying nature, and then there’s 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

Must read book, even if you have no interest in fishing or water.

Beautifully written. The words of Dombrowski bring you to another place. This book will force you to reflect on your life and how you’ve chosen to live it

As beautiful as moving water

Poetry in prose. A narrative woven like a perpetual stream through lush landscape and a few rocky patches, where we learn of a life lived truthfully, with love and worry, trusting that the current’s flow is where we need to be. Not in a back eddy. This book is a memoir of a father, a fisherman, a poet, and a man who knows that the integrity of his life is reliant upon the integrity of the land he inhabits. We are all of a place. And can feel whole if we dip into it with the awareness that Chris shares in this beautiful book.