
The River You Touch
Making a Life on Moving Water
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $15.59
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Jeffrey Foucault
-
By:
-
Chris Dombrowski
About this listen
“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 EditionsListeners also enjoyed...
-
Body of Water
- A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most Alluring Fish
- By: Chris Dombrowski
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passions - poetry and fly-fishing; two children, one of them in utero; and an income hovering perilously close to zero. Enter, at this particularly challenging moment, a miraculous email: can't go, it's all paid for, just book a flight to Miami. Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide.
-
-
Great Story but Lousy Narration
- By L. Mortensen on 05-17-18
By: Chris Dombrowski
-
All the Time in the World
- By: John Gierach
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Once again, John Gierach tells the world why the pastime of fly-fishing makes so much sense—except when it doesn't. In sparkling prose, with more than a touch of humor, he recalls the joys of landing that trout he's been watching for the last hour—and then losing an even fatter one a little later. Joy and frustration mix in Gierach's latest appreciation of the fly-fishing life as he takes us from his home waters on the Front Range of the Rockies in Colorado to fishing meccas all over North America.
-
-
Laughing at ourselves
- By Kindle Customer on 04-30-23
By: John Gierach
-
Sun House
- A Novel
- By: David James Duncan
- Narrated by: Robb Moreira, Barrie Kreinik, Elena Rey, and others
- Length: 42 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit Jesuit into crisis. A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.
-
-
Too saccharine to finish
- By Tom Sumter on 11-08-23
-
Fly Fishing Small Streams
- By: John Gierach
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Small-stream fishing wisdom with the same insight and pungent humor that has become Gierach's trademark. Advice on tackle selecting, reading water, and scouting.
-
-
Like a conversation with an old friend about all that is best!
- By His Excellency on 03-30-25
By: John Gierach
-
Tom Lake
- A Novel
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Meryl Streep
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
-
-
So incredibly boring
- By Rhonda Morrison on 08-05-23
By: Ann Patchett
-
Trout Bum
- By: John Gierach
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
While most of us fly-fish to escape from daily life, for John Gierach and his friends fly-fishing IS a way of life. They are trout bums. But John Gierach is also an exceptional writer. The essays in Trout Bum are reflective, bitingly humorous, and enormously wise in the ways of fishing and men. In vivid, unforgettable detail they recount the emotional, spiritual, and tangible adventures and pleasures of stalking trout in and around the Rockies—day in, day out, from season to season, with friends, and alone.
-
-
Fly fishing at its best
- By Jason on 03-27-25
By: John Gierach
-
Body of Water
- A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most Alluring Fish
- By: Chris Dombrowski
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passions - poetry and fly-fishing; two children, one of them in utero; and an income hovering perilously close to zero. Enter, at this particularly challenging moment, a miraculous email: can't go, it's all paid for, just book a flight to Miami. Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide.
-
-
Great Story but Lousy Narration
- By L. Mortensen on 05-17-18
By: Chris Dombrowski
-
All the Time in the World
- By: John Gierach
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Once again, John Gierach tells the world why the pastime of fly-fishing makes so much sense—except when it doesn't. In sparkling prose, with more than a touch of humor, he recalls the joys of landing that trout he's been watching for the last hour—and then losing an even fatter one a little later. Joy and frustration mix in Gierach's latest appreciation of the fly-fishing life as he takes us from his home waters on the Front Range of the Rockies in Colorado to fishing meccas all over North America.
-
-
Laughing at ourselves
- By Kindle Customer on 04-30-23
By: John Gierach
-
Sun House
- A Novel
- By: David James Duncan
- Narrated by: Robb Moreira, Barrie Kreinik, Elena Rey, and others
- Length: 42 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit Jesuit into crisis. A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.
-
-
Too saccharine to finish
- By Tom Sumter on 11-08-23
-
Fly Fishing Small Streams
- By: John Gierach
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Small-stream fishing wisdom with the same insight and pungent humor that has become Gierach's trademark. Advice on tackle selecting, reading water, and scouting.
-
-
Like a conversation with an old friend about all that is best!
- By His Excellency on 03-30-25
By: John Gierach
-
Tom Lake
- A Novel
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Meryl Streep
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
-
-
So incredibly boring
- By Rhonda Morrison on 08-05-23
By: Ann Patchett
-
Trout Bum
- By: John Gierach
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
While most of us fly-fish to escape from daily life, for John Gierach and his friends fly-fishing IS a way of life. They are trout bums. But John Gierach is also an exceptional writer. The essays in Trout Bum are reflective, bitingly humorous, and enormously wise in the ways of fishing and men. In vivid, unforgettable detail they recount the emotional, spiritual, and tangible adventures and pleasures of stalking trout in and around the Rockies—day in, day out, from season to season, with friends, and alone.
-
-
Fly fishing at its best
- By Jason on 03-27-25
By: John Gierach
-
The Longest Silence
- A Life in FIshing
- By: Thomas McGuane
- Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the highly acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts comes a collection of alternately playful and exquisite essays—including seven collected here for the first time—borne of a lifetime spent fishing.
-
-
Narrator had to catch a train
- By Brandon Taff on 01-11-23
By: Thomas McGuane
-
Fools Crow
- By: James Welch, Thomas McGuane
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The year is 1870, and Fool's Crow, so called after he killed the chief of the Crows during a raid, has a vision at the annual Sun Dance ceremony. The young warrior sees the end of the Indian way of life and the choice that must be made: resistance or humiliating accommodation.
-
-
Great book
- By matt on 06-26-21
By: James Welch, and others
-
The River Why
- By: David James Duncan
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 15 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Gus Orviston is a young fly fisherman who leaves behind his comically schizoid family to find his own path. Taking refuge in a remote cabin, he sets out in pursuit of the Pacific Northwest's elusive steelhead. But what begins as a physical quarry becomes a spiritual one as his quest for self-knowledge batters him with unforeseeable experiences.
-
-
I Can't Listen to This
- By Tom on 05-13-19
-
American Buffalo
- In Search of a Lost Icon
- By: Steven Rinella
- Narrated by: Steven Rinella
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.
-
-
Phenomenal
- By Hunter Cole on 08-01-19
By: Steven Rinella
-
The Immortal Irishman
- The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero
- By: Timothy Egan
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.
-
-
Yes, but....
- By Dale and Carol on 04-01-16
By: Timothy Egan
-
Of Wolves and Men
- By: Barry Lopez
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Humankind's relationship with the wolf is the sum of a spectrum of responses ranging from fear to admiration and affection. Lopez's classic, careful study has won praise from a wide range of reviewers and improved the way books on wild animals are written. Of Wolves and Men explores the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf's prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures.
-
-
To Better Know Wolves
- By REV on 08-20-22
By: Barry Lopez
-
Headwaters
- The Adventures, Obsession and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman (Patagonia)
- By: Dylan Tomine, John Larison - foreward
- Narrated by: Dylan Tomine
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Dylan Tomine takes us to the far reaches of the planet in search of fish and adventure, with keen insight, a strong stomach, and plenty of laughs along the way. Closer to home, he wades deeper into his beloved steelhead rivers of the Pacific Northwest and the politics of saving them. Tomine celebrates the joy - and pain - of exploration, fatherhood, and the comforts of home waters from a vantage point well off the beaten path. Headwaters traces the evolution of a lifelong angler’s priorities from fishing to the survival of the fish themselves.
-
-
Because fishing is about more than catching fish
- By Paul O. on 04-12-25
By: Dylan Tomine, and others
-
Where the Deer and the Antelope Play
- The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside
- By: Nick Offerman
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A humorous and rousing set of literal and figurative sojourns as well as a mission statement about comprehending, protecting, and truly experiencing the outdoors, fueled by three journeys undertaken by actor, humorist, and New York Times best-selling author Nick Offerman
-
-
By far his worst work to date.
- By Aron on 10-21-21
By: Nick Offerman
-
The Overstory
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
-
-
eye opening
- By Michael Stansberry on 05-23-18
By: Richard Powers
-
A River Never Sleeps
- By: Roderick L. Haig-Brown
- Narrated by: Phil Williams
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it - its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport. Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea.
-
-
The narration ruins this book
- By Amazon Customer on 05-29-15
-
Rough Beauty
- By: Karen Auvinen
- Narrated by: Jayme Mattler
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
During a difficult time, Karen Auvinen flees to a primitive cabin in the Rockies to live in solitude as a writer and to embrace all the beauty and brutality nature has to offer. When a fire incinerates every word she has ever written and all of her possessions - except for her beloved dog Elvis, her truck, and a few singed artifacts - Karen embarks on a heroic journey to reconcile her desire to be alone with her need for community.
-
-
Author's Memoir
- By Leonora on 08-06-18
By: Karen Auvinen
-
The Last Ranger
- A Novel
- By: Peter Heller
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Officer Ren Hopper is an enforcement ranger with the National Park Service, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: Breaking up fights at campgrounds, saving clueless tourists from moose attacks, and attempting to broker an uneasy peace between the wealthy vacationers who tromp through the park with cameras, and the residents of hardscrabble Cooke City who want to carve out a meaningful living. When Ren, hiking through the backcountry on his day off, encounters a tall man with a dog and a gun chasing a small black bear up a hill, his hackles are raised.
-
-
Disappointing Read From A Favorite Author
- By Michael on 08-17-23
By: Peter Heller
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
What listeners say about The River You Touch
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Amazon Customer
- 12-15-23
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.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Katie O'toole
- 01-30-24
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
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!