From Mountains To The Sea Author David James Duncan Explores The Links Between The Pacific And The Rockies

David James Duncan just might be the quintessential Northwest writer. If not, he’s certainly on the short-list of those writers who live here and who capture the spirit of the region in their work.

Duncan lives near Missoula, Mont., within sight of the Saffire Mountains, but he doesn’t write about Montana. He regularly fishes a trout stream that flows through his back yard, but he doesn’t write about fishing. Rather, while Montana and trout appear in his work, it’s the connections between the mountains and ocean that are paramount to him and that pervade his writing.

After living in Oregon for nearly four decades, Duncan moved to Montana a couple of years ago. He has a firm grasp on the importance of terrain, and he has raised the geographical connections between Montana and the Pacific like an umbrella over his writing. He thinks a lot about how the rains and snows falling on the North Rockies end up in the Pacific, about how the salmon return upstream in one final journey to spawn and about how the myths of Native Americans so gracefully weave this land of mountains, rivers and beaches into one region.

He reaches into those myths for the longest essay in his latest book, as yet untitled and unpublished, and will read from those works Friday night at Whitworth College.

The title essay, “How the Pacific Makes Love to the Rockies,” captures what’s on Duncan’s mind these days. It grew, he says, from myths of the coastal tribes.

“One of my favorite mythical beings was a guy called Southwind who was the god of spring,” Duncan says. He battles with Ice, the god of winter, and he could do incredible things in terms of spiritual virility. He is promiscuous and his mother is the Pacific Ocean. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and when he blows himself ashore, the whole psychology of the Pacific Northwest changes.

Of course, Southwind is a metaphor for the weather that sweeps off the ocean and pounds the Rockies 400 miles inland with rains, snow and wind.

“I’ve found that since moving to the Rockies, the coming of spring is particularly momentous and noticeable,” Duncan says. “The god of winter has a summer home here and there is a constant tension between the Pacific and the warmth and the land of the arctic where there is permanent winter. The drama is played out in more dramatic ways here in Montana than it ever is on the coast.”

Duncan has long been interested in a co-mingling of myth and artifact - abalone and grizzly bear claws, shark teeth and buffalo hides - between coastal and plains tribes.

“The stories and myths that moved back and forth were intensely different and yet intensely interwoven,” he says. “I moved to the mountains against the flow like a salmon and in doing so rediscovered a counterflux.”

Duncan explores the concept that the Pacific flows back into the Rockies in his new book. But this isn’t his first effort at defining and exploring the Northwest terrain. “River Teeth,” a mix of fiction and non-fiction essay, dipped into the same topic.

Both are departures for the author of “The Brothers K” and “The River Why,” novels that won Duncan a sizeable following.

Along with work on the essays, he’s also writing a new novel.

“I’m working on the novel every day, and I’ve been working on it for three years,” Duncan says. The plot? In short, Duncan uses Portland as the setting and is writing a comedy about Portland being the City of God.

Duncan has lived in Portland eight times; perhaps it’s metaphorically perfect that he moved to the mountains to write about God.

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MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: READING Author David James Duncan will read from recent works at 8 p.m. Friday at the Whitworth College Campus Center. The reading is free and open to the public.