My friend’s father taught us how to fly fish when I was sixteen. First, we learned how to make up our reels. We tied on the backing, then the line, then the leader. Tying the line to the leader required a nail knot, which my friend’s father tied with an actual nail. It was tedious and complex, and once it was secure, I swore I’d never change it out.
We practiced casting on the grass across the street from his house, tying yarn on the end of our lines instead of hooks so they wouldn’t snag but could still be seen. “Ten and two,” he repeated. “Ten and two.”
We road-tripped to the St. Joe River in Idaho, camped out for a few days, and caught some cutthroat. Excuse me for saying so, but after that trip, I was hooked. However, I knew I liked fly fishing long before I’d ever wetted a line.
This was the first of many pilgrimages to the St. Joe.
As soon as I saw the movie A River Runs Through It, I wanted to be a fly fisherman.
It is the story of two brothers in Montana at the turn of the twentieth century. Their father, a Presbyterian minister, taught them the catechism and how to cast using a metronome.
He told them, “It is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o’clock” (straight overhead being twelve o’clock).
Their father taught them that man is a mess and that all good things “come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”
The younger brother, Paul, became a reporter, a renowned fly fisherman, and a gambler who took big risks. Norman went to college and became a professor at the University of Chicago. Paul never left Montana.
Norman realizes that Paul is in too deep with his gambling debts and offers to let him come and live with him, but he responds, “I’ll never leave Montana, brother.”
“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us,” Norman’s father says after tragedy strikes, and they are powerless to prevent it.
Every family has someone in it who needs help but won’t accept it. Years ago, addiction came close to devouring one of my family members. We saw less and less of him; when we did, there was less and less of him to see. He became gaunt and pale with vacant eyes and scabs on his face. I stood in the middle of the St. Joe, a river I’ve gone back to time and time again, mended my line, and thought, I need to mentally prepare myself for his death because it looks inevitable. Thankfully, that’s not how his story ended, he was one of the fortunate few who recovered.
I wrote a book report on A River Runs Through It in high school, but I never read the other two stories in the book. They are both true stories and cover Maclean’s time working as a teen in the burgeoning Forest Service. Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim” is about as raucous as the title sounds. Maclean is paired with the toughest, loudest, cocksure lumberjack in the woods to pull a saw and the pressure builds all summer. The final story, USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky, is as long as its title. It provides insight into how the Forest Service operated, including details on pack animals and fire lookouts. It also offers a good reminder as we head into summer that the government has been trying to manage forest fires for over a hundred years and failing at it.
Anyone with a bookshelf in the Pacific Northwest should have A River Runs Through It on it. Every major publishing house rejected Maclean’s manuscript, with one saying something like this story has too many trees. It was finally published by the University of Chicago Press, where he had spent his career teaching.
This famous book is not a book but a novella. It is a long, short story about how discipline can create beauty, how beauty and tragedy are intertwined, and how our lives and those we love get mixed up in all of it. It’s a very American story with fly fishing, religion, and brothers who both grow up to be writers; what’s not to like?
The only thing my high school teacher wrote on my book report, besides my grade, was this in red ink, “You left out the best line, ‘I am haunted by waters.’”
Get the 25th Anniversary Edition with the introduction by Annie Proulx, if you can. She is a great author and tells a little story about this story.
Thank you for your time and attention. I’m looking forward to sharing another true story with you next week.
Loved this read. One of my favorite memories of my late father is river fishing. Felt that connection through your writing.