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| Me with a favorite book, September 1993 |
I’m working my way through Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It this summer for the hundredth time, and thinking about family.
I first read A River Runs Through It over seventeen years ago. I came to the book by way of the Robert Redford movie, which I saw with a good friend at a movie theater one snowy winter night in Heber the first year I taught school. I liked the movie so much I bought the book, and as good as the movie was, it couldn’t hold a candle to Maclean’s original story. Norman Maclean is a great writer; he’s one of my favorites. The man’s prose is like most authors’ poetry; A River Runs Through It is a very beautifully written book. Maclean uses fly fishing as a metaphor for - and counterpoint to - life. Maclean’s description early in the story of his brother Paul’s fly-fishing ability and technique is some of the best writing I've ever read, and you don’t have to be a fly fisherman to enjoy or appreciate it.
Running through Maclean’s book like the river in the title is family. A River Runs Through It is funny, but Maclean isn’t a comedian and doesn’t go for cheap laughs. Instead, the humor comes naturally from growing up home-schooled by his Presbyterian minister father, and with his argumentative younger brother. One of my favorite parts of the book describes the one and only fist fight Maclean ever had with his brother, and their mother’s unfortunate intervention in that fight:
... I did not see our mother walk between us to try to stop us. She was short and wore glasses and, even with them on, did not have good vision. She had never seen a fight before or had any notion of how bad you could get hurt by becoming mixed up in one. Evidently, she just walked between her sons. The first I saw of her was the grey top of her head, the hair tied in a big knot with a big comb in it; but what was most noticeable was that her head was so close to Paul I couldn’t get a good punch at him. Then I didn’t see her anymore.
The fight seemed suddenly to stop itself. She was lying on the floor between us. Then we both began to cry and fight in a rage, each one shouting “You son of a bitch, you knocked my mother down.”
She got off the floor, and, blind without her glasses, staggered in circles between us, saying without recognizing which one she was addressing, “No, it wasn’t you. I just slipped and fell.”
So, this was the only time we ever fought.
When I first read that passage it reminded me of the relationship I had with my younger brother Phil, except we definitely fought more than once. When we were kids, we would pound on each other one moment and be best friends the next. Even as teenagers we still occasionally settled things with a punch up, and yet no one else could ever settle things that way with one of us if the other was around. A River Runs Through It gained unexpected poignancy for me a few years ago when Phil, like Macleans’ brother Paul, died an untimely death. Like Maclean, there wasn’t much I could do to prevent Phil’s death, and I’ve brooded about it ever since.
Despite that ending, A River Runs Through It is not a morbid book. Another aspect of the book that keeps me coming back is Maclean’s love of - and almost reverence for - the mountains in which he grew up. I can relate to that. Like Maclean, I spent several summers working for the US Forest Service when I was younger, and I miss being in the mountains every day.
Rereading A River Runs Through It also reminded me that one of the great things about my Forest Service years was the opportunity I had to retrace the path my grandparents - my mother’s parents - made (almost literally) through the mountains during the early and middle parts of the twentieth century. They were from the same generation as Norman Maclean, and ran a sawmill set in the Uinta Mountains, east of Heber. Maclean’s parents had a cabin in the mountains because they liked to fish; my grandparents had a cabin in the mountains because they had to earn a living. Thanks to some exploring I did as a Forest Service employee, and thanks to some great road trips with a favorite uncle, I learned my way around the areas in the mountains where my grandparents (and parents) lived and worked.
My cousin Jim recently e-mailed me a photo of one of the cabins my grandparents lived in while they cut down trees in the mountains. Here it is:
Not exactly the luxury mountain cabin common nowadays, is it? There wasn’t a jetted hot tub in it, anyway. The cabin doesn't exist anymore; it was only meant to be a temporary accommodation for my grandfather and his family while they worked. The Forest Service demolished it fifty years ago.
Finally, the lesson Norman Maclean teaches in A River Runs Through It is that our families define us. Who we are and what we do with our life is shaped by our family, for better or worse. Ultimately, we have our free will to choose our own path through life, but our family sets us on that path. As Maclean writes, near the end of the book:
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand are dead, but still I reach out to them.
A River Runs Through It is a great book. Check it out if you haven’t already.
