A River Runs
Through It, Norman Maclean
"In our family, there was no clear line between
religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout
rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister
and fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told
us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to
assume, as my brother and I did, that all first class fishermen on
the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite,
was a dry fly fisherman.
Eventually, all things merge
into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the
world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On
some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the
words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by
waters."
Now you may be asking yourself
what this is doing in here. This is not a book of travelling. It is
not, but what it is is a book of America. A passionate work that
eloquently captures a piece of that romantic "wild America" that
everyone who ever embarks upon a trip such as ours hopes to have the
priveledge to stumble upon. Maclean's novella is this and more. It is
a life's distillation of a time and place. For decades he carried his
reminencence with him knowing that one day he would feel obligated to
set it in words. It is said that we all have one good story in us. I
can't imagine one more poetic and beautiful than Macleans.