Norman Maclean's River

A Presbyterian minister named John Maclean brought his family to Missoula sometime around nineteen ten, accounts vary on the precise year, and settled into the life of a small timber town at the edge of the northern Rockies. His older son Norman was about eight years old. The family attended to serious things: reading in the morning, writing in the morning, and fishing in the afternoon.

Norman Maclean left Montana for the University of Chicago, where he eventually spent his career as a professor of English literature. He retired in nineteen seventy-three and then, at the age of seventy, sat down to write the book he had been accumulating for sixty years. A River Runs Through It was published in nineteen seventy-six. It is a novella about fly fishing, about brotherhood, and about a gifted, troubled younger brother named Paul whom Norman could not save. The Blackfoot River runs through it literally and as everything else.

The Blackfoot joins the Clark Fork just east of Missoula, and the Clark Fork runs straight through the center of the city before heading west toward the Idaho panhandle. When Maclean writes that he is haunted by waters, the waters he means are specific and local: the Blackfoot's opal pools, the Clark Fork's braided gravel bars. He grew up fishing them with his father and his brother. Robert Redford directed the film adaptation in nineteen ninety-two, two years after Maclean died.

What the novella did to western Montana is its own kind of history. It made the Blackfoot famous, which brought pressure, which eventually required the Clark Fork Coalition to fight hard for the river's health. The river and the book became each other's context. You cannot think of one without the other now, and Norman Maclean probably knew that was the point.