By ConservAmerica Senior Advisor Rob Sisson
I left my native Michigan a decade ago for the storied landscape of southwest Montana. My motivation and emotions upon leaving the Great Lakes State were very similar to those expressed by my favorite author, Jim Harrison, back in 2002. Harrison was packing up his Leelanau home and moving to Livingston, Montana.
He said, “It seems I am asked several times a day whenever I leave our Leelanau County property just why we are trying to sell our farm and move to Montana….The only immediately suitable or acceptable answer that I’ve discovered is, “That’s where our two daughters and grandchildren live.” Everyone seems to understand this, though it has become apparent that my answer conceals a specific amount of pain, an emptiness or vacuum that will present plenty of room for future homesickness.”
My wife and I brought our twin sons ‘out west’ almost every year once they reached the age of self-propulsion. They came to view Jackson, Wyoming as their second home even though, barring a massive lotto win, we could never afford a home there. When it came time for college, they both settled on Montana State University in Bozeman. We followed their sophomore year.
Michigan’s trout fishing legacy is foundational to the practice of the sport across the country. The fabled Au Sable River is known worldwide as “the Holy Water” of fly fishing. Tom McGuane has written frequently about fishing northern Michigan with his own father. The late Michigan Supreme Court Justice John Voelker writing under the pen name Robert Traver authored some of the finest lines ever put on paper about angling. His books include Trout Madness, Trout Magic, and Anatomy of a Fisherman. Ernest Hemingway’s short story, Big Two Hearted River, elevated trout fishing to a mystical, soul-saving experience. My friend, Doug Peacock, knocked about the same streams and forests as I did as a boy and continues to write eloquently and poignantly about those places.
The first couple of years in Montana, I lived one, long roll cast from the Gallatin River and flayed at trout several times a week. We then rented an old ranch house in the Shields River Valley for four years and I learned to fish small creeks flowing down from the snowpacks of the Absaroka and Crazy Mountains. The older I get, though, the more I long to revisit the Pine, Sturgeon, Black, and Fox Rivers in Michigan, knitted among tangles of cedars and tag alder, or edged by red pines planted long ago by the CCC. The future homesickness Harrison envisioned arrives like a sudden change in the weather, a warmer breeze coming from the east.
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Norman MacLean’s book A River Runs Through It. A minor industry has popped up critiquing the book, the author, and its place in the canon of American literature.
A New York Times column recently asked whether the book could be published today or be a hit today given its masculine lens and its regional focus. It’s a good question but I think the author’s internal discussion misses, perhaps, the only reason it would not find an audience half a century on.
MacLean described the book as a love poem to his family. It’s moment in time is similar to my own family, two generations ago, in the sandy pine plains of Wexford County, Michigan or the Tug Hill Plateau in Upstate New York. America still felt young, spacious, and full of promise for people willing to put their shoulder to the till. Fishing was less sport and more about putting food on the table. My dear great grandmother was the cook at a small hotel in Otsego, Michigan and she regularly visited a non-descript creek just outside of town in the early morning hours in order to put brook trout on the breakfast menu for the hotel’s guests.
To me, the novella is multiple long form poems woven together such that the reader only subliminally perceives the cadence. Only later, it hits viscerally. One of the poems is about the MacLean family. One is the love story between Norman and Jessie. One is about Paul’s promise and short, gravel road to self-destruction. Still another is about fly fishing. Each is one to which all readers can relate to their own lives, their own family histories, and their own place on God’s earth.
The poem, though, that transcends the others, and the one that made the biggest impact on me is about water. Only those who have studied water with a calm, quiet eye for impossible lengths of time could possibly etch into literature words and sentences that grab us at our archetypical core of genetic memory. Like MacLean, my fellow native Michiganders John Voelker, Jim Harrison, and Chris Dombrowski were granted the gift of translating streams into the English language. It helps that Robert Redford so magnificently transferred MacLean’s written words to the big screen, so that we have a common mind’s eye when we read and re-read the novella.
I think of spring runoff with waters raging and plowing into boulders in the Gallatin River and the insanely and unexpected calm water just behind each rock where trout rest before darting into the current for any morsel pushed downstream. I think of mid-summer, when waters are flat and calm and gurgle, their surface a true reflection of the sky above and the mystery of plunging my sandaled foot into Wonderland below. My favorite time is when the rising or setting sun sets off millions of sparkling refractions from molecules of water as far down or up river as I can see. In those moments, I feel as rich and wealthy as anyone could possibly be.
These days, I’m reluctant to fish any pattern other than a larger than necessary dry fly, so my aging eyes can track it in the ripples, eddies, and seams. Catching an actual trout detracts from the solitude, the poetic motions of angler, line, and river.
MacLean captured it perfectly in the closing words of his story:
“Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
“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 think the question of whether A River Runs Through It could be written or receive popular acclaim today hinges on one thing. I’m quite positive my favorite writers—Hemingway, Harrison, Voelker, Peacock, McGuane—didn’t spend time playing video games or with their eyes glued to a screen, computer or phone. Was my generation the last one that spent hours upon hours outdoors, exploring the next curve in the river, the cedar root ball overhanging the whiskey-colored brook, or tipping rocks over to see what larvae clung to the bottoms? Who among the young have experienced the shock of stepping into a stream, expecting molar-cracking cold water, only to be shocked by the bathwater warmth in July? Who among them have heard a rattlesnake rattle while cutting through a sage plain to a prairie stream or seen a heron patiently wade in the silty shallows before darting its beak below the water’s surface?
Hemingway advised aspiring writers to “write what you know”. The only way new stories like A River Runs Through It get written in the future is if future writers know rivers.
We, of the generations who remember the musty, mildewing scent of summer cottages and cabins or of cotton canvas pup tents, the clang of an aluminum canoe on an unseen, submerged rock, the ripping of floating line at the start of a back cast, the rich smoke of a campfire and steam rising from wet, wool socks set nearby…we have two duties before us if a new generation of writers will write new versions of A River Runs Through It.
First, we must ensure that there are cold, clear, fishable streams for those in the womb of time to while away time by fishing, watching, or just daydreaming. Second, the harder task by far, is to remove the distractions and demands on younger people to afford them the opportunity to put in the time to learn about rivers, the ways of trout, and the trillions of ways light and water interact to change the words in their minds.
There is more wealth to be gained on the bank of a stream than a bank on Wall Street.