By Lloyd Green
In his sixth book, John Norman Maclean offers a tender tribute to his famous fly-fishing father, to his deep sense of family, the passage of time, and the virtues of both patience and restlessness. Along the way, we learn of fishing rods, matching flies to hatch, and landing trout. Precision counts but so does awe. Sunlight dances atop waters even as the day ebbs.
In Home Waters, the former foreign editor for the Chicago Tribune turned outdoors author shares glimpses of his own story together with the history of Montana and the rivers of America’s West. The expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark receives more than a brief mention.
Maclean also seeks to set the record straight on the death of his uncle, Paul Maclean, portrayed by Brad Pitt in in the film version of A River Runs Through It. Maclean’s father, Norman Fitzroy Mclean, wrote the best-selling novella at 70 after decades as a professor in Chicago. Robert Redford brought it to life on the screen as director, with Craig Sheffer playing Norman. Fly-fishing, and Montana itself, have never been quite the same.
As a child, John Maclean was raised in the Windy City while his father taught literature at the University of Chicago. But Montana’s rivers were always home, too.
The cabin first built by Maclean’s grandfather draws the author back, serving as both reference point and compass. Before entering academia, Norman Mclean worked for the U.S. Forest Service. Like the book of Genesis, Home Waters is about the passing of generations.
Maclean’s grandfather and namesake, Rev. John Norman Maclean, was a Presbyterian minister who first migrated to Iowa from Nova Scotia. His family had emigrated from Scotland to North America.
The elder Maclean took up fly fishing to fit in. He was also eloquent. The reverend “combined religious conservatism with a love of nature,” as did one of his favorite poets, William Wordsworth.
Maclean writes of his own father slipping through the force of religion’s gravity but not losing his respect for who and what went before him, including creation itself. Said differently, Home Waters is a graceful ode of filial piety.
“My father had by then escaped the bonds of the Reverend’s Victorian Christianity, but the heavens still had a pull on him,” he writes. Bluffs, mountains, a river, and a setting sun still evoked joy.
The author treats the reader to the close of a day of father-son fishing on Montana’s 75-mile Blackfoot River. “A crimson sunset spread across the whole of the Blackfoot Valley, the kind of incendiary spectacle that second-rate artists try and always fail to put on canvas,” writes Maclean. Imitation seldom equals the original and even less frequently surpasses it.
Maclean devotes considerable focus to Paul Maclean. On both the screen and the page, he is given his due as the consummate fly fisherman, someone whose casts rose to the level of dance: “a ballet involving fisherman, rod and line.” Those were “beautiful to watch”, but came with no manual. Nor could they.
In A River Runs Through It and Maclean’s latest book, Paul’s athleticism and vocation as a reporter are made clear — as are his foibles. Debt figures prominently in both renditions. Where the movie took freedoms, Home Waters counters with fact.
Paul died violently, and Home Waters does not dispel that fact. Here, John Maclean’s past as a former crime reporter becomes clear to the reader. He doggedly tracked down what happened on that fateful night even if the answer is less dramatic than in the movie.
Rather, what is different are the who, where, and why — an outcome likely based in violent coincidence as opposed to premeditation or retribution. In the movie, Paul is found dead in an alley in Montana, likely beaten to death over unpaid gambling debts. In reality, he was beaten to death in a backstreet in Chicago. The killer was never caught.
Home Waters lovingly paints fishing as passion and metaphor. Maclean admits to catching “an awful lot of fish,” but struggling to land the elusive big one. At the beginning of the book he comes close, only to lose to the battle as he had done when he was a kid.
Maclean does not curse at that turn of events. He can’t. To him, fishing is “a present moment of consequence” and a way “to communicate with each other, the living and the dead.”
The book ends with Maclean’s catch of a lifetime, a massive cutthroat trout, “pale silver from jaw to tail,” that sprung from the depths of Montana’s Seeley Lake to devour a dry fly.
Yet, the story is bittersweet, one of tragedy melded to rejuvenation and hope. Usually cutthroat are relatively docile when boarded, this one was not. Catch and release didn’t end well for fish or angler. The author expresses his disgust with the turn of events and himself.
But years can bring perspective, and events can become suffused with meaning. The lunker’s death came to signify life for a friend who underwent bypass surgery and avoided a heart attack. “The fish died from a heart attack and thanks be to God, I did not,” said the friend. Home Waters repeatedly reminds us that fly fishing provides a wonderful score to the drama of life.
–Lloyd Green, a lawyer by training, writes for The Guardian and other publications. He has loved fishing since he was a boy.