A River Runs Through It and Other Stories simply has to be the first book we review and recommend on Chi Wulff.
We assume that this collection of extraordinary stories (A River Runs Through It, Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim”, and USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky) are a part of every fisherman’s library around the world, and have been so for years. Life without this book on the shelf to reread at least once a year would be unimaginable around our camp.
The fact that Norman Maclean didn’t start to write his fiction works until age 70 after his notable career as an English professor at the University of Chicago makes these modern American classics even more remarkable.
Reading Maclean’s stories whisks one back into the Montana of old – to steal a quote from the movie “a world with the dew still on it, more filled with wonder and possibility than any I have since known”. Montana remains a magical place for many of us, enhanced even more by the images from these stories.
The ability to weave the ethereal simplicity of the art of fly fishing with the daunting complexities of a family’s relationships separates this book from so many other fly fishing stories written since. The ability to present what were at times the stark realities of growing up western Montana in contrast with the spirituality of fly fishing among the Maclean clan is part of what makes this book so tangible and engaging.
In the process of writing these stumbling comments I’ve pulled my 25 year old paperback copy off the shelf once again, and lost myself rereading some of my favorite passages. (It seems a sacrilege to replace it, but the 25th anniversary edition with the forward by Annie Proulx does look tempting….).
There have been few passages ever written that are as magical of the closing paragraphs of this story –
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fisherman in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light o fthe 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 am haunted by waters.
This is a must have for your library – I know, you’ve had it for years. If not, you simply cannot pass this one up.
