'Home Waters' recounts family roots in fishing and literature
Not surprisingly I have a good many books, spread across nearly every room and myriad shelves with a good number I count treasures. First editions. Signed copies. Antiquarian copies.
One that stands out, however, is a signed copy of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It.” The receipt, still pristine, totals $16.98 plus tax, from a Boulder, Colorado bookstore, dated April 1988.
There’s little surprise then that I would snatch up a copy of “Home Waters,” from John Maclean, Norman’s only son and a seasoned Chicago journalist, particularly as the new book promises “A Chronicle of Family and a River,” recounting the family’s years at their cabin on Seeley Lake, starting in 1921, near the Big Blackfoot River in western Montana, and more.
“Home Waters” delivers on all its promises.
Here we learn of Norman Maclean’s early years, fly casting for trout with his minister father; wet wading with his troubled brother Paul; dividing time between teaching in Chicago and lake life in the mountains, and finding the voice to eventually tell some of it in 1977’s “A River Runs Through It,” a story familiar to anglers and others alike through the Robert Redford film adaptation, where Brad Pitt memorably portrays Paul.
But the younger Maclean does not write only about his father’s home and experiences afield, but of his own, and how the twinned myths of family and rivers hold many truths as well as wonders.
“My father taught me to love fishing, but he did not teach me to fish,” Maclean explains early in his retelling. His father didn’t believe in fishing for the sake of catching fish, of course, but, as another old friend told the younger Maclean, the point was “‘to catch the right fish in the right way,’” which largely meant on a dry fly in a Montana river.
The elder Maclean had his own apprenticeship through his father, the Reverend John Norman Maclean, an austere Scotsman who came to Montana via Nova Scotia and Iowa, among other outposts.
In Montana, the Reverend found his calling, and his people, however, so the family settled in, and he was “almost certainly the first of the family on either side to become a fly-fisherman.” He did so, Norman once said, “because he thought it was his duty to take up the customs of his adopted homeland, leaving behind his Scottish and Canadian roots.”
Following Norman to Chicago after first following him to Dartmouth, Paul hoped for a career in journalism, such as his nephew found. Unfortunately, in real life as in the film, Paul’s trajectory was cut short. He was murdered in a back alley not far from his apartment, no suspect ever charged.
Paul’s tragic end shadowed Norman to the last, their relationship and love an underlying thread of “A River Runs Through It” and a strong presence in “Home Waters” as well. The son’s book honors his father more than his father’s book, however, and delivers both a loving and measured story of family and fishing.
Late in life the elder Maclean wrote to family and friends explaining, “‘Seeley Lake is much more to me than the remnants of its scenery. When I am there I feel that my father, mother, and brother are also...Love has to bring all of us back.”
In “Home Waters,” John Maclean brings readers back to his family’s love of Seeley Lake and a life spent out of doors, a life marked by both magic and tragedy, but always by fly fishing for trout.
Good reading.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: 'Home Waters' recounts family roots in fishing and literature
