Quick Thoughts on a Road Trip West: A River Runs Through It

I-90 from Spokane WA through the Idaho panhandle and well into Montana may be the most spectacular interstate highway I've ever traveled. The road follows long-followed routes between tree-covered mountains, races up and down spectacular passes, and grants one astonishing view after another  of this grand corner of our planet.

The highway weaves around the Clark Fork River for many miles as it approaches Missoula, the main setting of Norman Maclean's short novel, A River Runs Through It. Its story is based upon Maclean's growing up in Missoula, where his Presbyterian-minister father taught him how to fly fish and how to write. Many of my minister friends saw and loved the film Robert Redford made of A River Runs Through It about twenty years ago. It so moved me that I bought and read the book itself and about wore out the CD of the sound track. I think reading that book was the first time in my life that I read something and said to myself, "I want to write like that guy writes." It turned me on to writing as an art, not just as a means of sharing information.

A River Runs Through It also touched me, I think, because my brother, Don, was at the time I read it fighting the cancer that eventually took his life. I identified with Norman, who could do nothing to help his brother, Paul (played by a relatively unknown young actor named Brad Pitt), in his struggle against a very different illness.

I went on to read all I could find of the rest of Maclean's work. There apparently isn't much: two longer short stories usually published with River; Young Men and Fire that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago; and a book of various writings by and about  Maclean that his colleagues at the University of Chicago put together after his death. That volume includes pieces he was working on about The Battle of Little Big Horn, which I will reread when we get home since I've now been there myself.

So as Maxine drove I-90 nearing Missoula, I Googled "First Presbyterian Missoula Maclean" and learned that in 2009 a monument to Norman's father had been placed in front of the current FPC building (built in 1915). I wondered if we should stop to find it, and Maxine knew I absolutely needed to do that. Map Quest makes these things easy, and five minutes off the freeway we were at the beautifully well-kept brick building, and I was posing beside a large upright stone engraved with a picture of a fly-fisherman about to land a fish from a Montana river (surely the Bitterroot), and this inscription:

"In memory of Dr. John Norman Maclean, pastor of First Presbyterian Church from 1909 to 1925, whose love of God, family and creation inspired the story A River Runs Through It and construction of this sanctuary designed by his friend and church member, Missoula architect A. J. Gibson."

I feel as if my first visit to Montana has been somewhat like the first personal meeting of long-time pen pals. You know one another, and you are eager to experience one another in the flesh, but you are anxious that you won't live up to one another's expectations. That one or both of you might have mislead the other about who you really are. Norman Maclean's writings, however, seem to me to have presented Montana as the bold and beautiful place it really is.

Tonight we sleep in Gardiner MT, just north of the Wyoming state line, and about a mile from the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park. The next three mornings we will drive through the Roosevelt Arch to explore the wonders of one more spectacular place in our great country. I am very grateful that we can do this, and for all who've made it possible for us to do it...and for family and teachers and writers who gave me the hunger to want to explore and experience so much.