A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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a river runs through it and other stories by Norman MacLean. In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of Great Trout Rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did that all first class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. We're fly fisherman and that John, the favorite, was a dry fly fisherman. It is true that one day a week was given over wholly to religion. On Sunday mornings, my brother Paul and I went to Sunday school and then to morning services to hear our father preach and in the evenings to Christian Endeavour and afterwards to evening services to hear our father preach again in between on Sunday afternoons, we had to study the Westminster shorter cataclysm for an hour and then recite before we could walk the hills with him while he unwound between services. But he never asked us more than the first question in the cataclysm. What is the chief end of man, and we answered together so one of us could carry on if the other forgot Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. This always seemed to satisfy him as indeed, such a beautiful answer should have. And besides, he was anxious to be on the hills where he could restore his soul and be filled again to overflowing for the evening sermon. His chief way of recharging himself was to recite to us from the sermon that was coming enriched here and there with selections from the most successful passages of his morning sermon. Even so, in a typical week of our childhood, Paul and I probably received as many hours of instruction in fly fishing as we did in all other spiritual matters. After my brother and I became good fisherman, we realized that our father was not a great fly caster, but it was accurate and stylish and war glove on his casting hand as he buttoned his glove in preparation to giving us a lesson. He would say it is an art that is performed on a four count rhythm between 10 and two o'clock as a Scot and Presbyterian. My father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician. But he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to retain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word beautiful. After re buttoned his glove, he would hold his rod straight out in front of him, where it trembled with the beating of his heart. Although it was 8.5 feet long, it weighed only 4.5 ounces. It was made of split bamboo cane from the far off Bay of Tonkin. It was wrapped with red and blue silk thread, and the wrappings were carefully spaced to make the delicate rod powerful but not so stiff. It could not tremble