“A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean

 

Black Jack’s was a freight car taken off its wheels and set on gravel at the other end of the bridge crossing the Little Prickly Pear. On the side of the boxcar was a sign of the Great Northern Railroad, a mountain goat gazing through a white beard on a world painted red. This is the only goat that ever saw the bottom of his world constantly occupied by a bottle of bar whiskey labeled “3-7-77,” the number the Vigilantes pinned on the road agents they hanged in order to represent probably the dimensions of a grave. The numbers are thought to mean three feet wide seven feet long and seventy-seven inches deep. The bar was a log split in two by someone who wasn't much good with an axe, maybe Black Jack himself, but his customers had done a much better job in greasing it with the elbows. Black Jack was short, trembled, and never got far from a revolver and a blackjack that lay behind the greased log. His teeth were bad, probably the result of drinking his own whiskey, which was made somewhere up Sheep Gulch.

Here we have another of “The 100 Best” as chosen by Mr. Lewis. I only speak of the novella having never seen the film.

The offered passage lets us know Mclean has narrative power, it is one of the few sequences that is not centered around fly-fishing.

Much of this story is fly-fishing.

So much of it…

I am not a fly-fisherman, nor a bait fisherman and, initially, I thought my remove from this story was simply I do not share that experience, then I recall, I am also not a concentration camp survivor and have no likewise desire to be one and yet my recent read of Viktor Frankl’s experiences inside several camps was gripping.

This story is esteemed by many, so I don’t think my drop in a bucket minority opinion of, “I kinda wanted a bit less fishing and a bit more coherence in plot when not on the river” will do the story no reputational harm.

If you are a fly-fisherman you may be in hog-heaven with this one.