A River Runs Through It. Anyone who hasn’t also read this, well, it’s a phenomenal novella and linked to 2 other great stories in a book (and this is cool), a FIRST book published when the author was over 70.

I just “say NO” to Wal-Mart. I’m lucky enough to live in an area with a competing superstore chain that’s cheap (Meijer). And while Meijer is a little more expensive they pay their unionized work force at least 150% of Wal-Mart wages and donate to a lot of good things in this region. Of course I always think that whenever you spend money you are effectively voting. I spend first in locally-owned stores because I know where that money goes. Then on regionally owned chains. I’m least likely to spend on chains headquartered in Red States, or in anti-union chains. If this is a culture war, I want to make sure I’m funding the right side.

“Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of “A River Runs through It” that he is “haunted by waters,” so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories…” Think about this. This guy, born in 1902 Montana, who lives this wild youth in this wild place, spends more than 40 years teaching at the University of Chicago and then, only then, starts to put these stories into words. There are two hundred page novellas (A River Runs Through It and USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky) around a short story (Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim”), and they’re not just great, they’re proof that (a) it’s never too late, and (b) there are alternatives to the novel in creating great literature.

One wonderful fact: The “world’s great flood” he refers to in the story’s closing paragraphs is even geologically true. The floods formed with the breaking of ice dams in the rockies at the end of the last ice age are considered the biggest of all time. In fact, if you fly over this area, even the Columbia often appears to be what it really is, a tiny trickle of water flowing through a massive dried-up river bed.

“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 fishermen 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 of the 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.”