A River Runs Through Me

The Susquehanna River, July 4th, 2016...

I have picked up Norman Maclean's book "A River Runs Through It" again. I have been off and on with it. Like three years off and on. Maclean didn't start writing books and stories until his 70's, after he retired as a college English professor. That gives me hope that it is not too late for me.  Shoot, I am only 52!

I have just been missing Montana. It is not unusual to want to be somewhere else for a spell. I love the mountains and like Maclean "I am haunted by waters."  I was hoping to get to Portland, Maine and Acadia National Park this summer, but my work schedule is in disarray and that visit is not looking like it is in the cards. Not much I can do about it but ride it out. Good to have a job...  

So, the book is transporting me to another place, if only in my imagination. I read many books at a time so this is just one of several that I have going now. A River Runs Through It is semi-autobiographical of Maclean's own story but the book and the film don't appear to follow the same timeline of events.

With the death of the younger brother in the film , the minister father gives a funeral eulogy where he says something like this out of the book:

"Help, he said, is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs its badly. So it is (he said, using an old homiletic transition) that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed."

In the book, the father says this as a foreshadowing before the younger brother Paul is murdered; not sure why Robert Redford decided to switch things up. This fatherly reflection in the film does end the story on a poignant and sad note, which I appreciate. It is authentic when a tale does not end all happy. That's not life. There is tragedy, heartache, and suffering. Worse yet, there is eternal estrangement from God. Makes the account of tragedies of this world chump change. 

Disney has made billions of dollars on the "Happily Ever After" theme. That is what make real-life horrors of that two-year old being killed by the crocodile at the Disney Resort so brand-tampering. There is no happy ending here. Just sadness. I think it could be argued very successfully that Disney is damaging because it gives, kids in particular, expectations of things always ending well, and that lasts long into adulthood. Expecting to have happy endings all of the time is one sure way to be unhappy.   

I think that the recent mass-murdering shooter at the Orlando Gay Bar had also been checking out Disney World for his heinous slaughter.  It would have magnified the tragedy exponentially even more. Time will tell of how this ultra-Islamic-fueled love of death will last. I surmise that there will never be enough blood. Brings to mind how only the Blood of Christ is enough. "It is finished", Jesus said cried just before he died. 

"It" is an odd word. It can mean almost nothing, it can mean everything.     

Since I have been kind of waiting things out for work to resume, which in itself is proving  to be hard to predict current-wise, I have endeavored to explore more of the local river on the kayak and I was out today.  The part of the Susquehanna I was on today is further North up the river several miles. The waters were riled up by the winds and the currents had some unusual elements to them. It is always weird when a river is macro North to South but goes micro South to North in parts. My kayak was unstable for a good deal of the time on the river and figuring out how to paddle against the currents back to the launch site proved to be more challenging than I thought.

The quote by the dad in the film/book (I just came to the quote in the book yesterday and I still have 20 plus pages to read) has stuck with me ever since first watching the film when it first premiered. 

There in it is the honesty to admit that we cannot always be what we need to be, to ourselves and to others, because the currents of life have their own path which we cannot control or direct. The best perhaps we can do is navigate it imperfectly. It is an illusion to think that with more effort and more insight we can solve all problems. Sometimes, the best we can do is to accept that we can't change things. 

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 those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

—Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It (1976)