John Maclean draws record crowd

SEELEY LAKE – The rows of chairs set up in the Double Arrow Homestead Pavilion quickly filled with people. An overflow crowd clustered around the sides of the pavilion in chairs they brought from home. Another group set their home-brought chairs in the shade of a line of trees. They had no real hope of seeing the guest author but trusted the large loudspeakers would at least carry his words to them.

Who was the man able to draw this crowd of more than 180 people? On Sept. 5, under the auspices of Alpine Artisans' Open Book Club, John Norman Maclean, former newspaper reporter and author of five books on devastating wildland fires came to Seeley Lake to share his latest book "Home Waters."

"Home Waters" is about the author's family. The Maclean family was first made famous by John's father Norman who wrote "A River Runs Through It." It was made even more famous by Brad Pitt in the movie bearing the same title. Like all autobiographical writings, "Home Waters" is the author's attempt to make sense of the events of his life.

John, however, refused to slot "Home Waters" into the categories of autobiography or memoir. He called it a chronicle.

"It's not about me," he insisted. "I'm part of it but I'm not the biggest part of it."

In the book he says it even more eloquently, "I do not fish alone on the Blackfoot River, ever. Even though now I mostly fish it by myself. When I'm on the water, and especially when no one else is around, I feel the presence of generations of my family whose stories run through it."

In its narrowest sense, the "waters" of the title, the "river" running through the chronicle, is the Blackfoot River. The "Home" is the Maclean cabin on Seeley Lake. But according to John, the scope of "Home Waters" extends backward to Lewis & Clark in 1806 and forward toward the Maclean's of the future. The waters woven throughout the book are liberally interlaced with fish tales.

It seems entirely appropriate then that "Home Waters" had its genesis not as a book but as a simple fish story. It seems thrice appropriate that the fish story about John's epic struggle with an enormous rainbow trout took place at the fishing hole where his father also caught a huge rainbow when he was a young man, the very fishing hole filmed in the "A River Runs Through It" movie.

Strangely paralleling a traditional fish story that grows larger in the telling, John's fish story about his rainbow trout started as a simple writeup of the tale for a Chicago angler's club newsletter with a small following. Condon's Jenny Rohrer happened to read it and suggested John send the tale to Montana's Big Sky Magazine. A couple years later, a New York editor vacationing in Livingston, Montana came upon an outdated copy of the Big Sky Magazine and read John's fish story. The editor located John and suggested he make the story into a book.

John said as he thought about converting his rainbow trout story into a book, he began envisioning it encompassing a much larger scope and breadth. He also became aware that the book he proposed to write-a non-fiction genre, by definition compelled to convey factual, verifiable information-would inevitably come into conflict with his father's famous book, especially in the details surrounding the death of his uncle Paul (Brad Pitt's character in the movie).

In deciding to write "Home Waters" as he visualized it, John accepted three challenges.

One challenge was technical: how to smoothly transition between disparate times and widely differing events such as the account of Meriwether's journey through the Blackfoot Valley and Paul's murder. Not surprisingly, 30 years as a newspaper journalist plus five books-worth of experience gave him the skills to maneuver that tricky current.

The second challenge was how to deal with the disparity between his father's fictional account of Paul's murder and the factual details of the crime.

The stark reality, John said, was that Paul's death was "a fairly meaningless murder in a back alley of Chicago." Norman's book and the movie transposed the tragedy to Montana and injected the idea of some sort of Mafia retribution for unpaid gambling debts. The disparity in the two Macleans' accounts of the event epitomizes the fundamental difference between the genres of fiction and non-fiction.

According to John, Paul's murder is the governing force in "A River Runs Through It." That event drives the story from beginning to end. The sordid reality of the primary character dying a meaningless death would doom the book. In order to work as fiction, the book had to in some way elevate Paul's death. Norman's understanding of that necessity is evidenced not only by the 25-year popularity of the movie but also by the volumes of fan mail he received following the book's publication.

John attested to innumerable letters his father received from people who had siblings they described as "just like Paul" while they themselves, like Paul's brother, had tried fruitlessly to help that sibling. The writers described themselves as suffering from what is now labeled survivor's guilt. But their letters always ended by asserting that the book/movie had given them comfort and helped assuage their grief.

John balances his accurate but less uplifting account of Paul's death by counting the ripples resulting from his uncle's murder. To begin with, had there been no murder, there would have been no "River Runs Through It." Fans who felt the book/movie spoke to them personally would not have received the comfort they described in their letters. Without the success of his first book, Norman would never have written "Young Men and Fire." John would never have written five books about wildland fire tragedies. There would be no "Home Waters."

Perhaps more importantly, John told the audience, by his very life and death Paul serves as a good negative example.

John explained, "If you behave the way Paul did, it could lead to an awful end. His story can help you avoid that kind of behavior. It has for a lot of people, including me."

The third challenge John accepted when he decided to write his book is whether a non-fiction work such as "Home Waters" can command the same power as a fiction book, which doesn't have to give accurate names, dates and details. John is waiting for the readers of his book to supply that answer.

Judging from the glowing praise of the critics who reviewed the book, the crowd at the Open Book Club event, the people who purchased his book and waited in line to get his signature, all expect the answer to that challenge to be a resounding "Yes!"