Rivers are round, naturalist Aldo Leopold said. He meant the seamlessness of life and continuum of energy flowing from sun to plants to insects to trout. For John N. Maclean, the round river that connects now and then, and family and friends, is the Blackfoot. The Montana river, which flows near his family’s cabin in Seeley Lake, starts with a slide down the west slope of the Continental Divide, meanders through flats, then quickens and hugs the east flank of the Garnet Range before yielding to the Clark Fork near Missoula.
It’s a river given prominence by his father, Norman Maclean, the author of A River Runs Through It, a dark poem of a book about rivers and fly-fishing, but more intimately about a troubled brother who lived at full throttle and the family who loved him but couldn’t save him from a tragic death — a brutal beating, his body left in a dark alley. The story, drawn from personal experience, haunted Norman Maclean and found voice in the book, which was published when he was 73.
John Maclean picks up that thread and weaves it into a book (Custom House), Maclean reflects on his own family experience and the Blackfoot in an attempt, he says, “to remember the dead generations and to give the living ones a deeper sense of where they came from and hope for where they’re going.”
