On the other hand, many of the men in the Forest Service whose main job is fire control are unhistorical for fairly good reasons. There have been millions of forest fires in the past; the Indians even set them in the autumn to improve the pasture next spring. What firefighters want to know is the fire danger rating for today, and as for me, I am not as important to them as the fuel moisture content for that afternoon. They are tough guys and I like them and get along with them, although I am careful about telling them stories of the olden days when at times it took a week or more to assemble a crew in Butte, transfer them to the end of the branch railroad line going up the Bitterroot, and then walk them forty or fifty miles across the Bitterroot divide to get them to a fire on the Selway River in Idaho. I tried to be careful and meek and not end any such stories with a general observation such as “Fires got very big then and were hard to fight.” Firefighters prefer to believe that no one before them has ever been on a big fire.
Although it took more years than I had expected to get the information I wanted about the Mann Gulch fire, I know of only a very few instances where my difficulties were consciously made more difficult. To reassemble what was left of this fire, I needed the help of many more present members of the Forest Service than I can acknowledge in the course of this story, women as well as men. You must always remember the women, even if you are pursuing a forest fire, especially if you are pursuing it in a big institution. The new age for women had not yet worked its way through the walls of the Forest Service; still maybe it had a little. The women I worked with were in charge of the documents, the maps, and the photographs, and without them there would have been practically no illustrations in this book, or, for that matter, practically nothing to illustrate. Their attitude toward me was possibly a combination of women’s traditional attitude toward men touched by an added breath of confidence in themselves coming from the new. They were certainly good and they knew it. When I entered their offices, whether in Washington or Missoula, they looked up and seemed to say, fusing two worlds. “Here’s a man with a problem. What can we do to help him?”
Since I started to write this story I have seen women start taking over some of the toughest jobs in the Forest Service. I didn’t believe I would ever see it, but now there are even a few women Smokejumpers. I can bear witness. One of them lives just a few blocks from me in Chicago. Her father is a faculty member of the University of Chicago—he is a distinguished statistician and one of the best amateur actors I have ever seen. She is a remarkable young woman—attractive, brainy, and tough. They tell me at the Missoula base for Smokejumpers where she is stationed that she is up there with the rest of her crew (which means men) in the training races run in full jumping gear or hard-hat equipment.
Several times in this story of the Mann Gulch fire I have tried to find places where it would be permissible to say that the story of finding the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire has been different from the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire. Tragedy is the most demanding of all literary forms. Tragedy never lets you get far away from tragedy, but I do not want you to think I spent ten years in sustained pain writing what I wanted to write about the Mann Gulch fire. A lot of good things happened along the way. Some things got better, and I met a lot of good people, some of them as good as they come.
It’s hard to say when the pleasures and pains of writing start and end. They certainly start before writing does, and they seem to continue for some time afterwards. I met Bud Moore before I started to write, and he has become one of my closest friends. He and I soon discovered that both of us had worked in the Lochsa when we were boys and when the Lochsa was thought to be accessible only to the best men in the woods. Lewis and Clark had nearly starved there. Running into somebody who has worked in the Lochsa in the early part of the century is something like running into a buddy of yours who served on the battleship Missouri in World War II at the time General MacArthur was on it. Those of us who worked on the Lochsa early in this century regard ourselves as set apart from other woodsmen and our other countrymen in general.
I had started writing this story before I met Laird Robinson, but was still heavy in research and was wandering around the Smokejumper base looking for any odd items I might have overlooked. Laird had been a foreman in the Smokejumpers and had injured himself landing on a fire and twice had tried a comeback but finally had to accept he was through as a jumper. He had been made a temporary guide at the Smokejumper base until they got him placed in a line of work that would lead him toward the top. He was in his early thirties and in the woods could do anything, and among other things he wanted to know more about the Mann Gulch fire. He put a high premium on friendship, and we soon were close friends and doing a lot of our digging into Mann Gulch together, as you will see from the course of this story. It is a great privilege to possess the friendship of a young man who is as good or better than you at what you intended to be when you were his age just before you changed directions—all the way from the woods to the classroom. It is as if old age fortuitously had enriched your life by letting you live two lives, the life you finally chose to live and a working copy of the one you started out to live.
I tried to be careful that our friendship did not endanger Laird professionally, and there were times when it seemed that it might. We were well along in our investigations when evidence appeared suggesting that Rumsey and Sallee had been persuaded by the Forest Service’s investigator to change their testimony regarding the course of the fire at its critical stage. Persuading a witness to change his testimony to what he did not believe to be true was to me a lot more serious charge than scattering or burying documents that might bear on the threat of a lawsuit. So when I knew that I would have to try to find this investigator if he was still alive, I told Laird, “If you don’t like the way this thing is headed now, just step off it before you get hurt. I can see it might hurt you, but there’s no bravery in it for me because it can’t hurt me.”
Laird said to me, “Forget it. On my private list, friendship is highest.” He said, “Anyway don’t worry about me. The Forest Service and I can take care of ourselves.”
So one of the pleasures of writing this story has been listening to the talk of first-class woodsmen, some old and some young.
Interview with Norman Maclean*
In 1986 Maclean was interviewed at his Seeley Lake cabin by writer and teacher Nicholas O’Connell for At the Field’s End: Interviews with Twenty-two Pacific Northwest Writers (University of Washington Press, 1998). The interview shows a relaxed and candid Maclean, speaking about his two lives and geographies, his published book and work in progress, his father and brother, and his work habits. Though he occasionally repeats metaphors and anecdotes from his published works, the interview takes us close to Maclean’s heart and mind and voice.
When did you start fly-fishing?
I was about six when we came to Montana, and almost immediately we started going on these vacations and my father started teaching me to fly-fish. My father was a Presbyterian minister and always had at least a month off in the summer. We would camp out for a month on some big river, the Bitterroot or the Blackfoot.
Do you still fly-fish?
No, I don’t. I hope that’s a temporary answer. A couple of years ago I hurt my hip and I haven’t been able to work very well since then. I quit fishing but I’m getting better. I hope I’ll still be able to fish a little before I quit for good. It’s hard though. I don’t think I’ll ever be very good at it again. I’ve lost my sense of balance, and I can’t stand up on those big rocks and I can’t fish that big hard water. And that’s the only fishing I like to do, fishing the big rivers. If you want big fish, you fish big water.
I miss it a lot. I suppose I get some second-hand pleasure by writing about it.
What has fly-fishing taught you about the nature of grace?
It’s taught me many, many things about grace. I think it’s one of the most graceful things an individual can do out in the woods. It’s very difficult art
to master. My father thought it had the grace of eternal salvation in it.
In “A River Runs Through It,” you wrote, “Good things come by grace, grace comes by art and art does not come easy.” Is that true of writing?
Oh, yes. It’s conceivable that someone could find it smirky and pleasurable on some kind of level, but I think it’s a highly disciplined art. It’s costly. You have to give up a lot of yourself to do it well. It’s like anything you do that’s rather beautiful. Of course some people can do it seemingly by genes and birth, but I don’t think nearly as often as one would think. I think it always entails terrific self-discipline.
Why did you start writing fiction so late in life?
I can’t answer that, but I’ll make a couple of stabs. There will be a certain amount of truth to them, but no one ever knows why he tries something big in life.
One stab is that in the literary profession, which was my life profession, it was always said that no one began serious writing late in life. That was kind of a challenge. I thought, “As soon as I retire, I’ve got some serious things I’d like to write, and I think I know enough about writing to do them well. We’ll see how they come out.”
Just the fact that you would ask me such a question is part of the reason why I started. I wanted to answer it. But it must have been deeper than just showing off.
When you teach literature, you’re so close to it, and yet in some ways so far. If you don’t have a lot of extra energy, you don’t have time to do what a lot of teachers claim they always want to do but seldom do, and that is both write and teach. I suppose I said it too, but being Scotch I was thick-headed and so I tried it.
It’s very costly to start writing when you’re so old as I am. You don’t have any of the daily discipline built up. Some writers get up every morning and it’s like shaving to them. They can do it without thinking.
In “A River Runs Through It,” you talked about God’s rhythms. I wondered what you meant by that.
One of my fascinations about my own life is that every now and then I see a thing that unravels as if an artist had made it. It has a beautiful design and shape and rhythm. I don’t go so far as some of my friends, who think that their whole life has been one great design. When I look back on my life I don’t see it as a design to an end. What I do see is that in my life there have been a fair number of moments which appear almost as if an artist had made them. Wordsworth, who affected me a great deal, had this theory about what he calls “spots of time” that seem almost divinely shaped. When I look back on my own life, it is a series of very disconnected spots of time. My stories are those spots of time.
Did you feel a real need to write about these spots of time?
I’ve given up everything to write them. I’m now getting so old I don’t know whether I can write much more. I knew when I started, of course, that starting so late I wouldn’t get much done, but I hoped to get a few things done very well. It’s been very costly, though, and I don’t know whether I would recommend it. I’ve sacrificed friends. I’ve lived alone. I work on a seven-day-a-week schedule. I get up at six or six-thirty every morning. I don’t even go fishing up here any more.
When you’re this old, you can’t rely on genius pure and undefiled. You’ve got to introduce the advantages of being old and knowing how to be self-disciplined. You can do a lot of things because you can do what the young can’t do, you can make yourself do it. And not only today or tomorrow, but for as long as it takes to do it. So it’s a substitute, alas maybe not a very good one, for youth and genius and pure gift. And it can do a lot of things, but it’s very, very costly. Sometimes I wish that when I retired I’d just gone off to Alaska or Scotland and played croquet on the lawn.
Do you want to write many other things?
I’m too realistic to entertain such thoughts. Even when I began, which was right after I retired, I knew I could never become a great writer, if for no other reason than I didn’t have time. When I started, I agreed to myself that I would consider I’d accomplished my mission if I wrote several substantial things well. And I haven’t lost that sense of reality; in fact it deepens as I grow older and see I was right.
I am now trying to finish a second long story based upon a tragic forest fire. I’ve been on that for some years, and I hope within the next six or seven months to have it completed. But I have been hoping that for some years now. I’m being enticed into making a movie of “A River Runs Through It.” If I do those two fairly big things, then I won’t try anything very big again.
Do you write every morning?
I don’t write every morning, but I keep my writing schedule. I’m the only one who keeps me alive now. I don’t have a family living with me any more. I have two homes, here and Chicago. I have a lot of accounting and just plain housework to keep both those places going.
And even when you just make a small success, there are many people who want to see you. So I spend more time than I should seeing people and writing letters. I still go on four to six talking tours each year.
Your book has only three stories in it, but because they’re so well written, it’s made you more renowned than writers with four or five novels.
Yes, I would grant that, but there are probably a variety of reasons for that. To some at least, the book is a kind of model of how to begin a story and how to end a story, and it is taught as such. When people are good enough, they try to teach it as an example of prose rhythms. It has a special appeal to teachers of writing, and of course it has a great appeal to fly-fishermen, for many of the same reasons: it seems expert at what it is doing. I’ve had biologists write me and tell me it’s the best manual on fly-fishing ever written.
Did you enjoy writing it?
I don’t know how to answer that. Writing is painfully difficult at times, and other times I feel like I have a mastery over what I’m trying to do, and of course there’s no greater pleasure than that. But when you feel that words still stand between you and what you want to say, then it’s a very unhappy business.
Where did you learn to tell stories?
When I was young in the West, most of us thought we were storytellers. And of course we all worshipped Charlie Russell, partly for his painting, but also because he was a wonderful storyteller. I feel I learned as much about storytelling from him as I did from Mark Twain or Wordsworth or any professional writer. The tradition behind that of course was the old cowboy tradition—coming into town with a paycheck, putting up in a hotel, and sitting around with a half a dozen other guys trying to out-tell each other in stories. Whoever was voted as telling the best story had all his expenses paid for the weekend.
The storytellers’ tradition is a very, very deep one in the West. It probably doesn’t exist very much any more, but then you don’t have the great sources of stories. You don’t have bunkhouses for loggers and cowpunchers any more. They live in town with families. They don’t sit around at night and tell lies to each other. So part of it has been lost.
I learned as much, even technically, about storytelling from Charlie Russell’s stories as I did, say, from Hemingway. He [Russell] was still alive and kicking until I was in my twenties. He was an idol of Montana, much more so than now. He’s an idol now of course, too, but then we worshipped him, and with good cause. His stories are only two to ten pages long, but if you want to learn how to handle action economically and just have every sentence jumping with stuff, take a look at him. Marvelous storyteller.
A volume of his called Trails Plowed Under is just a miraculous piece of narration. Good title, isn’t it? That title pervades not only his paintings, but all of his stories. All the time he was writing and painting he had this feeling that “the West that I knew is gone.” There’s always a nostalgia hanging over his paintings and stories.
When you were writing your stories, how did they change as you turned them into fiction?
They changed long before I started writing them. I’m not sure that after a few years I could tell what happened from
what I say happened, which is fortunate if you want to be a storyteller. I had a drenching of storytelling in all the years when I was in the Forest Service and logging camps, and so it’s easier for me to tell a story about what happened than telling it exactly as it happened. They became stories long before I told them.
Did you have to make them longer when you wrote them down?
No. From the time my father gave me my first lessons in writing to the end of my training in writing, I always had teachers whose chief criterion was literary economy—use of the fewest words possible.
When you were writing your stories, did you write them down all at once, or bit by bit?
I know pretty well ahead of time what I’m going to do in the whole story, and often I come home after going for a walk in the afternoon and take a bath before dinner; in the bathtub I sit in the hot water till it gets cool, trying to figure out what I’m going write the next day. The next day I’m concerned with saying it. That’s probably highly individual. A lot of guys when they sit down don’t know where they’re going. They even use the act of writing to make them find out what they’re going to write about.
Do you work over the stuff that you’ve written a number of times?
The Norman Maclean Reader Page 23