By Vince Bzdek

Fifty years ago this month, a 72-year-old first-time novelist published what may be the best-written, truest book about the West ever penned.

If there is one novel every Westerner should read, I’d say “A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean might be it.

It was shunned by all the East Coast publishers, so the University of Chicago, the author’s alma mater, decided in 1976 to publish its first work of fiction as a favor to its beloved alum. The slim novella went on to sell more than a million copies and is now considered a classic.

It’s a story about fly fishing at its heart, but through that prism Maclean redefined how we Westerners might think about our relationship to place and to other Westerners, casting off old cowboy stereotypes of Western storytelling once and forever.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a host of other essential books, many of them classic old Westerns, that I’d recommend for Westerners as well. “Riders of the Purple Sage” by Zane Grey, “Angle of Repose” by Wallace Stegner, “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey, “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry, “Blood and Thunder” by Hampton Sides, “Cadillac Desert” by Marc Reisner, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” by Dee Brown, ”Centennial,” by James Michener,  and “O, Pioneers,” by Willa Cather.

But the writing of “A River Runs Through It” stands apart for me.

There is not a word wasted, the storytelling spare and natural. And yet, somehow that simplicity packs unexpected depths that turn this fish story into something more. One writer once called Maclean a wiser Hemingway.

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing,” is how it starts out, already telegraphing that we will be contemplating mysteries greater than just the art of fishing.

But let’s not short-shrift fishing as an art form. Maclean’s evocative descriptions of the sport triggered a huge surge of interest in Montana and fly fishing, especially after Robert Redford’s movie of the book, starring a young Brad Pitt, came out.

The book starts out with two young boys learning to fish at the foot of their minister father.

“My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”

By the end of the story, fishing has truly become an art for the boys now grown into men, one a journalist, the other a professor. The narrator’s brother Paul has become a kind of archdruid of trout fishing on the Blackfoot River. He’s invented his own form of casting that his brother and father can only marvel at as he loops his glimmering line after a big trout, allowing himself to be taken down the river by the current as he chases his fish, still hanging onto his rod, letting line out as the fish makes it run, reeling it back in slowly, out more then in, floating and reeling at the same time until he’s moving and thinking just like a fish.

He finally emerges with a monster trout, and “At that moment, I knew, surely and clearly, that I was witnessing perfection,” his brother says.

But art is not life, as McLean poignantly observes, and his brother Paul’s life is simultaneously coming undone through gambling and drinking until he’s found beaten to death in an alley for unknown reasons.

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear,” Mclean observes. “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. You can love completely without complete understanding.” The tragedy of the book is what so many of us experience with addicted loved ones, wanting desperately to help them in any way we can while they themselves can’t seem to find a way.

Maclean finishes his book with an ending equal to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s in “The Great Gatsby,” I would argue, winding up his story with something like a “moving prayer” that is timeless and unforgettably poignant.

“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.”

***

After many readings over the years, that phrase “a river runs through it” has come to mean to me, simply, there is a thread that ties things together, us to the land, friends to each other, humans to grace.

And when I see fish photos sent to my phone by my fishermen friends in Wyoming, I envy them the day they just had steeped in some river, knitted intimately into the natural world and at one with waters, sky, and the four-count rhythm of their casts. I envy them, in Maclean’s words, “the therapeutic clarity of uninterrupted wilderness.”

Their craft allows them a communion with nature’s rhythms I can’t quite get at myself, lacking their patience and skill, unless I am with them up in Montana, hearing their stories and breaking bread with them.

That’s when the thread that binds existence is clearest to me, when my friends and I step outside to the edge of Flathead Lake to take in a big gulp of air, and we are all laughing one great laugh together, the world’s worries fading to nothing. There’s no better feeling to me than to be huddled together with those closest to you on the edge of a giant inspiring wild, us against the world.

My friend Tom gave his brand new grandchild some advice the other day.

“Find Them.”

He meant us. He meant find your friends for life and then hold them to your heart with hoops of steel. They are the river that runs through you forever.

Vince Bzdek, executive editor of The Gazette, Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, writes a weekly news column that appears on Sunday.