When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, i… - Norman Maclean

If our father had had his say, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him.

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.

He told his Continental Divide stories in a seemingly light-hearted, slightly poetical mood such as reporters often use in writing 'human-interest' stories, but, if the mood were removed, his stories would appear as something about him that would not meet the approval of his family and that I would probably find out about in time anyway. He also must have felt honor-bound to tell me he lived other lives, even if he presented them to me as puzzles in the form of funny stories. Often I did not know what I had been told about him as we crossed the divide between our two worlds.