In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our f… - Norman Maclean

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.

Painted on one side of our Sunday school wall were the words, God is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana.

Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart — I don't know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep. Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.

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.