A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

by Norman Maclean

  Then I sat down and rested above the white goats. I looked back where I had worked three summers, and it looked strange. When you look back at where you have been, it often seems as if you have never been there or even as if there were no such place. Of the peaks in the sky, my old lookout, Grave Peak, of course, was the one I knew best. When I lived on it, it was a hard climb out of a basin full of big rocks and small grubs, a tent with a finally-mended hole, trees decapitated by lightning, no soft place to sit and one grizzly and one rattlesnake. But here from the divide, it was another reality. It was sculpture in the sky, devoid of any detail of life. There is a peak near my home town we call Squaw's Teat. It is not a great mountain but it has the right name for Grave Peak when viewed from the distance of the divide. From the divide the mountain I had lived on was bronze sculpture. It was all shape with nothing on it, just nothing. It was just color and shape and sky. It was as if some Indian beauty before falling asleep forever had decided to leave exposed what she thought was not quite her most beautiful part. So perhaps at a certain perspective what we leave behind is often wonderland, always different from what it was and generally more beautiful.

  I was trying to keep from myself the fact that I had walked to the top too fast and was a lot tireder than I wanted to be. I had walked those fourteen miles to the rhythm of “It's time to quit. It's time to quit,” but the tempo kept speeding up, especially after my girl began to watch me with a half-closed eye. Sitting there in the sun I began to feel chilled, so I crossed the divide and looked down Blodgett Canyon to see what it was like ahead.

  You might never have heard the word geology and yet have known the instant you looked down Blodgett Canyon that you were looking at a gigantic, glacial classic. For thousands of years it must have been a monster of ice hissing in the cracks of mountains. Coming at me from almost straight below was a Jacob's ladder of switchbacks, rising out of what I later discovered geologists call a cirque but what to me looked like the original nest of a green coiled glacier. When it struck for the valley, the mountains had split apart. At the top where it writhed out of its course and returned, it left a peak or a series of pinnacles. When it reached its own mouth, the partially digested remains of mountains rolled out of its gorge all the way to the river.

  It was a big world and not a very big boy and I thought it was time he shoved off, even though he hadn't taken a long enough rest.

  I shook myself to get warm and started down the switchbacks. I'd intended to take it easy in getting started again, but going down switchbacks doesn't give you much choice and when you're young and out to set a local record you aren't going to take the long way around each switchback. Wherever the face of the mountain was open, I cut straight down, omitting all six-percent grades. I descended in avalanches. Avalanches beside me, avalanches in the rear of me, avalanches in front of me. On the fly, I watched over my shoulder to duck the big boulders. When my legs felt torn in front and I had to stop, I could hear rivulets of granite particles pursuing me and then giving up and then making one more try. After I hit the bottom of the basin and had been standing there for some time to let the spasms in my legs quiet and even after all the avalanches behind had come to a rest, one big granite chunk dropped from nowhere beside me. I looked up and could find no likely place but the middle of the sky.

  At the bottom of the basin I was already lower than the white specks on the cliffs. On the cliffs there was only an occasional tree where a bird had dropped a seed in a crevice. At the top of the divide I had felt chilled in the sun. Here, at the bottom of the glacial basin my face was tightened with heat. Accompanied by avalanches from the sky, I had descended into the pit. The heat made one gigantic bounce from the solar system to the granite cliffs to me personally. Besides, it rose from what I walked on and I could feel that I was turning black under my face like Dante descending into the Inferno.

  I had also made myself into something of a medical problem by refusing to drink water. Since I'd never before walked this far in a day and didn't want anybody to know until I was sure I had, I took over all the thinking myself. I thought, when I go fishing on the Blackfoot River and it's hot and I start drinking from the river, pretty soon I can't stop drinking and pretty soon it doesn't even taste good and I end up waterlogged and half-sick. I reasoned, “You mustn't get sick, so you mustn't drink water.” I can remember taking a sip when eating my sandwich, and, although I can't remember, I must have taken a few other sips, but I stood pledged to some kind of youthful and lofty denial of the flesh. I walked suffering all afternoon down that chasm where mountains had cried for centuries as their structure cracked. At the end, I walked in semidarkness, medically dehydrated.

  For irony, a plunging stream accompanied me to the divide and another one followed me down. Blodgett Creek had started at the bottom of the basin right beside where I and the big boulder lit—springs all over with green sponges around them. I took off my woolen socks and waded in one of them to restore firmness to the flesh I walked on. The water was so cold my heart did something funny, so I stepped back on the sponge. On my way down the canyon, I stopped several times to wade in the creek. I watched little black trout who lived and breathed in it, but I fought, nobly I judged, not to take a drink of it myself.

  I tried to think of various things, but by the time I was half way down the canyon I could think of nothing but drinking. I had pictured myself reaching across the green table for all those dollars, but my pressure on the dollars weakened and I felt them slip slowly out of my hands. The man in the tall black Stetson that I wanted to be like, had from time to time said to me, “And I'll cover you,” but I still didn't know what he meant. I couldn't even retain my girl as part of my mental life. She watched me until she was just her half-closed eye, and then, as some years later, she gave me the big wink and was gone.

  From time to time, I thought I was on the fire line and that the sky was swirling with burning cones and that the universe was upside down, with hell above. The trail ahead seemed full of light ashes rising off the ground because I drew near them. At other times I felt sick and immediately afterwards thought I smelled dynamite.

  But always I wanted a drink. I knew as a logger I should want a “boilermaker,” a slug of whiskey with a bottle of beer as a chaser. Instead I wanted an ice-cream soda. I told myself that ice-cream sodas were for kids, but the image of a boilermaker left scars of dehydration. Besides, I liked ice-cream sodas and at seventeen was secretly curious how men could like the taste of whiskey. So I walked mile after mile with nothing in sight but ice-cream sodas that changed only to vary the color combinations—white vanilla, yellow lemon, and brown chocolate were my favorites, but once in a while I stuck in a strawberry flavor, just before chocolate. I filled the glasses nearly to the top with carbonated water, leaving not quite enough room for a dip of ice cream so that froth would run over. I drank all the ice-cream sodas I could make, always beginning by licking off the froth. I was a damn mess and childish, a fact I tried to keep from myself.

  When I finally saw the light from the canyon's mouth, the cliff on the north side looked tipped beyond ninety degrees.

  Even so, I wouldn't have been in too bad shape when I reached Hamilton if Hamilton had been where I remembered it was, a mile or two from the mouth of Blodgett Canyon. But after one good look I had to stop to absorb my disbelief. Hamilton is way out in the valley and upriver and must be five or six miles from the mouth of the canyon. Five or six miles, all gently sloping to the river, may be a breeze to you, but I sat by the side of the road and played mumblety-peg to steady my hands. I thought of the Bible and hoped that a pair of arms would enfold me and put me on a mule and lead me into Hamilton without any more thorns. There it was in plain view but farther away than seemed possible for a man to walk. This was the first time I had ever been in a fight when I took a terrible beating at the end. At seventeen I had been in a fair number of fights and had won most of them and naturally had lost some too, but always before when I was losing some big friend who ma
ybe I hadn't seen before would step in and stop the fight. I had never before taken a beating with nobody there to stop the beating. When you're watching a fight and you see a guy's legs buckle and his hands drop and he doesn't even back away, it's easy to say to another bystander, “Look at that gutless son of a bitch. He won't even put up his hands to fight.” It's different, though, when you're the guy with nothing left in your legs that will put up your hands, or back away.

  I didn't try any of the hard positions in mumblety-peg, nothing harder than to the nose and to both ears. It helped, though, and gradually I figured out why I was here and Hamilton was way out there. In the spring our crew had been taken by truck from Hamilton to the mouth of Blodgett Canyon as a start on our way to Idaho—in a truck, what's the difference between a couple of miles and five or six? In the spring, too, I hadn't looked back down Blodgett Canyon to see how a glacier had made it and shoved its remains all the way to the river. Hamilton was on the river, and now I understood why I had four or five miles yet to go.

  With that out of the way, I got up and snapped my jackknife shut and began to walk. Sometimes all you have left to win with is the knowledge of why you're taking the beating and the realization that nobody else is going to save you from it.

  Since it never got closer while I watched, I didn't look until it was there. I have always been grateful to Hamilton for being, if not where I expected, at least where I could understand.

  At the time I was also grateful to Hamilton for being an outwardly simple structure to comprehend after a long day. The road from Blodgett Canyon turns at right angles and joins the main street, and the main street of Hamilton is called Main Street, and the streets that cross it at right angles are named by number. I walked down Main Street to, I think, the block between Third and Second where there was a drugstore. I had two ice-cream sodas, a white vanilla and a yellow lemon, and ordered a third, a chocolate soda, to complete my favorite color sequence, but the drugstore clerk said, “Son, I don't think you should have another one now.” I felt like going around behind the counter and shoving the drugstore clerk into his chocolate ice-cream freezer, especially for calling me “son,” but I didn't and I can't claim to have thought better of it. I just felt strange all over.

  Everything was going very fast, including the quitting time rhythm which I certainly had thought would slow and then stop when I got to town. Instead, everything I wanted to do all summer I wanted to do right now. I wanted to find the Chinese restaurant which all the Bitterrooters in the woods said was the best eating place in town, and I wanted to find this Oxford gambling joint and watch their shills at work and I more or less wanted to find a hotel and leave my pack and wash up and maybe lie down before going out on the town. This idea of lying down for a while interested me least of all, so I stopped somebody outside and asked where the Chinaman's was and I think it was in the same block, on Main between Third and Second.

  The Chinaman behind the cash register wore a silky black coat, a white shirt, and a black string tie, and he studied me and my patches and pack and my hair that hadn't been cut in three months. He clearly didn't care for any Forest Service trade from Elk Summit, but without being asked I walked back near the kitchen and sat down at the smallest table in the room. I put my pack on the other chair for a guest. A white waitress came with a menu. Her voice was husky and she was the first woman I had smelled all summer, and she smelled like a woman. I couldn't read what was on the menu—maybe I didn't know the names of Chinese food or maybe I just couldn't see very well. The waitress came back several times and looked at me. I finally thought, “Probably I'm dirty,” so I asked her where the men's room was and I washed in cold water and wiped myself with a cloth towel that came out about a foot at a time when I pushed a button. I wet my hair but my comb was in my pack so my hair was wet and stringy when I came back and, despite the cold water, I didn't feel any better.

  She returned soon and still looked troubled and finally asked, “Do you think you should order now? Why not wait another hour or so before you eat?”

  I would never have got to Hamilton if I felt that way about things. I said, “No, I want to order now.” She must have known that she would have to order for me. She would ask, “Wouldn't you like to try…?” and then she would name something that ended with suey or mein. Each time I would say, “That would be just fine.” I was overpolite in trying to show her that despite the way I looked I was really at home in such classy establishments as Chinese restaurants. I kept saying, “Yes, that would be just fine,” until she stuck the pencil in her blouse and headed for the kitchen.

  The moment I was alone I got very sick. I do not know whether I knew I was very sick. What I knew was that the world was made of two parts—inside and outside a Chinese restaurant—and that I was sure to feel better if only I could get to wherever I was not now. Later, I could look for the Oxford.

  When the waitress finally came, I said, “Would you please give me my check?” She was frightened and said, “But you haven't even eaten yet.” I said, “I know. Just bring me the check.” She said, “Would you please wait a moment?” And she went, not to the kitchen, but to the cash register and talked to the Chinaman with the string tie.

  Everything inside me was going sickeningly fast and everything outside was standing sickeningly still. I wondered how much longer I could wait for my check and then fresh air. I could even guess what they were whispering behind the cash register. Lumberjacks had pretty much the same joke that they played on Chinamen behind cash registers. Four or five jacks would finish eating together and then one would saunter to the front and say to the Chinaman, “He” (pointing in the general direction of the table) “is going to pay for mine. He” (pointing in the same general direction) “lost a bet to me.” Then he would slide by, and this would go on until only one jack was left who would put down just enough money for his own dinner. “Hell, what do you mean me paying for those other guys? I don't even hardly know them.” I was alone but clearly I was from the Forest Service and I had ordered dinner and now I was trying to get out of the restaurant before it was even served. It was a somewhat different lumberjack game, but it had to be a game between a lumberjack and a Chinaman that a Chinaman was supposed to lose. The waitress hurried past me to the kitchen, obviously not looking my way.

  I couldn't wait any longer for anybody to talk to anybody else. I got up and thought I did pretty well to remember my pack. The kitchen door opened and I never knew before how many Chinamen work in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. Families of them, from children to old men, each outfitted with a butcher knife. They followed slowly behind me to the cash register. The waitress stood frightened by herself. She thought, Now I've done it.

  I looked at the bill several times to be sure that it was not more than the silver dollar in my hand and then I put both on the counter next to the cash register and I remember thinking that my paying the bill was a kind of inscrutable joke on the Chinese. I reached out my hand for the change and knocked over the glass of toothpicks and then slid slowly to the floor in a cloud of toothpicks.

  I do not remember hitting the floor.

  The next thing I remember was a husky voice and the smell of woman, and when I opened my eyes I felt more than saw that the waitress was washing my face with a napkin and I immediately fell in love with her. Wherever I had been, I had been very lonely, and I immediately fell in love with her for bending over me. The Chinamen leaned forward in a circle, and were scared by what they saw. The Chinaman with the string tie was unhappy because it was happening in his place. The waitress made a big thing of smiling and said, “We've called the doctor.”

  I thought that would be quite a while, but when I opened my eyes next he had already listened to my chest and was lifting me up to listen to me through my back. When he saw I was awake, he asked questions. He was an old man, he wore a Stetson, and we all knew immediately that he was good. No one said a word unless the doctor asked him, and the doctor knew we all were scared and wanted to tell us
not to be as soon as he could.

  He pulled my shirt together and, before he started to button it, he said, “It was those God damn ice-cream sodas.”

  He talked to all of us, not just to me. He said it was this way. I had walked too far; it was very hot; and I didn't drink anything. Then I drank two God damn ice-cream sodas. This is the way he explained to us what happened medically. He said my blood from “the exertion” (he said “exertion”) was mostly in the outside of me—in my legs and arms and muscles. Then I drank the two God damn ice-cream sodas and they were cold and so the blood all rushed to the inside of me and left my head empty and I fainted. He said, don't worry, take it easy for a day or so, and you'll feel as good as ever. All of us thought we understood everything and were greatly relieved.

  He was a small-town doctor, and I have never asked a big-town doctor for his opinion of the small-town doctor's medical explanation. I am sure, though, that no big-town doctor ever said what the small-town doctor said to me next. He said: “You come to see me late tomorrow morning in my office, do you hear? If you don't come tomorrow, I'll charge you for tonight. If you come tomorrow, I won't charge you for tomorrow or tonight. All I want is to know that you are well.”

  Then the circle began to break up, and people helped me to find the change that had slipped out of my hand when I'd fallen. The doctor said to the Chinaman with the silk coat, “Get him to a hotel.” I don't remember anything for a long time after that. Either I fainted again or I just went to sleep.

  Even while I was waking I knew I should be in a hotel. I got up and checked my clothes and they were on a chair and my pack was in a corner and about the amount of money I should have had was in a pocket. I knew I had been asleep for a while but I also knew it was a long time until daybreak. I went back to bed to check on myself and the surroundings.