Distinctly Montana Magazine

4 5 Y E A R S O F H A U N T E D W A T E R S 1 4 HOME WATERS REFERS TO YOUR FAVORITE TROUT STREAM, THE BLACKFOOT RIVER IN MONTANA. YET YOU LIVE OVER 2,000 MILES AWAY IN WASHINGTON, DC. HOW CAN THE BLACKFOOT RIVER POSSIBLY BE YOUR HOME WATERS? JOHN MACLEAN The family has scattered. My father and his brother Paul were born in Iowa. My dad spent his teenage years and early twenties in Mon- tana, but he went away to college, to Dartmouth, and was off to Chicago in 1928, in his mid-twenties. And he returned, of course, in the summers. My mother was the only one of us who was born in Montana. She was born in Butte and grew up in Wolf Creek. She wanted to escape small-town life, but she, like all the rest of us, regularly came back. I grew up half in Montana, and it was certainly the place that I liked best. What holds the family together? The Montana cabin at Seeley Lake has allowed us to keep coming back, to keep the connection. YOU OPEN YOUR NEW BOOK ON THE BLACK- FOOT'S MUCHMORE HOLE MADE FAMOUS BY YOUR DAD, AND YOU ALSO END THE BOOK THERE. WHY? The Muchmore hole has been part of my life, early and late. My dad has an anecdote in A River Runs Through It about catching a big fish that almost surely happened on the Muchmore hole. I always wanted to go there when I was young, and I would say, "Gee, Dad. How come we don't go do that?" And he'd say, "I knew a rancher there a long time ago, and we just can't get in there now." Decades later a friend of mine from Chicago bought a ranch that borders the Muchmore, and I started fishing there. The particular fish that's in the book is the biggest rainbow I've ever seen on the Blackfoot River. And I sat there afterwards and said to myself, "I've been thinking about this hole my entire life, and I've been trying for a fish like this my whole life." And eventually that thought became a book. THOSE ORIGINAL WOOD ENGRAV- INGS BY WESLEY BATES IN YOUR BOOK RECALL THE ILLUSTRATIONS IN YOUR FATHER'S BOOK. HOW MUCH INFLUENCE DID YOU HAVE OVER THE PHYSI- CAL DESIGN OF YOUR NEW BOOK? A lot, for which I am thankful. I wanted to echo the illustrations of the first edition of A River Runs Through It, which has those wonderful wood engravings. It was you, Jim, who put me in touch with a guy who was doing an es- say about the illustrations in A River Runs Through It. He and I then ran down the guy who had done them, Robert Williams, who had retired and was still living in the Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago. Williams explained how he'd made the engravings, based on images my dad provided. I said to my editor, Peter Hubbard, "Why don't we do something like that? Why don't we have drawings at the head of each chapter?" Once Hubbard found Bates, we passed draft sketches back and forth. The images at the beginning and end, for exam- ple, echo each other, and that took work. The one at the front shows three figures fishing in a John N. Maclean by JIM HEPWORTH The cover of John N. Maclean's memoir. Various elements of the new book's cover design echo or repeat elements from A River Runs through It, such as the unique quill fly that the Macleans used, and the subliminal reference in the photo to the "arctic half-light of the canyon" from the immortal concluding lines of the novella. Cover photo by Alec Underwood. I N T E R V I E W W I T H The black and white illustrations in Home Waters hark back to the old-fashioned illustrations in his father's book as well as the illustrations in most angling literature beginning in the 15th century. Wood engravings by Wesley W. Bates.

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