what most of my memoirs clients do<\/a>, nothing more, nothing less: set down a few stories for his children. The result was A River Runs Through It and Other Stories\u2014<\/i>three in all, including the fabulous title \u201cLogging and Pimping and \u2018Your Pal, Jim.\u2019\u201d While the title story concerns Maclean\u2019s family life as a child and young man, the other two pieces in the book are about his forest experiences in late adolescence. He fought fires in the West when he was only fifteen, so the story of thirteen college-age boys dying in \u201ca blowup in tall, dead grass\u201d was something he always identified with.<\/p>\nThis will be a very long post if I don\u2019t set some limits to it. So let me do two more things only: tell you why I love this book so much and give you part of the ending of the book. You\u2019ll have to read Young Men and Fire <\/i>to read all of the ending.<\/p>\n
Young Men and Fire <\/i>is a work about young men by an old man who stood where the young men stood and fought fires as they did. MacLean wrote, \u201cThe problem of identity is not just a problem for the young. It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no longer does it should tell you that you are dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Young Men and Fire <\/i>is the work of a man who never stopped searching for the meaning of existence. Maclean dedicated his retirement years to reconstructing what happened to the young Smokejumpers from the moment they landed full of youthful confidence \u201cup gulch\u201d from the fire to the final moments when, the fire having \u201cblown up\u201d and rushed toward them on a steep hillside in high flammable grass on the hottest of August days, they scrambled desperately for the ridge where they knew the fire would wane. Only two young men and their leader made it alive. Did the leader\u2019s \u201cescape fire\u201d (you\u2019ll have to read the book) cause the deaths of some of the fallen? And what did the fallen experience as they fought for their final breaths in a fire that suffocated them before it burned them?<\/p>\n
Maclean offers a beautiful answer to the latter question:<\/p>\n
Although we can enter their last thoughts and feelings only by indirection, we are sure of the final act of many of them. Dr. Hawkins, the physician who went in with the rescue crew the night the men were burned, told me that, after the bodies had fallen, most of them had risen again, taken a few steps, and fallen again, this final time like pilgrims in prayer, facing the top of the hill, which on that slope is nearly east. Ranger Jansson, in charge of the rescue crew, independently made the same observation.<\/i><\/p>\n
The evidence, then, is that at the very end beyond thought and beyond fear and beyond even self-compassion and divine bewilderment there remains some firm intention to continue doing forever and ever what we last hoped to do on earth. By this final act they had come about as close as body and spirit can to establishing a unity of themselves with earth, fire, and perhaps the sky.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
This is almost but not quite the end of Young Men and Fire. <\/i>You will have to read it yourself to reach the final lines. They will hit you like a haymaker.<\/p>\n
The best way to tell you how much I love this book is this: On one of our final trips together, my father, then an old man, and I traveled to Great Falls, Montana, to see my uncle (Mom\u2019s brother), a retired rancher. In our rental car, I set out alone one morning along the road that winds south with the Missouri, until I reached what are known as the Gates of the Mountains, the place where the Missouri flows northward <\/i>out of the Rockies and from there onto the Great Plains. One of the first gulches inside the Gates is Mann Gulch. Just downriver (north) of Mann Gulch, I hopped a charter boat and asked to be dropped off upriver at a place where I could climb into Mann Gulch. I was dropped at the mouth of Meriwether Canyon, and I then climbed the side of Meriwether to a place where I could look into Mann. Here is the picture I took from that vantage point:<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_dmDaLWNETzg\/TFjPQlBds3I\/AAAAAAAABYk\/W585A6TSYSE\/s1600\/ph.10-03-05_blackfoot.jpg\")
<\/a>This weekly slot was meant to feature poetry and has done so until today. But yesterday afternoon I picked up my favorite book again for the fourth or fifth time, and I can\u2019t imagine writing about any other \u201cWords\u201d right now. You may know Norman Maclean (left) as the author of the story behind the movie \u201cA River Runs Through It.\u201d My favorite book is Norman Maclean\u2019s other <\/i>book.