Norman Maclean and Me

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, I flew out to western Montana from South Carolina to spend the summer with my brother John and his family in Seeley Lake, a small town near the Mission Mountains. John was a forester with the U.S. Forest Service. Marilyn, my sister-in-law, was being treated for breast cancer. My job was to drive her to Missoula, 52 miles away, for radiation. I was also supposed to babysit my niece, Meg, who was two.

Norman laid the papers in his lap and began to talk to me about my poems, telling me things I hadn’t noticed before. Never had an adult taken me so seriously.

My second Saturday in Seeley Lake, we were going out to dinner with Professor Norman Maclean, a widower friend of John’s who taught English back East. In the Forest Service compound where we lived, everyone already knew our dinner plans. Norman was a summer person. Most year-round Montanans didn’t mix with the summer people, an affluent group that arrived in June and stayed until early fall, enjoying cabins built decades before on the federally owned lakefront. But my brother did. Part of his job was making sure all was well with these temporary residents, some of whom, like Norman, were lonely. He and John swapped stories about the early Forest Service, talked about alpine wildflowers, and bonded over their shared dislike of the “loud bastards” from Great Falls who took over the nearby