If you're fortunate enough to fly fish with Heraclitus, you don't quibble over details. I initially suggested we cast our lines onto the waters of Montana's great trout streams. I knew he admired the work of Norman Maclean and figured he would appreciate the opportunity to wade into the Blackfoot. Heraclitus insisted, however, that if he was going to come all the way to America, he would fish the quintessentially American river—the Mississippi. Yes, A River Runs Through It was a very impressive book, but he wanted to stand on the banks of the river where Mark Twain learned his trade as a pilot, the river that inspired Huckleberry Finn. Heraclitus knew we would have to cast streamers into the Mississippi—on the Blackfoot, we would have used dry flies—but that was a compromise he was willing to make.

As we approached the Mississippi near Hannibal, Missouri, I could tell that my companion's mood was shifting from great anticipation to something pretty close to despair. Certainly, the man who famously said that "one cannot step twice into the same river" knew ahead of time that we wouldn't be fishing in the river Mark Twain described. But he wasn't expecting what we found: a river teeming with garbage, littered with beer cans, cigarette butts, shreds of plastic, and unidentifiable scraps of metal, and topped with a thin residue of motor oil. The changes that had taken place between Twain's day and our own were gradual, perhaps imperceptible day-by-day, but their cumulative result was jolting.

We were about to leave when we noticed a group of barges working their way down the Mississippi. As they stopped in various places, their crew appeared to reach into the water and draw out some of the larger items fouling the river: tires, oil drums, discarded appliances. We hailed them when they came upon us. Their leader, a young man by the name of Chad Pregracke, told us they were cleaning up the Mississippi—and working more generally to raise awareness amongst Americans. Our waterways have reached a critical point: if we don't join together to restore them now, it will be too late. He added that if we were interested in learning more, we should read his book From the Bottom Up: One Man's Crusade to Clean America's Rivers, written with Jeff Barrow. He wished that he could stay and chat, but the current state of the Mississippi left him with much work yet undone.

Soon after Pregracke waved goodbye and resumed his efforts, Heraclitus indicated that he too needed to continue on his way. A few days later, with that encounter still fresh in my mind, I picked up Pregracke's book. He grew up on the banks of the Mississippi, near East Moline, Illinois. As a boy, he learned the art of the "sheller," diving for mussels; experts could make more than $300 a day. On the bottom of the river, shellers "develop a sixth sense because zero visibility forces them to use their brains in a different way. They often sense obstacles just before reaching them—perhaps because they can feel the subtle shift in the current as it passes an obstruction." As a sheller, Pregracke's identity was inextricable from the river. But even as he came to know its every twist and turn, the river was changing. He found it increasingly difficult to make his way along the bottom—and to find mussels—amidst the refuse. One day, he recalls, the biggest mussel was found in the bowl of a toilet that had been dumped in the river. Was the trade he had learned at a dead end? Who was he if he was no longer a sheller? He decided that someone had to take responsibility for cleaning up the Mississippi.

He began his work with a 20-foot flat bottom boat with a 40-horsepower motor. On the first day, he filled two boatloads of trash, dumped it on a flatbed trailer, and then headed off to a local landfill. His brother, Brent, would eventually let him borrow his houseboat to use as a base of operations. In addition, local media attention helped him to attract volunteers. Pregracke recalls that early in his efforts, "Two local environmental groups, the Izaac Walton League and the Quad City Conservation Alliance, called me with offers to help with a cleanup. They made a financial contribution, and about 15 of their members joined me on the river to pick up trash." Not long after he started, he applied for non-profit status under the name Mississippi River Beautification and Restoration Project. Realizing that he might want to expand the scope of his efforts to other waterways, he eventually changed the name to Living Lands and Waters—the name which his organization bears to this day.[1] Sponsors such as Alcoa and Anheuser-Busch allowed him to expand his crew and his fleet. He developed a small crew of recruiters who would then work to attract volunteers for clean-up efforts in particular locations. In addition, he eventually obtained his own houseboat, a towboat, and several barges. He even converted one barge into what he called a "housebarge" which not only provided him and his crew with a place to live but also classroom space where they would conduct educational programs for a variety of groups concerning their waterway cleanup efforts.

Eventually his efforts spread to a number of waterways. For the most part, Pregracke writes about work in Midwestern states that border the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. But he and his crewmembers also pushed up both the Illinois and Missouri rivers. Not to be contained in the Midwest, perhaps the most fascinating chapter in the book, chapter 9, provides an account of the cleanup efforts which Pregracke and his crewmembers initiated on the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. Recalling his experience on the Anacostia in the heart of Washington, D.C., Pregracke claims that "One of the trashiest sites was along Anacostia Park's riverfront. We were appalled to see an entire mile jammed with garbage."

Running like a deep current through Pregracke's narrative is a passionate conviction that our waterways are irreplaceable—a conviction that wouldn't let him rest. What looked like nothing more than a quixotic gesture, fodder for a feature or two in the local news, has become a restoration project with a national impact. A reporter in Hannibal, Missouri was the first to press Pregracke into realizing what he had accomplished. "This is it! This is how it starts! Do you realize this is how social movements begin?"

Norman Maclean is now synonymous with fly-fishing, Western dry-fly fishing in particular. Maclean's A River Runs Through It, a collection including two novellas and a story, is an improbable classic of 20th-century literature. It inspired Robert Redford to create a memorable film that introduced Maclean to an even larger audience. Although Maclean did not complete River until late in life, his contribution to the larger American story would continue with the posthumously published Young Men and Fire—a tribute to fifteen airborne firefighters, or Smokejumpers, who collided with fate in Montana's Mann Gulch Fire of 1949. And now we have The Norman Maclean Reader.

This collection is welcome simply because it adds to the small stack of books left behind by a distinctive writer. But it does more than that: it sharpens our understanding of Maclean's continuing appeal. At the heart of Maclean's work, we come to understand, is the conviction that well-ordered loves reside at the intersection of people and place.

If that insight strikes you as banal, tainted by naïveté and nostalgia, consider this: When we casually allow our rivers to become trash dumps, we are acting as if we live in no particular place, disembodied. So too when we casually forget our own history—family history, national history, natural history, human history. Like Chad Pregacke, Maclean was engaged in a restoration project.

In his superb introduction to the reader, editor O. Alan Weltzien, professor of English at the University of Montana Western, usefully complicates our sense of Maclean the man. He spent his professional career serving on the faculty of the University of Chicago. During that time, he taught classes in literature, filled several administrative roles, and won the university's Quantrell teaching award several times. Ironically, Maclean's legendary stature at Chicago took hold despite the fact that he wrote almost nothing in comparison to his prolific colleagues. (River was his only book published in his lifetime.) When the academic year ended, Maclean would return to the family cabin on the western shore of Montana's Seeley Lake: "Those migrations west and back defined Maclean, who relished playing the Montana exotic in the intellectual circles of Chicago's Hyde Park."

The first section of the reader consists of selections from an unfinished manuscript on General George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn—not just the battle but its surrounding context and afterlife. The middle section, "A Maclean Sampler," is a wide-ranging miscellany concluding with an interview conducted in 1986 (he died in 1990). Don't miss "The Pure and the Good: On Baseball and Backpacking." The last section includes letters from Maclean to former students, eminent historians, and the loved ones of people Maclean sought to remember through his stories. On every page in whatever section, we hear Maclean's voice—a voice that tells us, when we listen well enough, that our well—ordered loves reside at the intersection of people we know and the places we share with them.

Todd C. Ream is associate director of the John Wesley Honors College and assistant professor of humanities at Indiana Wesleyan University.

1. See livinglandsandwaters.org for further details.

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