c. 1920: Missoula, MT
brotherly love
When you are in your teens—maybe through
out your life—being three years older than
your brother often makes you feel he is a boy.
However, i knew already that paul was going
to be a master with a rod. He had those extra
things besides fine training—genius, luck, and
plenty of selfconfidence. even at this age he
liked to bet on himself against anybody who
would fish with him, including me, his older
brother. it was sometimes funny and some
times not so funny to see a boy always want
ing to bet on himself and almost sure to win.
although i was three years older, i did not yet
feel old enough to bet. betting, i assumed, was
for men who wore straw hats on the backs of
their heads. so i was confused and embar
rassed the first couple of times he asked me
if i didn’t want “a small bet on the side just
to make things interesting.” The third time he
asked me must have made me angry, because
he never again spoke to me about money, not
even about borrowing a few dollars when he
was having real money problems.
by the time he was in his early twenties he
was in the bigstud poker games.
Circumstances, too, helped to widen our
differences. The draft of World War i immedi
ately left the woods short of men, so at fifteen
i started working for the united states For
est service, and for many summers afterward
i worked in the woods, either with the Forest
service or in logging camps. i liked the woods
and i liked work, but for a good many summers
i didn’t do much fishing. paul was too young to
swing an axe or pull a saw all day, and besides,
he had decided this early he had two major
We cannot destroy kindred: our chains stretch a
little sometimes, but they never break.
—Marie de Sévigné, 1670
purposes in life: to fish and not to work, at least
not allow work to interfere with fishing. in his
teens, then, he got a summer job as a lifeguard
at the municipal swimming pool, so in the early
evenings he could go fishing and during the
days he could look over girls in bathing suits
and date them up for the late evenings.
When it came to choosing a profession, he
became a reporter. on a Montana paper. early,
then, he had come close to realizing life’s pur
poses, which did not conflict in his mind from
those given in answer to the first question in
The Westminster Catechism.
undoubtedly, our differences would not
have seemed so great if we had not been such a
close family. painted on one side of our sunday
school wall were the words, god is love. We
always assumed that these three words were
spoken directly to the four of us in our fam
ily and had no reference to the world outside,
which my brother and i soon discovered was
full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly
the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana.
We also held in common the knowledge
that we were tough. This knowledge increased
with age, at least until we were well into our
twenties and probably longer, possibly much
longer. but our differences showed even in our
