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"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen, and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman." "As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace." "Always it was to be called a rod. If someone called it a pole, my father would look at him as a sergeant in the United States Marines would look at a recruit who had just called a rifle a gun." "If our father had had his say, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him. So you too will have to approach the art Marine- and Presbyterian-style, and, if you have never picked up a fly rod before, you will soon find it factually and theologically true that man by nature is a damn mess." -Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories