By Scott Graber
It is Monday and I’m in the blue, gray and tan-painted lobby at Beaufort Memorial’s Orthopedic Clinic just off Ribaut Road. The pleasant, high-ceilinged room is full of folks awaiting their appointments. Most are older, silent, do not text or manipulate a cellphone. Rather they stare straight ahead in silence.
This afternoon I knew I would be waiting, staring at the walls, so I brought along a legal pad in an effort to escape these rooms until we actually had our moment with an actual doctor (or physician’s assistant, nurse practitioner or some other iteration this profession).
And as I sat my mind left the room and visualized an old man, wearing a vest and waders, repeatedly casting a translucent fishing line into a Montana River. I was remembering that incredible, indelible scene from the movie, “A River Runs Through It,” that came out in the 1990s.
“A River Runs Through It” is the story of a Montana family that actually lived in the rough, unbelievably beautiful, entirely unforgiving landscape of Montana in the early 1900s. Norman Maclean began his book in 1973; Robert Redford turned it into an Academy Award winning movie in the 1990s; and everyone I know who saw the movie was mesmerized.
Now, Rebecca McArthur has released “Norman McLean: A Life of Letters and Rivers.”
I know it has something to do with my long gone childhood; but I’m drawn to another scene from the movie where the Reverend McLean reads to his son from Wordsworth, Milton and the Bible.
Young Norman is then required to write an essay on these writings. After that the boy endures his father’s criticism of that essay. Then he must re-write the essay. And, finally, I remember that this sequence of events happens three times over a period of three hours.
“The method was unconventional, the instructor unforgiving, and the pupil spent nearly as much time crying as writing, ‘I cannot tell you,’ Maclean later wrote, ‘how much life 15 minutes can be when you are six, seven, eight, nine, and 10 years old and alone with a red-headed minister and cannot answer one of his questions.’”
After these sessions, however, young Norman was allowed to grab his rifle, or his fly rod, and disappeared into the Montana mountains which were, conveniently, located just behind their house.
All of which takes me back to my own father, once a young immunologist, who would take me to his lab every Saturday morning where he would have me “streak” petrie plates with Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Pseudomonas or Rickettsia. All the while telling me about the disease, symptoms that came from the innocent, innocuous fluid we removing from test tubes and applying to the thin layer of sheep’s blood.
These sessions were sometimes supplemented by autopsies. I remember one day when he removed a liver (perhaps it was a lung) and he handed it to me to weigh — all the while explaining pneumonia, tuberculosis, cancer or some similar disease that (sometimes) ran rampant through lung tissue.
My father would, however, hit his stride at science fair time. He would suggest an experiment that usually involved my own body.
I had, by the time I was a teenager, a healthy case of acne — a “moonscape” would not be inaccurate.
I remember harvesting pus from one of the larger bumps; growing that bacteria in a petrie dish; then killing or “attenuating” the pathogen and injecting it into my thigh with a theatrically large syringe.
At the science fair itself I do remember one of the judges turning away from the injection part of my presentation saying something like, “This has to be child abuse.”
Like young Norman, I too enjoyed a “reward” at the end of these sessions in the laboratory. That reward was walking a half mile to the Ohio State University stadium and watching Howard “Hopalong” Cassidy run into and through the backfields of other, visiting Big Ten teams.
I know my father was well-intentioned, wanting me to have a life like his — a life as a research scientist peering through a microscope and trying to imagine strategies designed to kill bacteria before they killed us. But after all of his work I took a different path seeking out juries, judges and a lifetime of argument and confrontation.
But Dad did give me his time, and his energy, and left me his curiosity — all of it.
And in this regard I was fortunate. Very fortunate.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
