What will you do when you get lonely and nobody's waiting by your side? Yeah, Clapton said it, but before him was Hemingway and Brautigan. In Big Two Hearted River Nick Adams returns to nature and fishing, the things he has known intimately since he was a boy, in an attempt to resuscitate himself from post traumatic stress from the War. He relies on the tranquility and pace of the river to heal himself from atrocity. 

"He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it," (Hemingway, 167).

There is a romantic sense of the pastoral in the two-part short story, with the river and the woods as a place to return to whenever one needs it. When one is compelled, by the rigors of society and civilization, to escape, it is there waiting, the river and the trout.

Professor Wilson touched on how Brautigan, in a post-Hemingway flower-power era, sees the co-opting of nature, and the privitization of former wilderness as a spin-off of the Hemingway pastoral ideal. He highlighted the packaged and sold form of nature as seen through The Cleveland Wrecking Yard in which a trout stream is no longer part of "a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot" (Hemigway, 165) as it is for Nick, but as something "stacked in piles of various lengths...there was a loudspeaker," (Brautigan, 106-7). The serene is fragmented and distorted by technology and profit-above-al-else capitalism. Professor Wilson seemed to stop short, for what are the consequences of a society that has bought and sold its wilderness? 

For one it's a society bereft of animals (all bought up, sorry) but it also seems like a society in which the opportunity for healing is gone. Take Nick Adams. Had he gone to rehabilitate in the river and found pieces and piles of a fabricated stream his chances of salvation would dry up. Or, take parts one and two of Brautigan's Knock on Wood, in which streams and waterfalls are houses and flights of stairs. The child, in a moment of youthful exuberance, becomes determined to fish a creek he has seen from a distance. 

In the end it is only a flight of stairs. In stark contrast with Nick, who doesn't need a map and judges his location by the sun and the position of the river, this kid needs to knock on wood to make sure that it's not a stream.

The real meat of the story comes in The Reply of Trout Fishing in America, "There was nothing I could do. I couldn't change a flight of stairs into a creek." As if to say, it's too late, there is no return to the big two hearted river of the pastoral. You had better do as the child does, and be your own trout, because emancipation from the demons within and without can no longer be found along the banks of any river. We had all better knock on wood that we can (again, thanks Clapton) make the best of the situation, before we finally go insane.