by Jim Harrison
How can humble grapes produce something so delicious with the cooperation of human alchemy? Drinking wine is beyond the vagaries of language and numbers and finds its essence, like sex, totally within the realm of the senses. Would you rather read The Joy of Sex or play Parcheesi with Penélope Cruz in Collioure?
Snake-Eating
Everyone knows that if Adam and Eve had eaten the snake rather than the apple, the world would be a better place, but then, intelligent Canadians will query, better than what? The parallel world bandied about by the ancients where our land is sea, and our sea land? Jealous Christian men are forever worried that small dogs, male cats, and snakes are looking up their wives’ skirts, forgetting the hundreds of species of insects that have vivid sexual lives. They have also forgotten the message of the Gnostic Gospels that as members of the mammalian species, we must eat our fears. When my old English setter Tess was startled during her nap in the yard by an emerging gopher, she quickly killed and ate this Republican beast who undermines the foundation of our existence, the ground.
The girl drove into the countryside on a warm August morning turning into the driveway of an abandoned farmstead feeling edgy because for the first time she was steering a car in her night clothes and without panties.
This is a complicated essay that demands a little sexual content to keep the attention of the readers, especially the millions of distraught hockey fans who now drink beer while staring into broom closets. On a recent trip to Toronto, a prominent Canadian critic, who doesn’t wish to be outed on the matter, quipped that the novels of Updike, Roth, and DeLillo could be much improved if skin pictures were interspersed in the pages. He was drinking a large glass of anisette without ice and I let the suggestion, obviously a good idea, pass without comment. I’m not going to go out on a limb that has no tree attached. Everyone knows that modern criticism is a gated community and that the literary ethos of our time is contraction, an etiolated minimalism where the corpse is sat on to expel the last breath of living air.
Back to snakes. The first rattlesnake I ate was cooked by a retired surgeon at streamside while we were taking a lunch break during trout fishing. We were in a canyon in Montana where the crotalids abounded. I thought my surgeon friend did a rather clumsy job of skinning the snake and said so, at which point he admitted his surgeon’s degree had come mail order from Phoenix, Arizona. Sure, he had lost a lot of patients, but he and his family had had a nice life and that’s what’s important in California. When he flopped the whole rattler on the hot coals it contracted in an alarming imitation of life, with the snake’s departing soul seeming to hang there in the rancid smoke. The meat was fairly good with a lot of salt, pepper, and Tabasco, reminding me of the muskrat of my youth that we ate on our little farm near the Big Swamp in northern Michigan.
She deftly shed her blue peignoir and climbed the apple tree with the grace of a gibbon.
Bite after bite we chew our food with the kind of quiet heroism that is unacknowledged by sporting journalists. In a culture in a state of severe decay, the peripheral always subsumes the primary; thus my exploits as a bold eater and mountain climber have been given short shrift in a world of skating and pucks. How proud I was on that zero-degree morning that I gave up being a hockey goalie for the warm, albeit musty, halls of the arts, and for scaling peaks unknown to others in the mountain-climbing fraternity. True mountains are not to be measured in numbers, any more than saying that a beautiful girl is five feet eight inches tall describes her qualitative aspects, say the back of her knees, which are as soft as a mole’s tummy.
Life seems to be taking my breath away. Last year at age sixty-six, I climbed a nineteen-thousand-foot mountain in Mexico called Orizaba and still had to do the cooking at base camp at eleven thousand feet because other members of the expedition were the typical fruit-and-granola ninnies. Naturally at this height soufflés are out of the question. I made a stew of a smallish but overripe boa constrictor with habanero peppers and squash. This snake tastes a bit like the chow dog I had been served and had unwittingly eaten in northern Mongolia. I admit that the boa constrictor put me off snake-eating in the year that followed, though there were definite aphrodisiac qualities. I made love to three Mexican women after we danced to internal music on a ledge with a mile-high drop. At dawn I cooked us a middling omelet from the eggs of the local monkey-eating eagle, averting my eyes from the pink embryos, which are improbably nutritious. I had to carry Michael (he pronounces it Michel), the expedition poet, down the mountain because he had stubbed his toe on a book he had been forbidden to carry. We all know certain dweebs who can’t go to the toilet or make love without a book or laptop in their company. Halfway to Veracruz, we had to wait three hours at a thatched-roof restaurant for our tacos while a twelve-year-old girl poached what I thought was a boa’s head but turned out to be a beef tongue. Like fish, snakes are better cooked fresh and no refrigeration was available, while well-salted beef tongue can last for weeks even on the equator. While I slept in the dirt with the dogs, Michael tried to seduce the girl. She stabbed him in his stubbed toe with an ice pick, which stymied his sexual impulses. When we reached Veracruz, I swam a few miles out in the harbor to inspect the propeller of the Greek freighter, pushing away at the last possible moment when the vindictive captain started the twelve-thousandhorsepower engine and put the ship in gear. When I swam back to the Emporio, I thought of owning twelve thousand horses, but then, my Montana ranchette is only ten acres.
This year my breath is too short for me to make the Orizaba climb. We killed seventy-three rattlers last summer on my Montana property, but I haven’t the gusto to eat the few that I saved in the freezer. It’s a little like a teenager who gets drunk on gin, pukes, and then is intolerant of this liquor, and may very well puke again while showering with juniper or pine-scented soap. Our fragile minds fill up with taboos as our lives pass. A Venezuelan Indian tribe, no matter how close to starvation, will not eat an anaconda that has devoured one of their children.
Curiously, our godlike intelligences, rarely used, can differentiate between similar species. Who can resist a hot bowl of anguillas, “baby eels,” in their bath of olive oil and garlic? If we didn’t eat these babies, they would end up swimming as many as seven thousand miles to the Sargasso Sea to mate before returning to their homeland estuarine waters. Try to imagine, if you will, spending your entire life underwater.
The girl hung by her knees from an apple tree limb giving a blue jay a peculiar view of her parts. The bird shrieked in alarm.
Perhaps the very last snake I will ever eat was during the Athens Olympics last summer. I had stupidly gotten involved with an ex-ballerina in New York City who had become a performance artist, a category of the arts that I find difficult to hold clearly in mind. It was a pathetic case of geezer lust and my little sack of Viagras were crumbling in the humidity so that I dried the damp blue powder with her hair dryer and snorted it like cocaine in the days of yore. I also had undiagnosed diabetes, so I was either asleep or furious and missed the prime event, women’s synchronized swimming. I was dozing in a nightclub when my ditzy performance artist was doing her food-chain routine by trying to throw spaghetti marinara to a litter of unweaned piglets. No one from New York knows, but certainly country folk are aware that unweaned piglets are interested in only mother’s milk. The crowd booed, she was inconsolable and ran out the back door into the Athens night. The nightclub owner, a faux Zorba type, wanted to cook one of the piglets. I find false heartiness repellent and wandered over to the Thai compound to see a friend and there was served a viper stew, the snake supposedly killed fresh that morning in the mountains of Thessalonika. Food is as much a crapshoot as literature, and I wondered later if venom in the stew had entered a wound where I bit my lip after ingesting too much Viagra.
Where we winter in Patagonia, Arizona, is the only area in the United States with seven types of rattlesnakes, but I’m no longer tempted. The javelinas that eat the snakes a
re much more interesting on the plate, though when butchering a javelina you must be careful to carve out the rank scent glands, which are reminiscent of a Republican wife after an inaugural ball. On warm moonlit evenings, we watch the rattlers do their horizontal dances in the yard.
The girl dropped from the apple tree and ran through the orchard grass so loose-limbed that she was kicking her own pale butt.
Tomorrow I have to endure a medical procedure in Tucson that involves a twenty-four-hour fast. This is new territory for me and I suspect that I’ll feel not a little like my old hero Gandhi. Without being unpleasantly specific, I will reveal that the surgeon, who apparently has a valid license, will visit my innards from two directions to discover which of my fifteen thousand meals caused the cherry bomb explosion a few weeks ago. Take it from me, seven jalapeños is one too many in a Thai pork dish. Sometimes I wonder if my wisdom is in decline. When I hear the expression “the wisdom of the body,” I am puzzled. Perhaps I have eaten too much of the world? An elephant’s anus cooked in a hole of hot rocks by the Kikuyu in Africa could have done the wrong job, or was it the thousand-year-old sea cucumber in Shanghai? Maybe it was mom’s super-dry pot roast or Labrador’s fermented caribou. My DNA has troubled Tucson medical authorities to the extent that Menninger’s had been suggested rather than Mayo. Last winter in the Yucatán, a very old legless Mayan chieftain asked me seriously if I was part dog after his vicious guard dogs tried to climb on my lap in instant friendship. I wonder. Maybe it’s time to be someone else? After a month of eating mostly yogurt and rice, I have dreamed that I’m camping on a glacier as white as my food. O, how I crave a braised pork jowl swimming in its fat, a Szechuan chicken cooked in a couple of pounds of bird peppers, or even a simple white truffle the size of a baseball grated on a bowl of pasta.
Back in the car she sat nudely on the hot mammalian leather of the seat.
Bear Posole
I had this dish years ago in the Sierra Madre and have made it several times myself to avoid letting gift meat go to waste.
Cut bear meat into inch cubes.
Simmer with slaked hominy, nixtamal. Canned hominy is no good.
Add cumin, chile, garlic.
Simmer until meat is tender, usually 2 hours. Mexicans improve this dish with a cleaned calf’s foot but pig’s feet work to improve broth.
Food, Fitness, and Death
In the past year or so I’ve lost my brother, my dog, my cabin, and my health. These things happen to people. Permit me to mix some husky metaphors. A novelist is a cartographer of an imaginary country that he willy-nilly populates and in which he constructs a landscape. He strip-mines his soul. His mental incontinence leaks all over the place. (Yes, I have wept when I’ve killed off one of my characters.) Emotions tend to fly around in his brain like birds wired on crystal meth.
That said, let’s go on to matters that might interest the average Jill and Joe. How feebly the arts compete with the idea of what we are going to eat next. How vainly have I struggled to create a poem as interesting as a recipe, or as a naughty photo for that matter. The dark power of food haunts us. Naturally, I remember my deceased Mom but deep in the North American night I’m more likely to ponder a caribou roast I had last year at Sarah MacLachlan’s house in Toronto, or the tagliatelle Mario Batali suffocated in white truffles at our home last fall. Historians have said that pork fueled the westward movement of empire in the United States. Apparently in Canada it was beaver jerky or something else on that order. Even as we speak, a faux gasoline known as ethanol is being made out of field corn. Cows and cars feed at the same trough in this bifurcated world.
All living creatures live by the credo “Eat or die.” United Nations nutritionists recently pointed out that of all species, humans, pigs, dung beetles, and Labrador dogs are the most susceptible to overeating. In my own case overeating plus the confused substitution of wine for water caused type 2 diabetes, plus duodenitis and esophagitis, as well as gastritis, which tagged along when I decided I could be my own doctor (which is somewhat like a mass murderer deciding that he doesn’t need a lawyer).
I’m telling you all of this to help you de-banalize your lives. I want to help and all I’m asking in return is that you put all of your stray pennies into an old sock that has no twin and send them to this magazine so that it, too, can survive.
It is deceptively easy to think we’re normal when we’re not. I know a vaunted Canadian writer who misplaced his car for several weeks. Normal people don’t lose their cars. When I wrote for The New Yorker about a lovely thirteen-hour, thirty-seven-course lunch I had eaten in France, I was startled by the number of readers who questioned my sanity. To my hero Balzac this meal would have been piffle. Rather than having a new wine with each course we strictly limited ourselves to nineteen wines, though in retrospect a glass of each did add up. I can see clearly now that such behavior may have contributed to my eventual infirmity.
I said recently in a poem called “Jimmy Lite,” “There’s nothing so silly as wisdom I can’t apply when I get on a plane. The rest is the sediment of despair, the ice cream cone dropped on the sidewalk in 1948.” And I won’t bore you with all of my recovery nostrums and routines: the endless wilderness night-walking, the injections of coyote blood; the sexual marathons in Veracruz; the failure to meet Penélope Cruz in Spain; the very cold swim with a pod of killer whales off the Queen Charlotte Islands; the doomed attempt to reforest Haiti; the orgies of rice, yogurt, and oatmeal, that torpid Irish exudate.
In May, after denying myself all of life’s pleasures, losing thirty-five pounds, and becoming the world’s most boring person, I went to France to test myself against the Enemy (gluttony and alcohol). Since my life had already migrated to another country I had the feeling at Charles de Gaulle that I was possibly carrying a Paraguayan passport. Curiously, I had no doubts about my strength to win this battle. As the world well knows, Americans have a touching belief that they are always doing the right thing whether it’s banning consensual sex between Native adults or invading Iraq. Especially of late mine is a nation fraught with acute mental dysentery.
The ostensible reason for the trip to France was to find the lost poems of Antonio Machado. Since Machado is one of my top ten poets in the history of civilization it’s unthinkable, however true, that a valise of his poems was lost when he ended up carrying his mother from Spain to France to escape the craven Franco. Naturally, you remember your mother when you’re carrying her. This was in 1939, within a month of my own birth, a thoroughly irrelevant detail. I couldn’t accept that the probable grand poems were permanently lost. In the arena of natural history it was similar to the moment that the last auk died. Like Dante, Machado early in his life had fallen in love with a thirteen-year-old girl. He waited until she was a proper sixteen to marry her, but then she died at eighteen of TB. In the girl’s last months the poet would push her in her wheelchair through the umber hills of Castile. Machado died in Collioure and I hoped to locate his manuscripts in an attic or woodshed. Machado was one of the very few poets who could fill in the missing lines of the ancient manuscript of Earth. Of course my mission was as unlikely as walking to the moon. Simply enough I was obligated. Machado discovered me in my illness last winter and gave me courage to survive. I didn’t discover him, he tripped over my cot in a spare, cold room and told me in my profound discomfort to at least take the dogs for a walk in the morning. Life is the small pieces.
So there I was driving south from Lyon, having recovered from a few days in Paris by eating a Lyonnaise specialty called “Saint Cochon,” which is an attractive pile of offal, blood sausage, ears, cheeks, tongues, that sort of haute cuisine, followed a few hours later by a classic tête de veau in order to achieve a balance between pork and beef. I climbed the three thousand steps to the cathedral on the hill to burn up the wine needed to cut through the animal fats that had collected in my tummy’s sink trap. I had figured out with my doctor in Tucson, Caro
l Howe (who recently quit the medical profession for moral reasons to become a librarian), that it takes about two hours of walking to burn off a bottle of wine. One day in Paris thus required five hours of walking but there was the added boon in the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes of seeing an infant kangaroo crawling out of his mom’s pouch. All poets of worth remember Apollinaire’s line “fermez la poche du kangourou.” My traveling companion, the noted writer and gourmand Peter Lewis, joined me on those strenuous walks because with cholesterol over four hundred he had recently received a heart stent to help flush his torso.
The search for Machado’s poems was, of course, exhausting partly because this country in the extremest southwest France is mountainous with only goat trails rather than roads. I rifled through the rooms of a twelfth-century nunnery where I sensed masturbatory practices though the Germans had naturally bombed the place. My Armani suit was filthy and my fingers were bloody from lifting stone slabs and lowering myself into cisterns with rope, kicking away vipers in my handmade Calabrian brogans, yet no valise of poems.
Luckily, to keep up my strength the Collioure area has French food with a punch. This is the anchovy capital of France and these tiny fish eaten in a state of decay in sufficient quantities offer optimal energy though they also give me gout. The splendid wines of the area made by Domaine La Tour Vieille killed the pain of gout and assuaged the heartsickness of not finding the valise of Machado’s poems. I actually knelt by his grave in the cold rain and told him I was doing my best. The grave was laden with fresh flowers and poems with the rain blurring the ink so that the poems sank into the ground in a liquid state, perhaps reaching the bones of the poet buried beneath. Kneeling there and shivering in the twilight I naturally thought of dinner and wine, the food Christine Campadieu had so brilliantly cooked, the tiny squid with the poetic ink staining the rice, the langoustines, the fresh favas with blood sausage, the rabbits browned with pork fat in a tomato sauce, and the food just over the bruised lip of the future, the four-kilo loup de mer buried in gros sel, the eel stew, all a marriage of the Basque and Catalan and not to be found elsewhere.