by Jim Harrison
At this very moment in Montana, having just dispatched a Republican rattlesnake with a scythe, I have decided to offer a ten-thousand-euro reward for the return of the verified poems of Machado. It’s time for others to take up the search and earn a weekend in Paris or Paraguay. I don’t have the money at present but I can always sell my renowned sexual favors to an actress for that amount. Life herself resists meaningful decisions but this reward idea is brilliant.
I don’t want to die as another grumpy, exhausted old writer. It’s time to plunge on leading with the heart and chin, the feet, consuming the necessary wine. The human sensorium is geared to safety but this lacks appropriate boldness for poets, those thieves of fire, but mostly academic Bic lighters. Yesterday while I was standing in a turbulent river trout-fishing it occurred to me that there’s good and bad exhaustion. Whether men or women, we’re publishers’ boy toys. Have I ever had a publisher in my minimalist career who didn’t push steroids in my direction? They want stronger, bigger, and faster novels, but then publishers have always been corporate nymphos craving new meat.
The idea of course is not to survive but to prevail and rice and yogurt don’t do the job. The Gandhi diet is for bliss-ninnies, or the body-Nazis who take their garlic in capsules. I recently read the book Pig Perfect—it is a compass pointing to the correct route for a poet’s diet. In this book there’s a recipe for a cocido Extremadura-style that includes a ham bone, pig’s knuckles, veal neck, back ribs, pig’s jowl, a pork loin, chorizo and morcilla sausage, and veal and pork meatballs. What poet could ask for more?
Next March I will return to Collioure to try again. Everything has got to be somewhere. I frankly can imagine Americans discarding a valise of poems but not the French. There’s the option of organizing ten thousand volunteers but this is a project that requires purity of heart and body. A possible clue came in a recent dream where I saw the valise of poems deep in a mountain cave guarded by giant red-eyed goats with sharp teeth. We’ll see in March if this is true.
The Fisherman Gourmand
I’ve always liked to present the image of a hearty fellow who wears rough-hewn clothes and drives a dirty SUV, hunts birds, and prefers fishing to all other activities. However, I’ve never cared for what is called camp food in the outdoor community. I recall an expedition to the borders of Yellowstone Park in the early 1970s with my friend Guy de la Valdène and a number of Livingston sportsmen. While the others were out for early-season elk, Guy and I fly-fished Suce Creek. It was visually interesting fishing because the others, who were on horseback, were trying to drive a herd of elk out of the park so they could be shot legally. This was a fresh insight into western life. However, dinner was something called Bob’s Campfire Chili, a wretched potage of hamburger, chunks of tomato big as a baby fish, literally pounds of chopped celery, kidney beans, and scarcely any seasoning. We did fake eating like they do in the movies, pretended whiskey was food, and took over the cooking chores the next day.
A nutritional scholar studying northern Plains foodways would come up with a slender volume indeed. Fine cuisine assumes a certain amount of leisure and money. I’m not on a high horse; everyone gets to eat what he wants. In the Sandhills of Nebraska, I didn’t shrink back from the Nuts and Gizzards $3.95 special of deep-fried calf testicles and chicken gizzards, which were fine when covered by a pink sheen of Tabasco. This proves I’m a normal guy. In addition to having your own garden, the miracle of Montana food is offered by Federal Express and United Parcel Service. The world’s food supplies are available on an overnight basis. Only moments ago, I opened a cooler containing three fresh abalone and some loins of albacore tuna sent by a predatory friend in California.
I’m lucky enough to work hard the rest of the year and fish for fifty to sixty days in the warmer months with my friend and guide Danny Lahren. We float the Big Hole, the Missouri, but mostly the Yellowstone. As others have noted, a life outdoors encourages the appetite. For coronary reasons I avoid the classic Montana breakfast of side pork or chicken-fried steak with eggs, potatoes, and cream gravy, though I admit to loving it. I trade the rowing chores with Danny because I’m the usual neurotic writer and like the soothing, somewhat autistic rhythm of rowing. Also, you get to eat more with impunity.
But what to eat? When fishing the Big Hole or the Missouri, we detour to the Front Street Market in Butte, a very good delicatessen, and curiously the closest at hand. The owner, Jim Yakawich, prepares us a huge sandwich on ciabatta bread that includes provolone, mortadella, and salami. We add Italian vinaigrette, onion, and roasted peppers in the boat just before eating to avoid the sandwich becoming soggy—few sportsmen are hearty enough to eat a wet sandwich. If the weather is cool enough, we pack along a Côtes du Rhône for the late afternoon. Frankly, alcohol in more than scant amounts is contraindicated in fly-fishing. Leaders become tangled and fish are misstruck, so the wine is usually saved for the last half hour of the day’s fishing.
For our Yellowstone floats I order supplies from Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, arguably the best all-around delicatessen in America, with a grand array of the world’s cheeses, especially French and English. Equally important are gift packages from Mario Batali in New York City and his father, Armandino, in Seattle. From this father and son pair I receive a dozen different artisanal salamis, lamb and duck prosciutto, as well as the sacred guanciale for the evening pasta course. There are also chunks of lardo taken from the neck fat of pigs fed only on milk and cream and fruit in the glorious last months of their lives, not less glorious than our own in my opinion.
Frankly, though, food is rarely on my mind during the hours of actual fishing, and my purge from the cultural detritus (a euphemism) that my profession often buries me in and that drives me to all the comparative solitude I can muster. Fishing requires a magnum level of attention that is curiously restorative rather than exhausting. We carry the new Sibley bird book and binoculars. and identifying birds is the only break in our concentration. We can chat about food, wine, or women but not about politics.
When our more exotic food supplies run short, we pick up fried chicken and coleslaw from Albertsons. Until lately, I’d scorned this fried chicken, but to my surprise I have found it quite good. One must order the dark meat assortment, as wise heads have determined that the ubiquitous “skinless, boneless, chicken breasts” have sapped the moral vigor of America. Generally speaking, both the mammalian and the avian species are careful about what they eat. Junk food is junk, and you can’t let down your guard when fishing.
Food and Mood
Existence is grounds for dismissal. It has only recently occurred to me that I might not be allowed to eat after I die. This is discouraging. “Make hay while the sun shines,” they used to say back on our ancestral farm, a tiny splotch of poor land in northern Michigan that ensured our continuing poverty—that is, except at the table, because if you have cows, pigs, chickens, and a big garden, you eat bountifully if not well. Even in the Great Depression when the gut of urban America was scoured clean, country people hunched at a full trough and thus it is that I come from a long peasant tradition of three square meals a day. We ate a lot even when we weren’t hungry because it was the way of my people.
Perhaps I should have called this little essay “Food and Religion” because, after all, religion is a mood, albeit an occasionally substantial mood. Toss aside your simpleminded incredulity for a while and think of me as Baba Ram Jimmy, a round, brown old man who has lifelong sought spirituality through food and drink. Right now in America it is hard to see the stars and moon through a blood-smeared windshield. In such difficult times we must turn to the sacral elements at hand, to specific rituals of worship, even if our private God is a twenty-ton Olmec stone head so neutral that it makes the Buddha look like a fraternity glad-hander. Needless to say the obvious rites at hand are breakfast, lunch, and dinner, by which we connect ourselves to holiness while still recognizing we are but animals in human clothing.
I am currently in physical and mental training for another assault on the mountains near Collioure, France, to look for the lost valise of poems by Antonio Machado, and much in my recent life has warred against this noble mission. After a glorious trip to northern Italy in late October to parse the mysteries of the white truffle, the inept folk at Lufthansa held me captive in Frankfurt, Germany, for a full day during which I caught a near-fatal virus. When I reached home in Montana, I fainted and tripped on a throw rug (non–alcohol-related household accident). The fall turned my face into a purple grapefruit (photo available). Instead of a visionary experience, this fall produced nothing; a discouraging view, this pure nothing. The trauma did induce a temporary exchange of personalities with Paolo Ranucci, a cobbler I met in Modena, Italy, but more on that later.
Inevitably this trauma led to a slump I could ill afford, what with a novel due in March for that Walmart of words, American publishing. There is no place in the world for me except where I already am, and luckily this is usually near a kitchen. I began my recovery from the slump by making posole, a Mexican hominy stew, out of a large buffalo heart a worried friend had sent. A hunting acquaintance gave me a package of mountain lion chorizo, having shot a record-size male that had been preying on calves while it was courting a snarling female. How unaware we become of danger during our absurd mating dances. A writer I know in Paris was struck by a taxi when he hurriedly crossed Boulevard Raspail in order to follow a girl with a pert butt. I made puttanesca (whore’s sauce) several times, thinking it appropriate for a writer. I ate antelope short ribs and the liver of a virgin elk, followed by Hungarian partridge, quail, and doves. I turned a keg of salt herring into a huge bowl of pickled herring using the recipe of my grandmother Hulda Wahlgren, who lived to be ninety-seven, though she did say to me, “This is going on too long.” I came down with gout, which gave my right big toe an aching pulse synchronous with my face. I drank a lot of French red wine even though my type 2 diabetes requires that I walk two hours per bottle. It’s far better to walk than to have your feet cut off because of this disease. Armandino Batali, the father of Mario, sent me a large package of lardo and I began to further turn the corner, back to a Technicolor life. To be sure, lardo is pure pork fat but we don’t shrink from the high fat content of the very necessary Jewish corned beef tongue. Besides, if you study the behavior of pigs you witness a lust for life that leaves the tribe of whining writers sucking hind teat, a shriveled and unproductive food source indeed.
I knew my recovery was nearly complete when I wrote ten pages of my novel on New Year’s Eve. I hadn’t written that much in a day since I completed my novella Legends of the Fall in nine days in 1978. I certainly won’t try it again because the effort ruined a night’s sleep. The earth began to whirl too fast. The dead used my brain as a chat room. I sensed there was a bear in the bamboo thicket outside the patio. My dog Zilpha didn’t want to sit on my lap, a nightly ritual, until I coaxed her with a piece of herring. Labs seem to be the only breed that enjoys herring.
So I’m now back in training for Machado and for a book to be called “Pilgrimages,” wherein I visit the graves of twenty writers I revere and try to reconstruct a bit of their mystery, and also what they ate. Research can also become errant and confusing. For instance, one day I was nonplussed to discover that three different small third world cultures have idioms that refer to the female pudendum as a grief muffin. Of necessity, these are cultures where muffins are part of the diet. We are where we live. This becomes evident in the foodways of the rich folk in the United States, who wander to and fro across the land acquiring lifestyles commensurate with their warm feelings about their wealth. They are fond of a neutral cuisine that reminds one of Umberto Eco’s ideas on imitation. Women wearing fifty-grand’s-worth of turquoise and lace granny dresses serve you Mexican food as remote from Mexican cuisine as a Winnipeg McDonald’s. Genuine food tends to emerge from the spirit of place. When I was eating the boned stuffed pig leg, zampone, in Parma, I thought how shameful that this great dish wasn’t available in the United States. Couldn’t the woebegone Republicans of Iowa be saved from political mischief by being set to work boning the millions of local pig legs, but then these people are repelled by the staff of life, garlic. The spirit of place even enters our sexual behavior. When I was in a little town north of Kathmandu, having failed to climb a peak in sneakers, I met a drunken Tibetan prostitute while I was dining on a bowl of tsampa and rotten yak blood. Through an interpreter this woman offered to sleep with me for a thousand dollars, but I couldn’t partake in her couloir or crevasse. We tend to think of all Tibetans as strict adherents of the Dalai Lama but this is apparently not true.
Back to Paolo Ranucci. I met this cobbler in Modena when I stopped by his dusty shop one morning after a nail in my worn shoe had bloodied my foot and ruined a two-dollar pair of socks. He speculated about why I wore such cheap shoes when he had seen me emerge from an expensive restaurant across the street the evening before. “Instead of the esteemed Sassicaia, drink Antinori plonk a couple of days and then you can afford a good pair of shoes,” he said in English. Sensing an anti-American binge in the offing, I countered by asking why Italians are uniformly ignorant of their great poet Gaspara Stampa. This intrigued him and we went to a café for a few glasses of harmless prosecco. It turned out that in the 1970s, Ranucci had attended the writers’ school at the University of Iowa for two years but then, for reasons of the bad local food and a shortage he sensed in his own talent, he left. He returned home and continued the family tradition of shoemaking, pointing out that the brogans he wore in the café had been made by his father in 1948. I admitted that my disgusting shoes were less than a year old. We had a light lunch at Giusti of tagliarini laden with white truffles, braised pig cheeks, and veal chops to fill any stray empty stomach corners, plus a couple of bottles of old Barolo. Once again I had spent my shoe money. It’s so easy when you’re hungry and throwing caution out the always-open window.
Ranucci’s point of view was colored by pastel melancholy. He had decided he’d rather be a good cobbler than one of a hundred thousand mediocre poets. “Why bother if I can’t be a singular lamp burning in our collective death ward?” he asked. I was stumped while we sipped at our crystal goblets of grappa. He advised me that on my upcoming trip for a week in Florence, after a full day in the Pitti Palace and the Uffizi, I should meditate on the liberally given American degree, the master of fine arts. Isn’t it a little cheeky? he wondered aloud.
We spent a couple of hours walking off lunch, when a stretcher would have been more appropriate for me. I fell down in what I thought was the garden of the Finzi-Continis, my face narrowly missing a pile of dog shit that appeared to be a metaphor of our invasion of Iraq. We visited the market, perhaps the finest in Europe, and I bought a large white truffle to eat like a soiled apple with my after-nap coffee. Ranucci cautioned me on my religious habits, saying that I might visit Dante’s house in Florence and try to envision a better Beatrice than the possible sin of gluttony.
And so I did. Luckily I had packed a difficult book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum. I had never thought of the figure of Beatrice as nearly as interesting as a bowl of steaming tripe, but I had been wrong before, having stridently insisted in the 1980s that this whole computer thing was going nowhere. I took the Bynum book along to a fine meal at Cibreo and several pages became shamefully stuck together with tripe juice. I had spent the afternoon at Dante’s house, and that night under a full Florentine moon I dreamed of my own Beatrice, only she was wearing garishly red hot pants. On my dawn ten-kilometer run along the Arno, I questioned whether it wasn’t a little too late for Beatrice to become an intimate part of my life, especially when she wouldn’t properly dress the part.
Now I’m on the eve of an unpleasant trip to New York City, where I intend to resign from everything. Writing novels is massively discouraging, compared to tercets
and strophes. New York City is enshrouded of late with a sickly green bubble, a theme park for the rich with The New Yorker and the New York Times its possibly blasphemous mouthpieces. A martini costs fifteen dollars and a passable hotel room five hundred. New York City makes the supposed greed of Paris look like a Girl Scout bake sale. Mario Batali’s Casa Mono restaurant is next to my little hotel and I have written ahead to see if they will make me oatmeal crepes filled with an epiphyte flan, those flowers I saw hanging from phone lines in Veracruz that live solely on air and rain.
Of late, I’ve had the urge to return to Earth for a while before being launched into space as a fatally skinless rocket. I’ve been noticing tiny black beetles and a number of new species of small brown birds, the soul life of crows, and have been studying Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods, sensing that these waifish creatures, the gods, can’t be approached directly—and certainly not by publishing books. Their names are unavailable to the ambitious.
Vin Blanc
A few decades ago it occurred to me that so much of life for a novelist and poet is flying solo and usually in a remote area above the Mato Grosso. There are no lights in the world below, and should you be lucky enough to crash gently on a canopy of trees you will be met by hordes of anacondas and fer-de-lance after you shinny down a tree trunk. We are isolated stockbrokers of life’s essences, and it is always 1929.