by Jim Harrison
Dreams offered a liquid clarity unavailable in daily life. Once, in New York City at the Carlyle Hotel he had heard the alarming news from home that their neighbor’s three English setters had been lost running off in a northern Michigan blizzard. That night after a troublesome fourteen-hour script meeting, and eating a full roasted chicken ordered ahead at Elaine’s plus two bottles of sumptuous old Barolo and an ample Calvados nightcap, he had dreamed the exact location of the lost dogs. They had crossed a country graveyard about seven miles south of home where a human friend had been buried the summer before, then headed southeast to a place where they liked to hunt grouse and woodcock. He flew home the next day still burdened with wine and chicken and drove directly from the airport to the location where he had dreamed the dogs would be. They emerged happily from a huge snowdrift where they had burrowed for protection from the weather. When he delivered the dogs to his hunting friend he decided not to mention the dream. The experience was far more pleasant than getting five hundred thousand dollars for a screenplay that after five drafts had been reduced to the usual chatty desuetude. Unfortunately his prescience was limited to dogs. A couple of years before he had visited with an interpreter in a Mayan jungle settlement where they were challenged by three enormous guard dogs. When they visited the jefe, who was without legs due to diabetes, his own leading disease, the jefe asked him through the interpreter if he was part dog. The interpreter advised him that this was a serious question and he replied that there was some canine in the blood in his mother’s side of the family. When they left, the jefe told him to be careful about the local jaguars, which hated dogs more than people. Jaguars always tore the heads off dogs.
When he reached the gate to Paloma Canyon on a friend’s ranch it was a few minutes before he could remember the lock’s combination because his mind had drifted back to a girl he had seen in a Key West dress shop exactly twenty-seven years before. She had been stooping before shelves of blouses in her white shorts and her butt was a perfect Anjou pear. He had felt the kind of involuntary shudder usually experienced only in fiction. And what’s more, when she stood her face was the twin of Botticelli’s Venus, a peculiar antique beauty he had rarely witnessed.
When he opened the gate he wished very much he had brought Zilpha along. He had never been here without a dog or a friend, and the absence of either seemed to make the canyon fearsome and impassive in a way that reminded him of the twenty-ton Olmec heads he had seen in a museum in Jalapa, which was a mountain city north of Veracruz. The other unnerving aspect of the museum had been the hundreds of small statues of women transmogrifying into jaguars. They had made him rethink the nature of women, but more important to the day was the recent publishing of a book that showed a number of jaguars caught by motion-sensitive cameras in this area. To ranchers the jaguars were even less welcome than wetbacks. However, he didn’t feel particularly threatened by anything except Washington, D.C.
To leaven the brooding atmosphere with black humor he walked several hundred yards out of his way to reenact his heart attack. The June before when he had revisited a cardiologist friend in San Francisco for three days of tests the doctor had told him that he had experienced it and did he remember the experience? Why lie about such matters? He didn’t know, but now he collapsed to the ground, flapping his arms in mock dismay. The actual event had involved his vision crinkling like aluminum foil or, better yet, blurring geometrically like an amok DVD.
Now he lay smiling on the comfortably warm earth and watched a daddy longlegs spider trot by as if bent on a specific destination. He had read that this spider was virulently poisonous but its mouth was too small to bite a human, a delightful metaphor the meaning of which he hadn’t determined. He was mindful that a teaspoon of the soil beneath his cheek contained a billion bacteria and that a teaspoon full of a black hole in the cosmos far above him weighed three billion tons, a strong teaspoon indeed. This was a slightly higher level of the junk in his head he wished to get rid of. A lovely little rock wren was flitting around not twenty feet away, which made him wonder why only one of Goya’s twenty children reached adulthood. He pondered the possible connection between Goya and wrens, coming up with the rather lame idea that the infant mortality of songbirds was disappointing.
He steeled his geezer body to get to its feet on a lame leg. His immediate mission in life had been limited to mayonnaise and finding the attractive dog collar he had bought Zilpha the year before in Denver. If he had taught her the word collar, she would have found it herself when they backtracked. She knew many words, like kitchen, walk, sit, quail, woodcock, grouse, Linda, his wife, or Mary, Linda’s cocker spaniel, but there hadn’t been a need to teach her collar, which was another not very meaningful indignity humans put on dogs.
Back on his feet he set off for a side canyon to the southeast, thinking of an old friend who had amassed a collection of thousands of raised-skirt photos. The man was a bit of a porn addict on the lighter side, as it were. His own tastes were more refined. There was a girl who worked in a coffee shack in a vacant lot in Butte, Montana, who wore braces and her tongue appeared to be too large for her mouth but other than that her appearance was decidedly Florentine. This taste had arrived in his hormonal college career during the single year he had changed his major to art history. He had invented elaborate sexual fantasies about Lucrezia Borgia. In his thirties it was Lauren Hutton (a bit Florentine) and Emily Brontë and more recently Clara Schumann. It was apparent that the leading cause of Elvis Presley’s death was constipation, an errant thought.
A side effect of his impaired vision was that he only imperfectly perceived inclines and declines. The real tip of inclines was when he became winded. In the car the tachometer was the indicator. When he reached a flat area that held a Hohokam fire ring, he paused for a much needed cigarette in this place where ancient Indians a thousand years before had warmed themselves and cooked dinner. In another place a dozen miles away near a spring he had found a flat granite rock with a half dozen metate holes, where they ground their acorns and other seeds presumably to make unleavened bread. Around the metate holes the granite had been worn smooth by centuries of bottoms sitting there grinding seeds. This was slightly erotic, though he was discouraged when he had read that male chimpanzees will give up lunch in order to look at photos of female chimpanzee butts.
He had dreamed that Zilpha’s collar was in a rock formation a couple of hundred yards up the ever-steepening ravine. Except in periods of extreme drought there was a rock pool that gathered a fair amount of water and he was now painfully thirsty in the late morning heat, not having had the sense to carry a canteen from a belt loop. When he and a friend, or friends, hunted quail in the area he could gaze up the steep ravine to watch the dogs drink from and wallow in the rock pool. It had rained an inch, rare for late February, two days before and he decided to chance a sip, possibly dangerous because of the intestinal parasite giardia that could come from the droppings of javelina, deer, or mountain lions that might be in residence in the water. Since rock pools were so rare in the area he suspected it might be a trinchera, a catchment built by ancient farmers to collect water that they would slowly release for their crops.
The climb was quite the struggle for a seventy-year-old and he paused a dozen times to catch his breath and to calm the pulsing twinges in his bad knee. This led him to worry about his wife’s asthma, which after one incident had kept her in intensive care for several days. They cajoled each other about what are now called “health issues.” It is far easier to suggest that your wife visit a doctor than to go yourself. His visit to the neurologist was a horrid case in point. She had worried about his recent misidentifications of so many of the birds that gathered at the patio feeders. More striking was the way he had asked her a dozen times in a month who painted the Milton Avery print of three chickens on the dining room wall. This had also worried him, but then he assumed that it was vodka or copious amounts of French red wine that had destroyed the cluster of n
eurons that had held Milton Avery’s name. They were both thinking Alzheimer’s, though neither of them mentioned the disease out loud. His brain scan, however, revealed nothing in particular. He told the neurologist that he had learned that heavy smokers don’t get Alzheimer’s and the doctor sputtered, “No comment.” Over the years it had become apparent that antismoking zealots thought the habit more contemptible than baby raping. A few years back at a cocktail party in New York City he had been smoking out on a fire escape and a lovely woman with tears in her eyes asked, “How can you do that to yourself?” and he had quipped, “I’ll think about quitting if you show me your butt.” She fled and he was a little embarrassed at his crudity. New Yorkers didn’t care for the rough country humor he had grown up with.
Nearing the top his mind began to play the music “Theme from Rocky.” He was sweating profusely, amazed again at the local weather. When he arose at six A.M., which was his pointless habit, the air had been below freezing and now nearly noon it was at least seventy, giving him a little concern about possibly emerging crotalids. The area was the only place in the States with seven varieties of indigenous rattlesnake. The species called Mojave gave him the most concern as it had poison so strong that it could kill horses and cows and the snakes were common in the immediate area.
He knelt and drank greedily from the rock pool then vomited convulsively on seeing a large dead rattler at the bottom of the shallow water. He shook while wiping his face with a handful of dry grass, remembering a similar event in the Absaroka Mountains in Montana when he drank from a creek only to discover that there was a dead elk close by around a bend upstream. He studied the swollen dead snake and determined that it actually was a crooked branch that had fallen from the widespread branches of the Emory oak above them. He laughed, thinking that life is not what it seems. There was also the serious thought that a type 2 diabetic couldn’t afford to lose his late breakfast of a bowl of Anasazi beans. A couple of times while driving he had begun to doze off and had to stop and eat a few bites of a candy bar to raise his wavering blood sugar, which could be either too high or too low. He had taken his eight pills that morning for his various infirmities, but his diabetic pill was time-released and he had lost it to an imaginary snake.
Luckily the car was downhill, but he wouldn’t even attempt it for a while. He cleared a bed in the grass, scraping away stones for a long snooze that would restore his equilibrium. He made a pillow out of his vest and drew out his pocket watch. It was just after twelve noon. Squinting his eyes in the last moment before sleep he noticed a brightish color under a bush no more than ten feet away, which he thought was likely a candy wrapper discarded by one of the hundreds of illegal migrants who made the difficult passage across the canyons and ravines of the valley. No, it couldn’t be, he thought. He scrambled over with a hearty wince for his bad knee. Sure enough it was Zilpha’s collar. “Victory in our time!” he shouted, with the shout echoing down the deep ravine. His first impulse was to attach the collar around his own neck so he wouldn’t lose it but he settled for drawing it up his arm to his shoulder. If he died the presumed searchers could call the local number on the dog tag to give his wife the news. His mission was now reduced to mayonnaise. He fell asleep with a specific glow warbling in his body, counting on his earwax to repel a tiny bug making its way up his neck toward his ear. He hadn’t the strength to squash it.
Two hours later he was making his painful way down the ravine while trying to decode two dreams that had arrived during his nap. Why should his knee hurt more going downhill than up? In the second dream he was in a room with a half dozen brown women drinking wine. They were fairly big women, not to his taste, and one was nude like a beige Rubens. They were all jolly and he woke up with an erection, a reassuring event for an old man. Did this mean that he should travel into Mexico in search of big women? The first dream was awkward and dismissible compared with the pleasures of the second. It was brief and he was floating down the river that adjoined a cabin that he used to own in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and where he would swim on the rare hot days. It was a remote place, but the river’s surface was covered with ugly flotsam that was passing him on its way to huge Lake Superior. After a few dream minutes he recognized the flotsam as all of the thousands of pieces of junk in his brain.
When he reached the bottom of the ravine he turned the wrong way on the two-track, east rather than west, because he was irritated at the psychological aspects of the flotsam dream. Trash is trash. He corrected his course and was pleased to spot his white SUV perhaps two miles in the distance down the big canyon so lavishly landscaped with the canyon walls decorated with green Emory oaks, juniper and manzanita, and umbrous grasses. Nature still looked more than a bit ominous without a dog or a companion or a gun for that matter. He tried to dismiss the feeling as primitive, which of course it was, but so was this lone old figure wandering in the wilds. When he passed the now less funny heart attack scene, he recalled Marlowe’s “O lente, lente currite noctis equi” (run slowly, run slowly, dark horses of the night).
The sun had come back out and he was sweating hard when he reached the water tank near his car. He doused his face in the icy water and said hello to the curious Angus cows and calves on the other side of the tank. Now he was thinking that the flotsam dream supported his contention that life was liquid rather than solid. Maybe written language isn’t natural, thus his profound mental exhaustion? He had merely floated for six weeks now and it was much more pleasant than working despite the occasional panic over money, which he shared with the world at large. Maybe if he continued floating all of his brain junk would disappear around a bend in the river. Only a week ago he had announced to his wife that he intended to spend the rest of his life studying wrens, which he loved for their pretty heads and tubby bodies. “That’s a wonderful idea,” she replied. He was supposed to go to France on business within a month and he thought of canceling when he learned that there was only a single species of wren in Europe. As a liberal Democrat he was often disturbed by the inequalities in nature, the total lack of parity. The marsh wren had two hundred songs while the canyon wren had only ten. Was that fair? But then the canyon wren had the loveliest song in nature along with the loon. It was apparent that in his wren study he would have to let wrens be wrens and let nature be non-Jeffersonian.
On a nearly hour’s drive back to the village his mind was empty and the mountain landscape looked more interesting than usual and somewhat mysterious. It could be Tibet or western China even though it wasn’t. He was unconcerned about heaven or the afterlife and would settle for being a tree in which possibly wrens would nest. For a moment he wanted nothing, not even time.
When he entered the village he slowed to follow a pretty Mexican girl on a blue bicycle, her lovely butt cocked upward as if aiming at him, which it wasn’t. At the grocer’s the woman clerk he liked looked quizzically at the dog collar around his shoulder and told him that his wife had been in earlier and had bought the mayonnaise. He decided to buy another jar to round out his day.
Truly Older
When you’re seventy-six, as I am, you can die in ten minutes, ten hours, ten months or maybe ten years, or every minute in between. About fifteen years ago I had intuitions of doom and wrote a memoir. Now fifteen years later I have noticed that I’m not dead yet. There is a temptation to bring the memoir up to date in the form of a novella. I am fiction anyway, lock, stock, and barrel. I made myself up from scratch and started fibbing as a baby.
This February I had to cancel a book tour trip to Paris because I was feeling poorly. I thought that maybe I had been feeling poorly for seventy-six years, though in my thirties and forties I walked a couple of thousand miles in wilderness forest. I hated to miss the duck and goose fat I need to keep going in this woeful life. Also the oceans of wine across the wine-dark sea. But to be frank I didn’t want to go to Paris and feel ill in the middle of winter when the body craves fuel. My publisher, Flammarion-Gallimard (they rece
ntly united), had promised to build me a little temporary igloo in the Luxembourg Gardens to save hotel money. Frenchwomen love to rub their hot butts against chunks of ice or so I’ve heard around the quad. Also you don’t want to be sick without your momma and she’s been dead twenty years and is no longer available. Of a family of seven there are only three of us left. Life is like that.
Unfortunately my illness isn’t faked to get out of a book tour, which I’ve done here in America. My doctor found it inscrutable that my blood pressure had dropped to ninety over fifty which is perilously low. I am drastically lethargic though I still write every day like a good Scout. I suppose I am losing specific density and might blast from earth into an azure haze.
Somehow I remain roaring with largely irrelevant ideas and plots. Instead of living in a confused state of what I call the “high whine” why doesn’t the Republican Party settle down and figure out how to recycle toilet paper? It would save hundreds of millions to build prisons to house the poor, who they loathe. You dunk water and Clorox along with the toilet paper into the oil barrels that they love. On a hot day you dump them on the neighbor’s tennis court. Voilà! By evening you scoop up the detritus with snow shovels and you have precious toilet paper. Naturally I should patent this brilliant idea but as an artist I don’t have time to deal with legalities.