by Jim Harrison
Back to the Academy Awards and the shrill evidence of an extreme black phobia in Beverly Hills. Spike Lee and Ed Zwick don't drive Miss Daisy. Afterward, I watched an intriguing video, rented at a convenience store, called Cheerleader Camp, starring Lucinda Dickey. These gals looked real good until they started killing one another. Blood is antierotic except in a steak. I was reminded of Eric von Stroheim's description of his life as “a symphony of disappointments.” I was also reminded of hot dogs and the question, How can a modestly prosperous writer cast his spiritual lot with the social mutants?
In a few days I am beginning an irrational ten-thousand-mile car trip. I am going to look at a secret half-man and half-wolf petroglyph in Utah. After all, Thoreau said it is in “wildness” (not wilderness) that we find our preservation.
1990
The Fast
"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. . . but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. . . . Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” —SöREN KIERKEGAARD
Throughout the long night I ate nothing. The fast had begun early the evening before, after a bowl of Brazilian salt-cod chowder with a wedge of corn bread and a large glass of cold water. The meal was a bit simpleminded for so auspicious an event, auspicious at least to me, and I was the one going without food—not you, gentle reader, with your vibrant nightmares of self-indulgence.
But why was I fasting alone in my cabin, thirty-seven degrees in early July with a fifty-knot gale blowing north-northwest off Lake Superior? What's the point of fasting when no one is there to admire you—the same problem, in fact, in being a spy when you can't tell anyone you're a spy? Many years ago in Key West, when I was a private detective, I'd have a few drinks in a saloon and admit to strangers that I was a private detective, which somewhat decreased my effectiveness. Word gets around via the coconut telegraph in that city.
Frankly, I was fasting for wisdom. A career change was imminent, and I was in transition. (In case you don't know, and you probably don't, in traditional cultures one fasts for wisdom at such junctures.) During the past week I had walked seven miles a day in the undistinguished, slovenly wilderness of the Upper Peninsula. It was only wilderness by default, because no one could make another buck out of the depleted land, the enormous white-pine stumps forming their own ghost forest.
That morning I had mentally taken myself out of contention for the presidency of Harvard. There were no sandhill cranes in Cambridge, and they were my current obsession, along with other birds, bears, coyotes, and wolves, all quite scarce in the Boston area. Harvard would have to get along without my leadership as it entered the next millennium with its casual, aristocratic pout. My obvious sacrifice was the stewed tripe at Locke-Ober's, the flavors married dizzily to a bottle or two of La Tache, certainly a power lunch, especially if taken solo.
The hungry night found me caught in the lateral career change from writer to amateur naturalist. Life is short, and money buys so little. I felt depleted beyond reason, burned out to the point that I could actually hear the unearthly screams of the butchered piglet within me, and no animal's cries were more anguished in my forty-year-old barnyard memories. I could not balance the idea that, while the exposed heart is richest in feeling, there is a point at which it never recovers. The merest news item of another child beaten to death would occasion tears. And the princelings of the evil empire in Washington, D.C., had burned five hundred billion flags in the savings-and-loan swindle, leaving not a sou to help the social mutants, the poor and homeless, the Chicanos, blacks, and Native Americans. These princelings were the same shitbirds of greed cutting down six-hundred-year-old trees on public land while reassuring us that they were replanting, so if we could hang in there for six hundred years the forest would again have grand trees. The only soothing fantasy was that a million-strong lynch mob would invade Washington to terminate a political life that had become a paradigm of child pornography.
Of course, this sort of maudlin bullshit, the furious introspection we are prey to when society runs amok, covered a deeper unrest that I had revealed to myself in a naive sentence in a novel, to the effect that we are all, in totality, what we wish to be, barring unfortunate circumstances. And I no longer wanted to be a writer; I wanted to become an amateur naturalist.
The dominant question on the eve of this rebirthing was, What does an amateur naturalist eat? For starters, nothing; hence the fast. Writing is such a sedentary profession that I had become a tad burly, and to whirl through the forest with my single eye cocked on the flora and fauna, I needed to be light of foot. But then there were the contrasting styles of two friends who are naturalists, Peter Matthiessen and Doug Peacock. Matthiessen is rail lean from such small numbers as walking across East Africa and hauling fifty-pound bags of rice over nineteen-thousand-foot passes on the Tibetan Plateau of Nepal. In The Snow Leopard, he unfortunately neglects to mention what spices and condiments were used to prepare this rice. Peacock is decidedly chunky but owns a pair of legs somewhere between Arnold Schwarzenegger's and Herschel Walker's, the result of twenty years of tracking grizzlies and marching endlessly through the desert, the working theory being, When you are out of sorts, walk a hundred miles.
On a recent trek into Utah to look for petroglyphs, Peacock and I had, I thought, eaten rather poorly, concentrating on a big bag of tsamba that Yvon Chouinard, the famed mountaineer, had prepared for us. Tsamba, Tibetan in origin, is a mixture of grains tasting like the mixed sweepings off a granary floor, despite the addition of hot peppers. Tsamba swells up in your gut and displaces any interest in women, whiskey, cigarettes, or foie gras. Tsamba quickly turned me into a rambling eco-dope in the vast canyon lands of Utah.
It was barely dark at eleven outside my cabin on the Upper Peninsula when I went out to the pump house and turned off the generator. I remembered that a sage had said, “There must be freedom before there can be freedom,” and scooted back to the cabin, hearing a pack of coyotes in chase under the howling wind. The meaning of the sage was clear enough: I had been wandering around the woods ever since my left eye was severely injured at age seven. All I had been doing recently was taking it to its proper limits and becoming more technically attentive to what I saw. I had already discovered that if you're not in a sex or food trance when you walk, you see the cranes before their enraged flush and note the change of pace in the bear tracks after it has caught your scent. You see that birds squeeze their eyes shut when they lay eggs and that the raven that answered you fifty-seven times was saying nothing in particular.
It was a very long night without my usual trip to the Dunes Saloon for a few nightcaps, without the assortment of snacks that aid sleep. Might I offer myself a sprig of parsley in my cheek? No, the parsley, like marijuana, could lead to further crime. How about a large glass of red wine, which, after all, was technically fruit juice? Nope. The coyotes passed within a few feet of the window, closing in on their midnight snack, a snowshoe rabbit. The beasts were eating, but not me; but then, raw rabbit lacked appeal.
Total sobriety and an empty stomach made for a restless, dream-filled sleep. I tended the votive fire relentlessly, so that the flames would acquire the correct shape. In a weak moment, I allowed myself to relive a great meal I had recently had at Lutèce (soupe de poisson, poussin en croûte) after which I got to shake hands with the great Andre Soltner himself, an event that beat any experience in show biz except for a dinner years ago with Federico Fellini, Marcello Mastroianni, Alberto Sordi, Giulietta Masina, and Anouk Aimée. You know, those folks. At about 4 A.M., the vision arrived with the force of a cattle prod or lightning down the chimney. The wind had subsided, and I was standing naked out on the picnic table, eyeing the three-quarter moon and trying to howl up a fresh batch of coyotes. I received a single, somewha
t retarded response from down in the river delta near a den I had previously located. They were evidently done hunting for the night. I was actually hoping for a wolf, but I hadn't heard one in nearly four years, though the day before I had found a set of tracks in the drying mud of a pond's edge.
It was with this memory that the vision struck. Just before I had found the set of tracks, when I was well back from the pond, I had glassed a Hudsonian godwit, a rare shorebird. I then realized that with a few notable exceptions, such as the Hudsonian godwit and the ruddy turnstone, the birds of North America needed renaming.
I shuddered at the enormity of the project. Most writers know only four birds—hawk, gull, crow, robin—and I was looking at more than 600 species that required fresh names. I thought I'd better get started promptly, in order to finish before I kicked the bucket and my soul was hurled into the usual black hole in the cosmos. I went back into the cabin, dressed warmly, and headed east, fording a thigh-deep creek and passing a location I think of as the Place of the Bears. The area smelled dense and rank, and I imagined for a moment that I was in the locker room of the Soviet ladies’ Olympic team.
At dawn I named a Delphic warbler and, better yet, a smallish brown bird henceforth to be called the beige dolorosa. I dozed off under a tree, and the nature of breakfast began to take shape. A nightwalker is entitled to a little wine, and there was a bottle of Borgogno Barbaresco waiting. The meal itself would be a modest pasta made with three pounds of frozen squid I had brought from home. There were three tomatoes and a bouquet of fresh herbs I kept in a flower vase. A head of garlic and the somber character of Spanish olive oil would fill the bill.
As I headed home, I experienced a specific chafing problem known to many amateur naturalists, so I had to walk splay-legged. The new project unrolled its path in glory. I had no intention of becoming a neo-Dondi/Gandhi, but by the end of this new calling I would be a small brown man in a green coat looking for brown birds. “Deep in his throat, but perhaps it is a bird, he hears a child cry . . .” I quoted to myself, from a poem I wrote at nineteen.
1990
What Have We Done with the Thighs?
Where have all the thighs gone? Where are the thighs of yesteryear? This is not exactly a litany raised by many, but the heartfelt concern of a few. In recent memory I do not believe that I have entered a restaurant where thighs are allowed to stand alone proudly by themselves. I mean chicken thighs, though duck and turkey thighs are also lonely and neglected.
On a recent trip to New York via L.A. I tried to raise the thigh alarm in both places to show biz folks in au courant restaurants.
“God, what I'd do for a plate of thighs, you know, grilled in paillard form with a sauce made of garlic that has been roasted with olive oil and thyme, then puréed and spread on the crisp thigh skin. Alice Waters makes them that way.”
“I think that's Mike Nichols's agent,” a lady answered.
“Once on safari in Brazil I ate a big platter of roasted thighs with a blazing hot chimichurri pepper sauce in Bahia, then it was off to the jungle up the Rio del Muerto where we were trying to catch a big anaconda for the new Disney theme park in North Dakota. I was lost for thirty days and ended up using duct tape for toilet paper.”
“I think I saw part of it on PBS,” a producer in an Armani power blazer said. “In Taos where I met Dennis Hopper's cousin Duane. Duane Hopper. They're both from Dodge City, Kansas.”
“Yeah, I've been there. The lady at the Best Western fried me three thighs for breakfast. With biscuits and pan gravy.”
“Let me correct myself. That isn't Mike Nichols's agent. It's only Roger Ebert's agent. I heard R. E. just wrote a hot screenplay called Naked Scouts on Their Birthdays,” the lady chimed in.
“I think chicken breasts are the moral equivalent of a TV commercial. I make Bocuse's poulet au vinaigre only with thighs,” I insisted.
“The Budweiser Clydesdales are really getting dreary,” she replied. “Dalmatians are cute in the snow.”
“So are zebras.” I watched as she ordered a poached chicken breast, insisting on flat-leafed Italian parsley on the side, as if it were intended to save this filet de torpor.
So I am a voice crying out in the wilderness. A casual inquiry to my brother, who runs the University of Arkansas library system in Fayetteville, and has contacts with Tyson, the world's largest producer of chicken for the table, revealed (hold onto your ass!) that the U.S. shipped 50,000 metric tons of thighs and legs to Russia in 1990! I fear I do not comprehend the mind that remains unstunned by this figure. It fatigues the brain, and deep in the forest on my daily hike I leaned against a lightning-blasted beech tree, a power spot, and imagined a thousand of these tons frozen into the shape of a prone King Kong in the hold of a giant freighter. I had gotten rid of one but had forty-nine to go. So many thighs, so many freighters.
Other notions began to spin off through the wintry air. Are we shipping our vigor, our strength, abroad? Would the ghost of D. H. Lawrence suggest that we fear thighs because of their proximity to the organs of reproduction and evacuation? Is it because we are still mummy's children and crave the anonymous, tasteless breast? Is it a subconscious fear of AIDS? Probably not, as sixty percent of those under thirty in America have never seen a live chicken and couldn't tell a thigh from Jon Bon Jovi's chin. Once I prepared quail for an actress of some note who doubled as a vegetarian. She was appalled after dinner to discover she had eaten a “living thing.”
“Not after it was shot and plucked and roasted at 400 degrees for twenty-three minutes,” I offered, suspecting Quaaludes.
Back in the forest I imagined the shark carnage that would occur if a freighter sank with such a cargo, the ship breaking up and the immense, frozen blocks of chicken thighs slowly melting in the saltwater. Strangely enough in the old days in Key West I once night-fished with a Cuban for sharks with a live chicken, the big hook bound to the hen's body with twine. For reasons of squeamishness I did not hold the rod with the live chicken bait but drove the getaway car. Soon enough we were eating broiled shark steaks and tending a shark stew laden with garlic and fresh tomatoes. Much of the hen was still intact though a bit of a mess to pluck. Not surprisingly, the shark had headed for the rear end where the flavor resides.
I left the woods and made my way over to Hattie's Grille in Suttons Bay, my favorite restaurant in the vast expanse of northern Michigan, though there are three others that could also survive in the competitive atmosphere of Chicago, or the coasts—The Rowe Inn, Tapawingo, and the Walloon Lake Inn. Naturally there are other good places but they have largely neglected a responsibility of first-rate restaurants, which is to educate our palates. Jim Milliman is the owner and chef of Hattie's Grille, assisted by Alice Clayton, a birdlike young woman who is breathtakingly deft in the kitchen.
When I arrived during the afternoon prep work Milliman was busy making three desserts, bread, and a pâté all at once. Then his wife, Beth, called and asked if he could whip up a white-chocolate mousse. He smiled and began chopping Belgian white chocolate. I poured a largish glass of Trefethen Cabernet, which is a steal, and was reminded again of the sheer speed that is demanded of the chef. I used to daydream of becoming one but the fantasy dissipates when reflecting on the exhaustion of preparing a dinner for ten. My own restaurant could only accept a daily party of four, at most. My hands are clumsy. I typed five novels with a single forefinger. Frankly, this limited my interest in revision.
Milliman doesn't go in for fancy names for his creations; his smoked whitefish pâté is called just that, and a lovely dish of his devising, medallions of Maine lobster in a tequila sauce, carries no frilly adjectives. He is particularly skillful with seafood though I enjoy his pheasant potpie, the garlicked veal chop on a wild-rice pancake, his chicken thighs braised in stock, cream and shiitakes.
I was strangely silent, sipping or gulping my wine, in hopes I would be asked what was bothering me.
“What's bothering you?” asked Milliman, who is accustomed to me in
full babble about food matters.
I explained my thigh thoughts, ranging through culinary history down to the sociopolitical implications of exclusionary food faddism, the penchant for fey minimalism in the upwardly mobile groups. I finished with, “Do you think this all stands for something bigger?”
“Absolutely,” Milliman said. Then we discussed approximately a hundred good ways to cook chicken thighs, branching out into turkey thighs (I favor the nutrition nag Jane Brody's way of poaching them in vermouth with fresh vegetables and a head of garlic). For duck thighs and legs you need go no further than Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of South-West France, or to Madeleine Kamman. Alice Waters bones rabbit thighs and grills them with pancètta and fresh sage. I prefer my thighs with two wines I got from Waters's husband, the wine merchant Stephen Singer: any Bandol, or a chianti called Isole.
On the way home I stopped at the grocer's for a slice of pork steak, a white-trash proclivity of mine. You pretend you're cutting off all the fat. It's the rare restaurant that offers pork steak. Doubtless it's being sent to China along with hard-to-find pig hocks. On the bulletin board in the grocery foyer someone was offering “Rabbits, Pets or Meat” on a three-by-five card.
This is a visceral world, I reflected, watching the carloads of deer hunters in bright orange milling up and down the country roads in the cold rain. There would be a big kill this year with extra permits given in lieu of extensive orchard damage. I have an orchard and couldn't shoot a deer for eating my young trees, but then I don't depend on the orchard for a living. On the rare occasion I deer hunt I hike the vacant Lake Michigan beaches where the deer notably aren't to avoid shooting one. This is horribly dishonest as venison is by far my favorite meat. I'm forced to hang around local taverns with a long face, saying such things as “If I hadn't lost my eye in the Tet Offensive (a fib) old mister swamp buck would've been deader than a door-nail.” Then I accelerate by asking for lesser cuts, the heart and liver, or the whole neck, including the bones, from which you can make a splendid carbonnade or posole. It usually works.