by Jim Harrison
The area is still beautiful, green and hilly with a vernal juiciness that reminds one of the Lake Country in England. But it's hard to identify the landscape with the woods, swamps and rivers where Nick Adams played Injun, and endured the rites it passage that Hemingway wrote so cleanly about. Not, anyway, when you see a million-dollar condominium peeking through the woods like some sort of fey Rotarian Xanadu. This is not to quibble about progress, merely to say that the place no longer resonates of the literature that put it on the map, in the same way that if you are looking for the golden Colorado of the fifties you'll only find it in Montana. How quickly mass tourism subsumes the indigenous culture, converting it to its own pursuits. For three months of the year northern Michigan is a vast summer suburb of Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, in the same manner that Aspen, a former mining town, is a winter haven where businessmen, movie people, the disaffected children of orthodontists may rub souls to the porcine, blissed-out strains of John Denver.
Farther north I crossed the Mackinac Bridge and my thoroughly predictable snit dissipated. Several times a year I use the Upper Peninsula as a tonic, its vast, not particularly distinguished forests and rivers as a retreat from the summer eyesore of a Rolls Royce pulling into a local filling station. You can even find a wee trace of Hemingway along the Fox River where he fished brook trout after World War I. But then the brook trout, which are the pimps of the trout world, are mostly gone now. Instead of turning left into the Upper Peninsula I continued on straight north into Canada, up the Ontario coast of Lake Superior until I stopped at an unlikely little town called Wawa.
Late that first night after eating fried steak and onions I lay on my motel bed looking at two girlie magazines which had the collective sexual impact of a dozen sleeping pills. I spread out a large map of Ontario wondering at the rivers I had crossed that day and how they bisected groups of hills that formed a humble but somehow impressive coastal range. The road had offered a seventy-mile section without a sign or gas station. Lake Superior had a Bahamas-like clarity when I stopped along the shore to look at some Ojibwa petroglyphs, a sea monster accompanied by three wriggling serpents. It seemed strange that we had, with the Indians, desolated a kingdom, murdered a civilization, that had not thought it important to build monuments to itself. And I knew that in the backcountry the lakes and small streams that fed the rivers held good brook trout for those who cared to walk. Then I remembered a long but only partially finished story of Hemingway's called “The Last Good Country,” in essence a boyish fairy tale of escape with his little sister into the woods from a charge of poaching a deer. In texture it is not far from Robin Hood with a nearly mythic sense of the young outlaw.
I poured a glass of bourbon and wondered why I had always in my own youth preferred the dank lushness of Faulkner to Hemingway's cool but utterly romantic precision. But I had grown up in northern Michigan and at a certain age you tend to find your own concerns closely rendered in prose embarrassing and suffocating. And there was that pickup truck full of fishing equipment out in front of the motel. All my sporting obsessions verge on anachronisms, the ready assumption that everything used to be better in the outdoors to the narrowing point of the present, where you may as well fall in love with Germaine Greer and forget about the whole thing. Ah, how mournful. It was this fatal but necessary penchant for self-dramatization that was so cruel to Hemingway. And it was clearly born in the Indian-outlaw-cowboy fancies and confusions of his youthful summers in the woods, the enchantment with a backcountry peopleless enough, pristine enough, impersonal, cold but beautiful enough, to bear for a lifetime a warrior's code so intractable as to oftentimes be comic in its pretensions.
But also somehow courageous even if he did have to sometimes chop off the horse's legs to make him fit in the stall. An image of a man standing out in a field yelling MORE! The brook trout, deer and grouse of his youth in Michigan accelerated to elk and grizzly in Montana. In Key West he began with bonefish, then the violence of tarpon. The obsession with the huge marlin of the Gulf Stream and the Straits of Cuba was inevitable. Live pigeon shoots in Spain, innumerable quail and duck. He had to be among the very best and clearly was with a vengeance often embarrassing to his companions.
Then Africa. A few years back I was sitting at dawn in a small cabin at Keekoruk in Kenya sipping tea. Keekoruk is the stepping-off point into the justly fabled Serengeti. There was a large herd of Cape buffalo nibbling at the tender shoots of grass of the airstrip a very few yards away. They tend to get pissed off when you shoot at them, I reflected. By and large, the greater part of African hunting has been the rich sportsman's hoax on his gullible fraternity of hunters back home. The blockhead who shoots a lion at three hundred yards does not like to be reminded that a Masai warrior dispatches the same cat at smelling distance with a spear. The point is that there's not more than an off chance at finding your balls by pulling a trigger.
And of course the ultimate arena of the gun is war. Hemingway was involved with honor in three of them. And he wrote just about as beautifully as any man in our century when he didn't allow his purposefully fabricated public personality to get in the way. It was a mockery of the warrior code that had actually been repeatedly called upon to keep him alive.
This is not to say that a great man can't be a preposterous asshole, information easily got from any of the pork-and-bean critics with a liberal arts degree in psychologizing. To say that Faulkner was a garden-variety drunk scarcely dismisses twenty or so novels. Maybe it's the idea that by the time you let your personality start killing fish, animals, men, you have blown it, removed yourself from the arena of sport or hunger, from the adrenaline of fatal play. It becomes a public act of wanton attrition, a singular blasphemy to the last good country you have looked for all your life but have been side-tracked from for reasons of vanity, no matter how understandable.
As a matter of simple fact, the shark and hyena own the lion's majesty, are breathing beasts not put here as anthropomorphic reservoirs of our hate. If you can't understand a shark or hyena you probably don't have a shot at understanding yourself. If the next good country doesn't exist it's because we pillaged the last one we so stridently walked through. The old horse outside my granary door is autumnal without knowing it. It is more interesting to be absorbed enough in your life cycle not to have opinions about it. Witless Thoreau understood that you couldn't really “know” anything unless you started with the forty acres out behind the barn and the brain that perceived it.
"Il faut, (d'abord) durer,” Hemingway liked to think and say, with an animal tact. Melville wrote a book about incomprehension which gives him the edge. You can't parse the furrow in the grizzly's brow by shooting him. But then Hemingway was a great man, too, with a transparent power in both his virtues and vices, occasionally an absurdist samurai insisting that the world's edges be as sharp and clean and durable as his youthful visions. It was a thing of beauty that within his embittered code, hari-kari was much the more graceful act than senescence.
Meanwhile back in Ontario: out beyond Hawk Junction, far off the road, I have found a stream that has become a beaver pond for a hundred yards, then a stream again. Mosquitoes and flies form so dense a nimbus around my head they might be mistaken for a cloud. Out in the middle of the pond a large brook trout is rising. I am in the water to the tip-top of my waders and I still can't reach the fish with my light, split-bamboo rod. I return to the truck for a heavier fiberglass fly rod. The fish is perhaps a hundred and twenty feet away and I still can't reach it. The rocks are slippery under my feet. I am not going to drown to catch the fish. I'm not even going to get wet. I am going to sit on the bank until dark and watch it feed, also watch the loon at the far end of the pond watch me.
1977
The Preparation of Thomas Hearns
Polarities are rarely solved by guitars, I thought. I looked at my pistol, a Ruger Magnum, lying on the railing of the deck which broaches the Sucker River in Grand Marais, Michigan, some five hundred miles north of Detroit. The
pistol was bought this spring not to defend myself against people, but porcupines: porcupines can eat through the walls of a cabin and when you return after a long winter the whole cabin is literally full of shit. The other creature I shoot at is the sea lamprey when it comes wriggling upriver like a short, fat snake. Lampreys are so ugly they're not even Freudian. They arrived in the Great Lakes after a major ecological fuck-up during the building of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Lampreys destroyed the native lake trout population so I shoot at them, rarely killing them, only rolling them over a few times.
But polarities and guitars: there is a Lou Reed tape on the car stereo (no electricity in the cabin except that provided by an old Kohler generator in the evening). Nothing made me quite so happy as when the bourgeoisie forgot about folk music. I remember black college students watching, say, a white pre-med type from Scarsdale sing a ditty, “Dis train I gwine ride carryin’ one thousand ton de waddymelon back to mammy. . . . “ That was thirteen years ago when I taught at a university. I try to avoid universities now, thinking of them as producing bung fodder for a strung-out economy.
This morning while I was grouse hunting a big coyote crossed diagonally in front of me; well-muscled, rippling fur, he pretended I wasn't there. The coyote reminded me of Thomas Hearns, a great fighter who blew it in the fourteenth round the other night in Vegas. I lost the price of a used Subaru on the match, but felt oddly unmoved. The damage didn't equal that of a previous venture into a charter boat in Key West, English gambling stock, Australian oil stock. If you get the idea I'm a financial moron you've stuck the bandelero in the ass of the donkey.
But Thomas Hearns. And Detroit. Hearns wanted to win one for himself and Detroit, which has been on a very bad roll for a decade. The city looks like a bad roll—worse even than a lamprey's mouth, a vast cold suburb of Moscow, so bleak and tormented that citizens shoot each other out of boredom. Of course there is the usual array of high-medium restaurants and the town is ringed by snazzy homes inhabited by vastly overpaid auto executives who precipitated the slump by being outsmarted by the Japanese. And there are four professional sports teams (the Lions, Tigers, Pistons and Red Wings) with collective records that have matched their city's long ugly economic slump. A Hearns victory would have provided at least a Pyrrhic boost. Now there will be a cold winter's wait for the next move while the melting pot continues to leak and we open the Detroit Free Press to read of shoot-outs between dozens of different minorities.
In August Thomas Hearns trained at a ski resort, with the titillating name of Sugarloaf, in my home area, Leelanau County. The curious thing about Hearns training in Leelanau County is that there are no blacks up here. You must think of Michigan as your hand: up past the palm where the fingers begin is the northern lower peninsula. Your little finger is the Leelanau Peninsula, a country of rolling hills, fruit orchards, magnificent beaches. The closest town to the Hearns camp was the former fishing village of Leland which plays host to a rather fungoid summer aristocracy based on the periphery of Midwestern capitalism: non-addictive glue, the insides of carseats, holeless donut-makers, and glass jars with or without lids. The Leland area is a sort of Republican Key West packed full of Reaganite bliss-ninnies smirking over the recent tax cuts. It's smack dab on the 45th parallel and is perhaps too far north to be seriously considered by blacks and gays as it is a region climatically unsuited for either vice or good food. As in Aspen, certain nitwits make much of how long they've been coming to the area. The real charm in living here, outside of the natural beauty, is the grace of the residents (many French Canadians, Scandinavians, WASPs who don't know they are WASPs), the respect for privacy, the lack of any cloying moral majority. You have to eat at home but there are a few good bars. You can even drink with some particularly decent cops who will gladly bust you if you do something wrong. There have been two murders in twenty years. The hunting and fishing is pretty good. That has to be enough. Thomas Hearns chose the largest local resort, Sugarloaf, to train at not because the resort had filed for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy, but because it had a large tennis barn in which to set up a ring, a golf course to run on, and some good local trout fishing. Hearns is a fishing addict, sleeps with teddy bears, and belongs to a police auxiliary.
So Thomas Hearns and the Kronk boxing team trained up here on the 45th parallel for two weeks, and thousands came to watch, partly because it was free and partly because it was so bizarre. The lack of admission is important in that the whole state is an economic garage sale with everyone buying each other's used mitre boxes, chain saws, hunting boots, Robert Hall sportcoats, plastic dinnerware and legless dolls.
The camp was a wonderful nonevent, something akin to a Chinese puppet show. The whites watched and the blacks boxed. Everyone in the county was polite and the blacks endured not a single racist slur in two weeks. Thomas Hearns looks like a cobra, a little like a pissed-off Miles Davis at four in the morning, but the man invited local kids into the ring for a lesson. He likes kids and understands adults are a waste of time while training for the big one, especially adult journalists.
At the training camp the media posed the only problem. This was true, too, in Las Vegas. I despise the word “vibration” but the media always exudes a sourness, a negative energy. They live and work in a voyeuristic space where they're always outside jacking off while watching life taking place on the other side of the window. The New York group, particularly, bites like Dobermans on quaaludes. They didn't like Hearns because he's not a “show nigger” like Sugar Ray, and they didn't get a chance to help in the hype and build-up for Hearns.
It really never occurred to me that Hearns could lose, though my feelings about boxing as a sport are ambivalent: say, similar to my best friend making an obscene phone call to my wife. Boxers, like novelists and poets, begin on an incorrigible trajectory that comes to nothing for all but a few. The wounds and scar tissue run so deep they go all through the body and out the other side. Note that Ali isn't sounding so well lately; the speech patterns, the badinage, lack the precision of a few years back. Joe Louis, the last Michigan boxing hero until Hearns, went to his grave speaking a language that only a few friends and relatives could truly comprehend. Maybe it was worth it for Louis, arguably the greatest of all heavyweights. With Hearns we'll have to wait and see. Boxing fans resemble the wives of fighter pilots. I haven't been in a fight in ten years but I still remember poignantly how ugly it is to be hit hard. It's worse than a whole pile of bad reviews.
Heraclitus said that “the moon is the width of a woman's thigh.” This is to draw us back to the earth herself; not necessarily a gentler earth, but at least an earth far from the place where two men beat the shit out of each other for money. It's a solace that only a minority really cares about such things. In newspapers the food page always exceeds the sports page in readership. Much of the news is media news read by others in the media and of little concern to anyone else. On TV we are led to believe that the news itself is less important than what baritone fop reads it from the prompter. In Hollywood there is a certain wonderment over the idea that the rest of the country doesn't care about the process, but wants a story not necessarily about what some schizoid technocrat thinks about the history of show business.
Meanwhile, in the little village of Lake Leelanau, seven hundred Plamondons are having a family reunion. First they drink and eat and dance, then they drink and eat and dance again. At mid-afternoon they march through the village (population 400) led by an assortment of Traverse City bagpipers. The bagpipers seem a trifle out of place in that the Plamondons are French Canadian, but that is carping. I retire to Dick's Pour House (owned by Richard Plamondon and formerly owned by Ralph “Dick” Plamondon) to sort out this spectacle. I am informed that it is the Tricentenaire de la famille Plamondon en Amerique du Nord, 1680–1980. None of the local Plamondons speak French, but that doesn't interfere with the common language of food, drink, and dancing. Early in this century 200 local Plamondons went out to Alberta and founded a town called Plamondon. The onl
y really newsworthy Plamondon in the history of the family is the infamous Weatherman saboteur, Pun Plamondon, who did time for blowing up a government building in Ann Arbor.
Then there are two more events in rapid succession, though they do not leave one breathless. There is the magnificent Heavyweight Championship Horse Pulling Contest at the Grand Traverse County Fair. At the fair there are no blacks but a lot of people who are classifiably poor by government standards. The horse pulling is a big annual event for me, and if I'm lucky this year out in Glitzville, I hope to field a team next summer. I inquire about the price of a gelding, part of the winning team and weighing 2600 pounds. I tickle his ear. They want $25,000 for the horse. You can't deduct geldings. The government again. The prize for the winner here was $250, a lot less than the upcoming fight in Vegas. The team pulled the equivalent of a moving weight of eighty cars.
Another short event: our Labor Day beef roast with a whole side of rare beef, plus two roasts, a barrel of sweet corn, beans, kegs of beer, cases of whiskey, sponsored by Richard Plamondon. To say it was a hog show is to give the finger improperly to the pigs. People danced, sometimes rolling on the ground. There was a fistfight over the twin questions of cherry farming and deer hunting. So much brave irreverence, and hormones, spilling over wantonly.
Now I am back in Grand Marais, out on the river, and I've just found out Hearns lost. If I'd been home the loss would have meant more, both for the money and the sympathy for a fighter with so implacable a sense of dignity that he does not quite seem to belong to us. In the two weeks I spent around him I never saw a small move, only a feline grace like some black Mifume preparing for the first big test. He'll be back.
Meanwhile there is the night, and tonight it is a cold saturating of stars—García Lorca described “the enormous night straining her waist against the Milky Way.” Sometimes up here I have seen the northern lights shoot with a green twinkling hiss across the sky. No TV or radio, just your own questionable skull. I'm up here bird hunting and have six weeks of walking around the woods in search of grouse and woodcock to look forward to. My bird dog looks out into the impenetrable dark and begins a deep growling; my scalp prickles and I think of the pistol and shotguns in the cabin, or my fists, as simpleminded men will do out of fear, or for fame, or for money.