Just Before Dark

by Jim Harrison

  The next day there was an obligatory stop at the site of Wounded Knee, northeast of Pine Ridge in South Dakota. A genuflection was in order, also the questions to an unknown god of how we could have done such a thing, and are we still capable of doing so?

  We felt an emotional crunch back on the interstate (interstates tend to resemble the banality of television) near Rapid City, though we used it only for the thirty miles to Sturgis. I had recently read the galleys of Dan O'Brien's The Rites of Autumn, the story of how he made a four-month trip from Montana to Texas teaching an orphaned peregrine falcon how to hunt. I wanted to meet the bird in question, and when I approached her large cage, Dolly let out a threatening shriek that redefined my notion of the feral as does a grizzly bear. I felt the sound up and down my backbone. I looked off in the near distance at Bear Butte, a mountain sacred to the Sioux, and thought of Rilke's verse: “With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open.”

  Up past Belle Fourche on Route 212 we found new dimensions to emptiness, turning north on 323 at Alzada on the gravel road that leads to Ekalaka, the county seat of Carter County, and the only county seat I know of whose main approach in one direction is a gravel road. Ekalaka has a wonderful museum with a collection of dinosaur bones rivaling those of the great museums of the East. The bones are local and were gathered by the high-school science teacher, Marshall Lambert.

  Now we were nearing Miles City, the cow capital of Montana, and the Big Open itself, about which definitions vary. In your Rand McNally you might draw a vertical line between the Fort Peck Reservoir (the over-dammed Missouri) and Miles City, and a horizontal between Winnett and Brockway. This is a little limiting, as the drive between Lewistown (a wonderful place) and Sidney is five hours, and the largest town of the first three-hours’ drive is Jordan, with a population of 485. The stretch between Winnett and Brockway is an absolutely empty 130 miles, except for Jordan. I realize this is not everyone's cup of tea, but I draw enormous solace from this expanse. Those who think of the area as desolate are ignorant of earth herself. The redoubtable state senator from Jordan, Cecil Weeding, sent out a campaign brochure that said, “We don't have people standing at our elbow everyplace we go. We've learned to fend for ourselves and enjoy the solitude isolation brings. Crime isn't even a real problem . . . neither are crowds . . . gouging . . . pushing . . . shoving.” This is a reflection from Garfield County, with nearly 3 million acres and a population of 1800.

  Early the next morning (we had a choice of 5 A.M. and 7 A.M., before or after his morning chores; we chose the latter) we met with Art Larson, who ranches south of Cohagen (population twelve) with his wife, Nancy, and son, Carl. The Larsons ranch about thirty sections (a section is 640 acres) of their own and an additional forty in partnership. Art, a third-generation Swede, is the owner of the property and possesses all the misunderstood characteristics of the cattle-bound Westerner: laconic, shy, almost absurdly independent, loathes government control, loves horses, and is deeply suspicious of sheep ranchers and wheat farmers. I was a little startled to learn that Nancy had been a member of the San Antonio Symphony and reads the outlandish novels of Tom McGuane, who had initiated this introduction, and that their son was off at a rock concert in Billings. After half a day with them I had a distinct feeling that here was a life being lived well.

  We spoke of the violent windstorm of the evening before, during our first night in Jordan. The Teacher and I had been dining in the QD Cafe there when a cowboy ran in and hollered he had “outdrove a storm down the creek bed.” Then the building began to shudder and garbage cans flew across the parking lot, where cars and cattle trucks wobbled in the wind. Everyone in the café was silent, waiting for the rain that might abate the drought, one of the worst since the 1930s, but no rain came. After dinner (a fine rib steak) we drove into the nothingness as the wind subsided a tad. The air was pink from the dust against the setting sun, and great bolts of lightning drove earthward in the black sky to the south. It was so Wagnerian that the Teacher slipped a Wagner tape into the car deck.

  Art and Nancy looked a little tired, and we learned that those selfsame Gotterdammerung lightning strokes had kept them and their neighbors up all night fighting range fires. Despite his fatigue, Art drove us around the ranch checking the windmill-driven water wells. The ranch feeds eighteen hundred yearling cattle, which are driven, as in the old days, down to Miles City in the fall. After checking the water tank, we looked over a herd of cutting horses that the family breeds, raises, and trains. Cutting horses are an elegant hobby indulged in by solvent ranchers, and for many of them the contests provide their major social occasions.

  It is a comfort to the Larsons that there are only two neighbors within twenty miles, and then the next is fifty miles to the west. There is also a mildly grim note in that near the turn of the century, soon after Art's grandfather arrived, the countryside was covered with homesteaders. The average rainfall in the area is between twelve and thirteen inches, but averages reflect a thirty-five-year cycle and, as such, can be—and are—killing statistics. You might get a few years of twenty inches followed by half a dozen years of half a dozen inches, at which point the final homesteaders would leave by the thousands, which they did in the Great Depression. As in western Nebraska and Kansas in the 1870s and 1880s, the railroads and their robber barons, the dominant force in homestead expansion, tended to fib about the amount of rainfall past the ninety-eighth meridian. Even now, Deborah and Frank Popper, of the Rutgers University geography and urban studies departments, respectively, have predicted that economics and climate will force most of the region—especially its most rural areas, including much of the western Dakotas—to return to its native state.

  Incidentally, there is a specific etiquette that should be followed in visiting remote places. You don't ask, “How could you live here?” which implicitly questions the value of someone's entire life. There's an amusing sign in the café-store-bar in the tiny village of Shell, Wyoming: “Welcome to Wyoming. Frankly, I don't give a —— how you do it back home.”

  Art sent us off on back roads to Ingomar to have a bowl of beans at a bar called Jersey Lilly's. This added a mere 150 miles to a round-trip back to Jordan. We saw great numbers of antelope and the rare, brief sight of a song-bird astride a flying hawk's back, pecking away in foolhardy rage. We swerved off the road, thinking we saw a yellow balloon with a basket of passengers, but it was a golden globe of tumbleweed a few hundred feet up, catching the sun and drifting along in the wind currents.

  Ingomar turned out to be a near ghost town and the bar the only functioning business. There were rails out front where you could tether your horse, and two footloose lambs gave us a hard look. We had a good bowl of spicy pinto beans with the proprietor of Jersey Lilly's, Billy “the Horseman” Seward, a prominent lightweight boxer of the late thirties and early forties. World War II saved Billy from becoming punchy, and he runs his unintentionally period-piece bar and café with verve. We looked at his boxing scrapbooks, and I noted a photo of a ballerina from Chicago that he didn't care to talk about. For a moment I was back inside a novel, some western version of Sherwood Anderson. I asked about a sign advertising the Ingomar Rodeo and Fondue Party. The idea was that you had a big scalding potful of boiling oil and folks stuck chunks of beef in on pitchforks so they could cook it to taste. Sauces were also provided.

  On the long way back to the Garfield Motel, the Teacher mentioned that at our current rate of expenditure a month in the Big Open would cost far less than our four days in April in New York City. I agreed with pleasure, though a great deal can be said for room-service breakfasts at the Carlyle, lunch at Lutèce, and the simple fact, at this point, that I would pay a cool fifty bucks for a slice of pizza from Ray's.

  Before dinner at the QD (the only game in town, but quite pleasant) I stopped at Jordan's two saloons, because I like taverns and, not incidentally, I like a few drinks. How can you experience the rich fabric of life in a locale without visiting bars? The answer is, you can't.
On this particular evening I wangled invitations to bird hunt on a couple of ranches. This wasn't difficult, as reasonably behaved strangers are met with curiosity and friendliness in Jordan. Then I met a peculiar lout, a stranger from Bozeman, who bragged that he had shot 2,200 gophers that summer and was aiming for the “record” of 4,700. He wasn't amused when I asked him how he cooked the critters. Did he lie? I get to ask such questions because I am not a shy, retiring shrimp of a fellow. The air was cleared when the Teacher came into the saloon to fetch me for dinner.

  On this trip I chose not to visit the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, which encircles Fort Peck Reservoir. I made this decision because I did not want to rub my nose in another piece of nasty government business—some years ago two thousand antelope starved to death here because over half the forage was consumed by cattle. The Bureau of Land Management administered a program by which refuge land was rented to ranchers, so that the very name “refuge” is a phony sop offered to environmentalists. This Bureau of Land Management mess is scarcely unique to the area (read James Conaway's Kingdom in the Country). On a recent trip into the Cimarron National Grasslands in southwest Kansas, I was struck by the utterly barren junkiness of the area. Over the years any number of my questions have been met by the usual bureaucratic condescension, at which point I like to answer that as a seventh-generation farmer I'm quite able to recognize raped and barren land without being chided by a nitwit slobbering at the public trough. It's probably not very amazing that the worst stewards of the land are not the so-called greedy ranchers but our careless, sprawling government itself.

  That last evening we drove back north of Jordan for a stroll. A lovely girl in a mauve shirt was riding a horse across a limitless pasture in the twilight. Beyond her in the darkening landscape two coyotes were calling out to each other. It was a scene of unpardonable beauty, and as far away from everything I don't like as I could possibly get. It is there, and free for the looking if you can handle the driving. The Buddhists like to say, “The path is the way,” and that is the proper mood for this trip. You can sing “Home on the Range” at the antelope, hawks, meadowlarks, rattlers, and sharp-tailed grouse, and no one will care. And you won't have to go shopping, because there are no shops. It is the grandeur and mystery of a land in which we have only been slightly involved.

  1989

  LITERARY MATTERS

  Such a price the gods exact for song, to become what we sing.

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  A Natural History of Some Poems

  A cage went in starch of a bird.

  —FRANZ KAFKA

  Some lofty concepts, like space and number, involve truths remote from the category of causation; and here we must be content, as Aristotle says, if the mere facts be known. But natural history deals with ephemeral and accidental, not eternal or universal things; their causes and effects thrust themselves on our curiosity, and become the ultimate relations to which our contemplation extends.

  —D'ARCY W. THOMPSON

  The only reason for writing a paper with the violently personal flavor of what follows is that a close inquiry into the processes of the composition of a poem by the poet himself might possibly lend to a more accurate understanding of poetry. The very real objection that anyone might have is that of honesty; papers of this sort have always had an air of the unreal to me—the temptation to pose for the picture, to exaggerate, to minimize unpleasant or embarrassing aspects, is great. The motive, the impulse in the artist to create a true harmony out of chaos does not cease when he is twice removed, or cornered by a haberdasher's three-sided mirror, the desire to be presented in a graceful literary focus generally makes him a questionable critic. I have, therefore, tried to maintain a deliberately clinical atmosphere; these are laboratory notes written by a white rat who has been mauled, forced to run warrens, prodded, shocked, and rewarded. The experience is still intense and fresh enough in mind, I think, to be closely and accurately described.

  SKETCH FOR A JOB APPLICATION BLANK

  My left eye is blind and jogs like

  a milky sparrow in its socket;

  my nose is large and never flares

  in anger, the front teeth, bucked,

  but not in lechery—I sucked

  my thumb until the age of twelve.

  O my youth was happy and I was never lonely

  though my friends called me “pig eye”

  and the teachers thought me loony.

  (When I bruised, my psyche kept intact:

  I fell from horses, and once a cow but never

  pigs—a neighbor lost a hand to a sow.)

  But I had some fears:

  the salesman of eyes,

  his case was full of fishy baubles,

  against black velvet, jeweled gore,

  the great cocked hoof of a Belgian mare,

  a nest of milk snakes by the water trough,

  electric fences.

  my uncle's hounds,

  the pump arm of an oil well,

  the chop and whirr of a combine in the sun.

  From my ancestors, the Swedes,

  I suppose I inherit the love of rainy woods,

  kegs of herring and neat whiskey—

  I remember long nights of pinochle,

  the bulge of Redman in my grandpa's cheek;

  the rug smelled of manure and kerosene.

  They laughed loudly and didn't speak for days.

  (But on the other side, from the German Mennonites,

  their rag smoke prayers and porky daughters

  I got intolerance, an aimless diligence.)

  In ‘51 during a revival I was saved:

  I prayed on a cold register for hours

  and woke up lame. I was baptized

  by immersion in the tank at Williamston—

  the rusty water stung my eyes.

  I left off the old things of the flesh

  but not for long—one night beside a pond

  she dried my feet with her yellow hair.

  O actual event dead quotient

  cross become green

  I still love Jubal but pity Hagar.

  (Now self is the first sacrament

  who loves not the misery and taint

  of the present tense is lost.

  I strain for a lunar arrogance.

  Light macerates

  the lamp infects

  warmth, more warmth, I cry.)

  I think it was in 1960 that I first read the poems of Pablo Neruda. The discovery of a “master,” of a poet of the first magnitude, is of extreme importance to a young poet—one finds his own voice finally through the voices of others. It is a process of choosing, gradually undergoing the influence by study, and discarding the disagreeable elements. At the time I was visiting New York City and was nearly anesthetized by its very familiar bleakness. Every section of the city seemed to conceal some unpleasant memory. I was impressed with Neruda's green world, his primary colors and surrealist imagery—he seemed a christ of all fleshy things speaking in the “out-loud” speech of the tribe. I immediately began writing a poem to him but then, as with all of my poems of that period, I abandoned it. I realized that the poem was an intellectual exercise, an act of worship, idolatry. Whitman's introduction to Leaves of Grass had made me very sensitive to derivative art—to this day I cannot bring myself to write about a painting or a statue or another's poem though I often have an impulse to do so.

  The poem thus went underground, to be exhumed years later in Boston during a similar period of crisis. I had been unemployed and generally at the end of my tether for a year. My daily life had become a round of employment offices, interviews with personnel people who seemed to sense instantly that I was unsuitable, flatly unemployable. My jacket pocket was filled with application blanks for all manner of work—I seemed unable to get past my name and social security number. I was sitting on a bench on Boston Common before an appointment, wondering what someone like Neruda would answer to “biographical inform
ation and other pertinent details,” when I remembered the poem. When I got back to my brother's apartment that evening—I was separated from my family—I looked through my manuscripts, all incomplete, and found the poem to Neruda. I immediately realized that rather than Neruda I had been attempting to write a poem in praise of myself—to describe what, if any, were my “pertinent details.” The poem, regardless of its weaknesses, precipitated an explosion of work. I stopped worrying about being unemployable and finished, in addition to the “Sketch,” thirteen poems within a month. Though some of the thirteen proved to be worthless, up until that time I had never finished a poem that was acceptable to me even in a minimal sense. I suppose I am fond of it for this reason—it made me able to function as a poet for the first time, to insist on the act of poetry as perhaps my only viable ability, to construct a complete poem, however short and clumsy.

  The true matter of “Sketch” is a conscious refusal of a tradition, a rejection of what we seem to see as the “role” of a poet in a capitalist society: the poet as an economic leech, rheumy-eyed, full of vapors, a sycophant, fond of the idea of nobility and the company of the moneyed classes, vaguely elegant though threadbare, preoccupied with his ancestry, and in the United States an Eastern Seaboard education. Though I wasn't taken by Neruda's politics—he is a member of the Communist Party in Chile—I found nothing in his work to suggest the glazed decadence of most modern poets. For years I had admired and studied Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane—it is impossible for an American poet to reach technical maturity without reading them; but they are so mauve-tinged and seemed unable to offer any help for the life that runs counter to a young man's art. My family background was essentially Populist and it was impossible for me to become comfortably absorbed in their concerns. I was, after all, from Michigan, my youth spent in a small town in a rural area where my father was an agricultural agent. The poem's strident attitude was more in rejection of other attitudes than something that would become a fixed characteristic of my work.