Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  What we lock in the closet forcibly away from public view invariably becomes ghostly and destructive. Nearly everyone is somewhat aware that it is the media rather than religion or a sense of national purpose that gives structure and credibility to their lives. It is the nature of diversion that frames our reality if you look at the amount of time spent. Who can forget Ronald Reagan speaking of “oil-rich Indians on their preservations,” a notion gotten from several identifiable movies. When you go looking for accurate movie portrayals of Native culture you come up with only the recent Smoke Signals and, to a lesser extent, Little Big Man. Movies and television are largely to reality what fast food is to our bounteous crops.

  In my own peculiar case, which proves not at all uncommon, I learned much about the habitat before I learned of the people who belong in it. The natures of our predecessors were only slightly taught in school, if at all. The information was out there but you had to dig, so I dug. It’s unlikely I would have done so without my father’s direction and the knowledge of how a relatively wild and natural habitat could be made livable without destroying it, and how Native religions could emerge directly from the earth that gave people life.

  I’m dealing here with a world that is immensely susceptible to romanticism, the predictable distortions of ideologues, whether they are Rousseau or late-blooming hippies wearing turquoise with freak hots for peyote. We have to look at this world from the inside toward the outside, rather than the reverse. There can be no allowable concept of ethnic or genetic virtue, inevitably the major source of human butchery.

  Here we run into the very thick back wall of xenophobia, of geopiety. I have seen countless examples of writers and critics acting somewhat scornful of one another on a regional basis. To a New Yorker much about Native culture of the northern Midwest all the way out through the Great Plains and Northwest is somewhat suspect unless the New Yorker goes out there and discovers it himself. A critic once visited the old ranch house I use as a studio near the Mexican border. He assumed it was part of a movie set. No, it’s just an old ranch house near the Mexican border. The seven cow dogs in the yard aren’t pets but are used to round up cattle in this rough country. This can go on and on. For instance, the peyote cactus is a fascinating hallucinogenic experience, but far more important the cactus is used by Native American groups to reinforce their tribal identity and as a powerful ally against alcoholism. When I saw an Assiniboine dance nine hours in a row at a powwow he was guided by a stronger impulse than aerobic exercise. Obviously, the converse is true. When writers west of the Appalachians complain that they are being ignored by the “Eastern Literary Establishment” I have to tell them there are at least thirty thousand writers in Boston, New York, and New Jersey who have similar feelings of neglect. The world looks quite different depending on where you stand and the nature of your self-interest.

  Xenophobia is simply a biological part of the human beast and rarely transcended. Historically, minorities war for our attention. We have blacks, Jews, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans, all who have been profoundly traumatized by our history. I must say that largely speaking only Jewish intellectuals have been able to rise well above the problems of their own ethnic group and see clearly the torments of the others. The Jews, for instance, were fundamental in the forming of the NAACP. The ugly idiom “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” is more evident in Native Americans who have a cultural aversion against complaining, therefore it was easier until more recently for Congress and our populace to ignore them. The federal courts have even ruled that the Bureau of Indian Affairs must account for the billions of dollars of Native money that they have misplaced. Curiously, an issue as immense as this has gotten scant coverage. Clearly there are thousands like me churning in their own sense of injustice and squeaking with the wheel, “My issue is bigger than yours.” It is quite difficult for a people to have a sense of history when so much of it has been banished from their sight.

  Just the other day I was reading how the kestrel, commonly known as the sparrow hawk though it doesn’t pursue sparrows, has a curious ability, because of the infinitesimal cones in its eyes, to perceive ultraviolet light, enabling it to further see the iridescent urine stains that voles leave in the grass, so it is able to better pursue them. This isn’t a wonderful idea but a fact and it led me again to remember William Blake’s “How do we know but that every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed to our senses five?” Whether you are reading E. O. Wilson or Jean-Henri Fabre you are drawn into ponderous delight of the smallest creatures. At this point it occurred to me that Native Americans spent a lifetime of attention to the natural world in order to survive. The fact that they no longer have to do so poses a series of enormous questions.

  The poet Wallace Stevens made the statement “We were all Indians once” (current DNA studies say that further back we were all black). This seems technically true and led me to the uncomfortable conclusion that because of my familiarity with the natural world I identified strongly with those who until recently had depended on such familiarity for their existence. I had also long understood that my most intense pleasures came in activities such as hunting, fishing, and studying wild country that were the same for any Pleistocene biped. The essential difference between me and Native Americans was that my people never got the rawest of deals. My people were never reduced from a possible ten million down to approximately three hundred thousand between the years around 1500 to 1900.

  I know men both white and Native who go into the mountains or forest, on horseback or on foot, to kill deer for their families. In impulse this is not unlike riding the subway to an office job. I have been told countless times that hunting is no longer a necessity for anyone in the United States, but that assumes you relish food stamps or the predominantly ghastly feedlot supermarket beef that oozes pinkish juice as if it has been injected with water. I’ve been to dozens of venison “feeds” in my lifetime, which are celebratory occasions where whole groups of families sit down and eat as much deer meat as possible. With the Chippewa (Anishinabe) you eat venison and com stew at a Ghost Supper and afterwards go outside and throw some tobacco in a bonfire to say good-bye to your beloved dead whom you might have been clinging to in a mentally unhealthy way. It is believed that the dead wish to be relieved from our sorrow so that they may freely enter the next world. We can be taught by these ancient and traditional aesthetics of grief. I am amazed how throughout the United States the rich, the mildly prosperous, and those in cushy government jobs are eager to tell our dirt-poor Natives how to live. After being massacred at Wounded Knee the Lakota were forbidden even to hunt or dance.

  At my remote cabin during my sixty-third summer I dreamt that after a lifetime in which I had spent thousands and thousands of days outdoors looking “at” nature I was finally inside looking out. The meaning of this was imprecise but the feelings have stayed with me. It became far simpler as a poet to imagine myself a tree or boulder, a creek or a field, and easier yet to imagine myself a fellow mammal. When Shakespeare said, “We are nature, too,” he was making a leap away from the fundamental schizophrenia in Western culture that few have made. At my cabin made of logs there is less distance between inside and outside. You can smell the heart of the forest as you sleep and hear the river passing beside the north side of the cabin. At our winter casita near the Mexican border the walls are made of adobe, the dried mud of earth. This is comforting but does not discount the elegant imagination of man. I once spoke to a bedridden old woman in the immense bedroom of her hunting lodge in the Rambouillet forest in France. The walls were of quarried stone and covered with ancient tapestries. Attached to the ceiling were hundreds of sets of bronze-tagged stag antlers, the history of centuries of hunting. The property had once been owned by Charlemagne and the lodge itself seemed to grow out of the forest. The inside and outside circulated freely among each other. I felt as comfortable as I had sitting in the doorway of an abandoned hogan on the Navajo reservation watching dawn, which
seemed to emerge from the ground and into the sky.

  We have lately received a terrible lesson that emerged partly from trying to historically put all the nations and peoples in the Middle East into our giant dim-witted Mixmaster and ignoring the potage except for “Just sell us the oil, folks.” We did largely the same thing from the time we got off the boat in regard to Native Americans. Over five hundred tribes were reduced to one name, savages, Injuns, redskins, whatever. Even cursory reading, let alone travel, reveals unique differences, but there never was much cursory reading. Though they live in the same area the Hopi are as different from the Navajo as the Finns are from Italians, perhaps more so. And the Utes are as different from the Ojibway as the French are from the Germans, and so on. Never in our history has the public perception differed so profoundly from reality. Native history is still often taught as if these people were all currently dead.

  I had no right from the beginning to identify with the Natives rather than the conquerors. It was an accident and in describing the accident it is appropriate that I feel a little foolish. They’ve received nothing from me except a number of novels in which I’ve dealt with the curious world of the mixed-bloods. I’ve consciously stayed away from areas where I don’t belong, which are many. There are a couple of dozen Native Americans writing fine novels now, a specific renaissance that takes place too far from New York to be much noticed.

  In my own case and others there is more than a bit of the fool in a poet’s calling. The metaphoric jumps of poetry are also biographical. Wordplay was big in my life from childhood onward. Jim Pepper, a Native jazz musician, sang a beautiful song that was mostly a recitation of tribal names, a song that should be played in every school in America. If I list tribes I’ve visited or read about I’m swept away by the beauty of accumulated names and images, also the sorrow of our implacable cruelty: Acoma Zuni, Kiowa, Apache, Mescalero Apache, Arapaho, Pawnee, Miami, Arikara, Potawatomi, Ponca, Haida, Blackfoot, Lakota, Minneconjou Sioux, Omaha, Cheyenne, Chippewa, Ute, Cree, Havasupai, Papago, Pima, Mohawk, Mandan, Kwakiutl, Mohave, Crow, and so on.

  What I have received from these cultures can’t be numbered in the manner of our late addiction to hokum lists surrounding the millennium, which reminded me of a linear row of bowling trophies. Life is inevitably holographic and thousands of brushes have painted us inside and out.

  I have learned from Native Americans that we prove we belong where we live upon the earth only by carefully using but not destroying our house. I’ve learned that you can’t be at home in your body, your truest home, if you wish to be somewhere else, and that you have to find yourself where you already are in the natural world around you. I have learned that there are no specific paths for me in my work as a poet and novelist and that I write best calling on my boyhood experience as a faux Native setting off into country where there were no paths. I have learned that I can’t have a viable religion by denying pure science or the conclusions of my own attention to the natural world. I have learned that looking at an upland plover or sandhill crane is more interesting than reading the best book review I’ve ever received. I’ve learned that I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance. I’ve learned you can’t comprehend another culture unless you can stop your moment-by-moment mental defense of your own. As the Sioux used to say, “Take courage, the earth is all that lasts.” Few of the hundred million other species can talk, so we must speak and act in their defense. That we have failed our Natives should urge us on, on both their behalf and that of the earth we share. If we can’t comprehend that the reality of life is an aggregate of the perceptions and nature of all species we are doomed with the earth we are already murdering.

  III

  THE REST OF LIFE

  GRADUATE SCHOOL

  When I was fourteen and involved in an extended religious fever a group of us in our early teens were driven into Lansing one early June evening to attend “Youth for Christ.” There were literally thousands of us singing and praying and I received a special recognition for leading the team that won the countywide elimination contest in the Bible Quiz championships. Since I was a mediocre athlete and student except in literature and history it wasn’t difficult to find the time to memorize much of Corinthians, Colossians, Ephesians, Acts (of the Apostles), and the Gospels, though I preferred the word music of the Old Testament Isaiah, or the dire portents of Revelations. In the East Lansing library I even sneaked looks at the forbidden and blasphemous Apocrypha, a thrilling moment indeed.

  But that hot early-summer evening at Youth for Christ a southern evangelist preached eloquently on how sex could lead us to spend eternity in hell. He asked us to imagine that each grain of sand on all the beaches in the world was a year, and when all the grains were used up eternity was just beginning. The preacher cared for us so much that he virtually sobbed out his sermon. We were all quite stricken and very aware that the lust in our hearts could doom us. When the “invitation” arrived at the end of the sermon hundreds came forward to rededicate their lives to Christ and a life of purity until they took their marriage vows and proper sex could be consummated. I had come forward in our own church months before and decided to do it again that evening but only if a red-haired girl from Charlotte, a town about thirty miles distant, did so and then I’d follow her up for the breathless pleasure of being close to her. I restrained my imagination about her to the level of the ethereal, though I knew this state could plunge in a trice if I wasn’t careful. I stared at the back of her neck while the audience sang, “Just as I am without one plea . . At the end of the service she put a foot on a chair to tie her shoe and I could see well above the knee on the other leg. My doom arrived in the form of a hard-on that brought me to tears.

  The next evening our Bible club had a picnic and swimming party. We had a long water fight with the girls mounting the boys’ shoulders in the chest-deep water. It was impossible not to notice the palpable warmth at the back of your neck. My partner was Evelyn, our minister’s daughter, which made it doubly confusing. When we’d flounder in the water it was apparent that Evelyn was less interested in holiness than in me. French kissing and discreet fondling underwater are alarmingly potent. In discreet fondling you’re pretending you’re not aware of what you’re doing and all the touching is quite accidental.

  That night I prayed on my knees on the metal floor register in order to stay alert. I was keenly aware that spending an eternity in hell was a long time. There was still sand between my toes from the swimming party. My burbling prayers rose upward, and naturally when I slept my dreams were riddled with sex including the image of a girl I’d seen emerging from the baptismal tank in a wet white dress that clung to her pink butt. O God.

  The other evening while making notes for a new novel I wondered again about this Christian idea that God is keeping a sharp eye on our genitals and the possible consequences of our fear over spending eternity in hell. This form of indigenous Calvinism made much of time, thrift, hard work, and good works. I’ve never missed a plane and was rarely if ever late for work or a meeting. To not be on time and not get your work done is unthinkable. It is also maddening and easily lapses into obsessive-compulsive behavior. It is an often manic attempt to have some kind of control over swiftly passing time. I’ve watched midwestern farmers carve up their days milking the cows at five A.M. and five P.M., then supper at six sharp, hungry or not. Early after our arrival here Native Americans noted our preoccupation with time and how we are not able to eat until a bell is rung and then we quickly sit down and eat. Once a producer asked me when I would finish a new screenplay assignment and I said I would FedEx a draft on the fortieth afternoon. He laughed, then was quizzical about my seriousness. I admitted my behavior might be vaguely clinical. I’ve tried to blame it on my Swedish half. Once in Minnesota I saw a Swedish folk dance and noted that the dance steps had all the spontaneity of barbed wire.

  Curiously this time obsession deals only wi
th the continuous present and the future. I’ve often noted that I can keep track of the past only by what dogs we’ve owned at the time. My books and even screen projects surround the dogs, who are now permanently sleeping dogs except for Mary and Rose. We share in common the beginnings and ends of our stories, a slick statement not the less true for being so. It is the middle that stretches us thin with all the attenuations of time, the essential but still inscrutable component of the universe, the question mark that enshrouds us all and about which no one appears to have a clue. Even our cells change every split second.

  Luckily for us we’re only occasionally aware that we are caught up willy-nilly in the violent storm of time. Our biological imperatives both blunt and save us. It’s easy to imagine Pleistocene man looking up and thinking, “Either those stars are moving or we are or both.” Perhaps these larger considerations are too grand for us to deal with except momentarily and then rarely. The young man, really not much more than a big boy, hitchhikes to New York City to be a poet and then forty-five years later as a geezer tries to deeply consider what has gone on in between. There have been over fifteen thousand nights and days in between. Always the willing victim of his own polarities he’s had no middle ground for rest. The somewhat desperate sense of time has been so all-enveloping he never has truly noticed its fragility or his own. The hubris is seemingly mixed in his marrow and seeps outward from there. He’s a bright enough boy to know that to write something truly durable owns nearly the same odds as a plow horse winning the Kentucky Derby, but why should that deter him? He’s a clumsy old breed of terrier and with the deaths of father and sister, those he loved most, when he was twenty-one he no longer had the slightest reason to be careful, to hold back. When the father and sister die you follow your heart’s affections in their honor.