Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  I drove the ten miles or so out of the woods faster than usual with a new and peculiar itch in my brain that I figured could be dispelled only by the sight of the harbor of Lake Superior or, more likely, a cheeseburger and beer at the Dunes Saloon. It was a simple case of cowardice in the face of a new experience. I had always stuck to the idea offered by my ninth-grade science teacher that all genuine phenomena have a natural or scientific explanation and driving out of the woods my faith in this had become a bit wobbly. I hit a long puddle too fast and fishtailed then slowed until I almost became stuck and downshifted into four-wheel drive with the windshield covered with mud. I felt relieved when I finally reached the blacktop that led to the village. I reminded myself that my persistent life question, “How do we live with what we know?” didn’t cover everything and that I might humorously add, “How do we live with what we don’t know?”

  At the bar my sometime lover of last night, Carol, at first ignored me though there were only two other customers, old Finns making a whiskey dent in their Social Security checks. She hissed at me, “You’re an asshole,” which the Finns thought very funny. I called Cynthia from the pay phone at our appointed time of twelve-thirty, which doesn’t always work because on some days she’s a substitute teacher until Polly can get her on as a regular. On this day her voice is bell clear and musical, which means her mood is good. She tells me that Clare is letting K accompany her on her way over in my direction to clean out a hundred or so bluebird houses on the Kingston Plains. She has sent along a pot roast for our dinner, which pleases me.

  When my purposefully overdone cheeseburger arrives I have a confusing memory of Cynthia from when we were in our early teens. It was an early June morning in the last week of school. I was having breakfast alone and leafing through some of my mother’s art books for prurient reasons. A bare-breasted Courbet woman and a series of Degas dancers always hit me the most directly. I went upstairs to get my schoolbooks with the accustomed hardon and through the open door I could see Cynthia toweling off after a shower, a disconcerting reminder of the Degas drawings I had just stared at with lust. I averted my glance from the taboo Cynthia, who was singing a Beach Boys song, and wondered how my nasty, ugly parents could produce a girl with such a lovely shape. At the time she was reading the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, and George Eliot and called me Squire Glum.

  On the way back to the cabin after the pleasant denial in the tavern I naturally returned to Donald and the bear so that by the time I passed the village limits my discomfort had palpably returned. I was a boy again walking past a cemetery in the dark. Donald loved bears. One had visited him during his three nights without food, water, or shelter. Bears would occasionally visit the bird feeder at the cabin because of their affection for sunflower seeds but they would leave if I rapped at the window. Years back a young one had followed me on a long hike out in the sand dunes though at a distance of a couple of hundred yards, but until this morning I had never had one approach so closely. I had nowhere to go with my unrest. I had read a dozen books on black bears but none of my knowledge was doing me any good because these books were of a scientific nature. Perhaps ten years ago I had loaned my copy of Rockwell’s Giving Voice to Bear to Donald, who in turn loaned it to a friend, who consequently lost the book when he moved to Thunder Bay up on the north shore of Lake Superior. Donald was upset about the lost book, which dealt with various American Indian tribal attitudes toward the bear. I assured Donald that I could find another copy but I never had mostly because I felt more comfortable with a purely scientific approach to the mammal. Donald teased me about this once when we were brook trout fishing and on our long walk into the beaver pond stopped so he could inspect a large oak tree that had been blasted by lightning. These are meaningful spots to the Anishinabeg, places where the gods have touched the earth directly. Donald had noted my lack of real interest and said, “You think a bear is just a bear.”

  At the cabin I sat on my creaky porch swing wishing that Clare and K were already there so I wouldn’t have to deal with these scattered thoughts of bears, death, and lightning trees. The oak had been large and its upper half had been shattered into scorched splinters, the green wood too damp to burn for long. I tried to decide if it would have been good to be there when it happened as sort of an aimless Moses to whom a burning bush was only a burning bush.

  I went into the cabin and poured myself a rare midday whiskey thinking it might allow me to take a nap after which my perspective would be changed. A few days before on the back porch of our house in Marquette I had been having a drink with Cynthia and Polly and had become irritated at their matter-of-fact confidence about absolutely everything that was passing through their minds. Cynthia started my eventual disintegration.

  “I was thinking when I got up this morning that how can death be bad when it’s happened to every single living creature and plant since the beginning of the earth? I said this through the door to Clare’s room but she didn’t answer. Instead she turned up the volume of a Schumann record. On the way downstairs I remembered reading that Schumann died in an asylum at age forty-two.” While Cynthia spoke she watched with amusement at the way I gulped my highball.

  “I know what you mean,” Polly said. “When I was at Iron Mountain last week I helped a nurse bathe my dad. All the time I was growing up he made sure I never saw his bare crippled legs. Anyway when I rubbed his legs with a warm washcloth I thought, ’Those can’t even be called legs.’ I wondered if his life had been worth it in ordinary terms. It was nearly forty years since his legs had been mangled in the mining accident. The question was whether his life was worth it?”

  “Did you even ask him?” I questioned stupidly.

  “That’s not the kind of question you ask your dad. When I was in high school a friend drove him home from the union hall and the both of them were truly drunk. Well, Dad fell down in the yard and wouldn’t move and his friend had fallen asleep in the car. Dad was still pretty big then and Mom and me couldn’t move him. It was a cool May night and Mother was afraid it might rain. She took the oilcloth from the kitchen table and spread it out on the grass and we rolled Dad over onto it so he wouldn’t get damp. We covered him with a few blankets and a piece of canvas tarp. At first light Mom went off to work and out the window I saw her standing there in the light rain with her lunch bucket looking down at her sleeping husband. A little while later I heard him yelling for coffee so I took out a thermos and cup. He was staring up into the crab-apple tree, which was full of birds, and he said, ‘These goddamned birds woke me up’ but I could see he was very happy. After that he took to sleeping outside quite a bit.”

  “That doesn’t seem like much to carry a person.” I sipped at my ice toting up life’s balance on my imaginary board.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, David. Go listen to your Coast Guard weather report so that you can say something sensible like ‘It’s windy’ or ‘It’s cold’ or something solid. Where are you today, anyway? I mean for Christ’s sake you’ve never learned small measures. A hungover cripple wakes up under a crab-apple tree and smiles at birds. Go sleep under a crabapple tree.” Cynthia was pissed.

  Of course she was partly right. I had spent basically twenty years thinking and come up with a fifteen-page undistinguished essay. Now dozing on the porch swing with its homely creak the sound of which irritates a local downy woodpecker I am obsessed with how fragile art, literature, love, and music, even the natural world are in the presence of severe illness and inevitable death. Four months after Donald’s passing we’re still staring off into the middle distance even when we’re facing a wall three feet away. Five years ago my life was saved by finding a dead man under a manzanita bush, and a week later seeing a photo of a dead girl, her face covered with large sun blisters. But I didn’t know and love them.

  When I awake Clare and K are standing in front of me in their silly-looking camouflage suits. Clare looks thin but is smiling and K is drinking a beer. This is my last day at the cabin and it’s passing quic
kly what with mid-October sunlight being so flimsy this far north.

  “I found a car for you. It’s a used Subaru four-wheel drive, five years old but with only forty thousand miles on it. It’s pretty ugly and needs a paint job but I know that’s not what you want. A mechanic friend checked it out and says it’s aces.”

  “Thanks. I’m glad you’re here partly because I’m hungry. Cynthia said you’re bringing food.”

  “It’s only four-thirty and we walked our asses off. I want a shower and then a margarita at the bar.”

  Clare began stripping her clothes off on the way into the cabin. K looked a bit haggard, perhaps from the effort of trying to bring equilibrium to Clare. I was looking at him trying to think of something helpful to say in Clare’s absence but then he disappeared behind the memory of a dream I had been having on the porch swing. The dream was chaotic but began with milk cows and numbers. Around the turn of the century, say from 1890 to 1910, when mine disasters were at their worst in terms of fatality numbers, the victims’ families in company housing were welcome to stay in the housing but only for a month. For this time the families continued to have the use of a milk cow. I had seen old photos of these often gaunt milk cows in rocky pastures near the company row houses and women on stools milking the cows into buckets often with children watching. For a moment in the dream I thought I saw Cynthia on a stool but the woman more closely resembled my mother. Then numbers began to appear in the landscape. Numbers often marred my interesting dreams but in this case Donald was number one but the number was blurred. This was an area where in three major mines nearly two thousand men had died in a twenty-year period. In the dream I finally understood that death and numbers don’t cohere. Everyone is “one.” An accident report might say that nine died, four of them in their teens, but each death was “one.” Each of six million Jews was “one.” With death it is a series of “ones.”

  I came back to ordinary consciousness when K jumped up on the porch, an upward leap of four feet and thus beyond my immediate comprehension. He showed me a letter he and Clare had received from Fred at his Hawaii Zendo, which mostly described Fred’s difficulties growing exotic fruits like pomegranates and figs. This immediately made me homesick for Mexico, where at a roadside stand in the province of Veracruz Vernice and I had bought thirty-two kinds of fruit. Fred concluded the letter by saying about Donald, “I never knew anyone who so thoroughly was what he was.”

  K and I tried to pin this statement down into a sensible framework but then Clare came out on the porch from her shower. When I’m with K he often drives and I sit in the back seat and regularly this position causes different perceptions and emotions. Cynthia says this is because I know so few people that I rarely get to sit in a back seat. It worked better when I picked up Vernice at the Guadalajara airport a few years ago. After a fine night in a fancy hotel where we had a room service dinner on a balcony and could hear acoustic guitar music from a club below us we set out early in the morning toward Zihuatanejo with me at the wheel thinking about nights of music, love, and laughter.

  “If we’re heading southwest toward the coast why are we driving into the sun?” Vernice had asked quite irritably. She was quite intense over seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

  I had stopped on the road’s shoulder and mapwork revealed I had made a wrong turn an hour before, which made Vernice even more irritable. I got in the back seat of the spiffy rental car after a little quarrel and fell promptly asleep, a habit started early when my parents quarreled loudly and I’d take to my room for a nap while Cynthia would head out the back-porch door. Anyway, I didn’t wake up until four hours later, at noon, whereupon Vernice told me I had missed some gorgeous mountainous landscapes.

  “You have a gift for English. Describe them,” I had said.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  The trip was going poorly partly because I had miscalculated the nature of the roads and the time it would take to drive, and since we arrived a day late in Zihuatanejo (I had neglected to call) our plush beach hotel had rented our room. We found another place at one-tenth the price that Vernice typically liked better. It was on a five-story rooftop overlooking the harbor and closer to the poor folks downtown. It was really only a small room with a huge patio, the entire rooftop, with chairs and a table, lounge chairs, and plants. It was hot in late May and the air conditioner worked poorly so that after a good dinner of a whole roasted fish we pulled the mattress out onto the deck. Vernice still wasn’t in the mood for love but when I woke up in the night she was standing naked at the roof’s edge looking at the harbor and the ocean beyond the harbor’s mouth and the approach of a gigantic thunderstorm from the southwest. I joined her a little queasy from two bottles of wine to “smooth” my feelings.

  “I’m seeing the Pacific Ocean,” she said.

  I got us chairs and we sat there watching the lights on the tiny boats far out in the harbor fishing for snapper in the night. As the thunderstorm got closer the boats started heading in and I mentioned that I should drag the mattress back into the room and she said, “Please don’t.” There were black birds on the cornice and in palm trees nearby that I later determined to be great-tailed grackles. They had horrid voices that were wonderful. Vernice got up from her chair and sat on my lap waving her hands in the very warm liquid air. Now the approaching storm was only a few miles out near the harbor’s entrance and the lightning cast a hot blue glow on the huge volcanic rocks covered with seabirds, mostly gaviotas. With each tremendous clap of thunder perhaps a minute apart our grackles would scream their slate-breaking calls back at the thunder. “How many millions of years have they been doing this? Just like us, arguing with thunder,” Vernice said, swiveling her body so that I entered her and she was still watching the storm, and then we could hear the wind and the sheets of rain coming toward us. When the storm reached us we were literally submerged and ran for the mattress, got under the soaked sheet, and continued making love. When I was on the bottom I could see the bluish-white lightning up through the sheet. I had never felt such a warm rain and driving wind and wondered how grackles could withstand its force to keep screeching. We dragged the mattress back in the little room and flipped it over and where there was a dry spot in the middle we finished making love. Vernice began laughing in between singing phrases of the Catholic Christmas hymn “O Holy Night.”

  I came to consciousness from my reverie and could see Clare waving from the front window of the tavern. I tried to remember if it was Camus who wrote, “It rained so hard that even the sea was wet.” I went inside and had a double whiskey, which my putative girlfriend the barmaid poured short. She had met K before but when I introduced Clare as my niece she said, “I bet. I’ve seen you with a lot of nieces.”

  “I am the asshole’s niece,” Clare said.

  “For a while they called us needy but now they’re back to assholes,” I said to K, who was racking up the pool table for a quick game with a pulp cutter who smelled strongly of chain-saw oil and pine resin. Like miners and commercial fishermen, loggers always look older than they are. This one, Tom by name, was drunk one night and in an enraged state asked me why breakfast cereal had gone up to five dollars a box. He had four kids and a wife so large that their rusted-out compact car tilted to the passenger’s side.

  Clare was back at the front window looking out at the cold harbor. The wind had picked up from the north and it looked like a mid-October snow was coming.

  “Mother said Vera called from Jalapa and her son did something very bad, I’m not sure what, and now he’s in a place for the criminally insane. Or don’t you care about your half brother?”

  “I knew he was headed in that direction. Vera claims he was okay until that car hit him while he was on the bicycle. So I’m not sure. Back when I met him he was what the Mexicans call muy malo. They save that one up for men, and a few women, who are real bad.”

  “Anyway, Mother’s helping Vera get him in an institution that’s not so totally crummy. When I was up
wandering around the Yellow Dog last week there was this one spot near a small waterfall where I sensed Dad in the river. Of course it was the last place we fished together. I was wondering if some of our spirit might stay in a place. What do you think?”

  I was nonplussed. This kind of thinking was out of character. Clare tended to be as matter-of-fact as her brother Herald though, rather than mathematics, Clare leaned toward botany and the history of clothing. I certainly wasn’t going to tell her about my bear experience of the morning the thought of which still gave my stomach a jiggle. I glanced at Clare, who clearly expected an answer of some sort, however lame. Once while we were fishing Clarence told me that he talked to his wife in the asylum on the phone. She was unable to speak but he said he knew “what she was saying.”

  “I suppose that death, especially the death of someone we love, pushes us away from all of our built-in assumptions about what life is, I mean the ready-made day-to-day life and all that we’ve learned about what it is supposed to be that we readily accept. Death gives us a shove into a new sort of landscape.” My voice trailed off with disinterest in what I was saying, or maybe slight fear.