Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  Cynthia and I walk Polly home. They are talking about the problems of Polly’s daughter, off in New York City, who has an acute case of herpes, which makes it difficult for her to find “sexual partners” (Polly’s phrase). I find their matter-of-factness about such matters amazing and the idea of being a partner with a dick rather clinical. Cynthia kisses me good-bye at her door and tells me not to try to see Vera without calling home first. I feel the mildest resentment over this but agree. I continue on with Polly and minutes later we’re at her doorstep. I had figured that there was some chance of her inviting me in because it’s Friday night and she doesn’t have to teach tomorrow. No luck. At her door I get a conclusive peck on the cheek and a whispered “Take care of yourself.” Of course I’m pretty confident she has another friend or “love interest” (her term). When she visited the cabin in August and spoke with “martini truth” (her term) she wondered why I kept hanging on to her when I never really wanted a wife or children and had no intention of being in the area more than half the year and with that time being spent mostly at my “depressing” cabin. Over the years Polly is the only person who has openly found the cabin depressing. She thinks the windows should be enlarged. I stand out on the street for a few moments and through the yellow square of light I can see her on the kitchen phone, probably with her daughter or boyfriend. I tend to try to hold on to what we used to be together.

  On the walk up the long hill toward home it occurs to me that the wind has subsided and the three-day blow out of the northwest is over; the inland sea, Lake Superior, gradually has become a murmur rather than a steady roar. The last of the leaves from the hardwoods that line the street have fallen and are pasted against the sidewalk by rain, their bright yellows and reds turning dullish. Time to head south. I have this sense of being a prematurely old man in a quarrel with himself over the worth of his life, a hopelessly bullshit notion. I stop under a streetlight and think about Donald and how the death of a man who was so loved seems to exhaust everyone as if they’re struggling in a vacuum and not quite enough air is being pumped in for survival. There are none of my helpful little packets for this border crossing.

  In the last fifty yards toward home I see that the lights are out except for up in Clare’s room, and a porch light in case I return. I am relieved and then immediately wonder how much good my more than twenty years in the woods have done me. The culture pretends it admires solitude (but not too much solitude, for you might become nonproductive) but I’m swept away by the Saturday western movies that Cynthia and I watched on television as children wherein the nutcase prospector is always returning from his solitary life in the mountains and babbling at everyone in the village. After a few days and nights at the cabin and in the woods seeing no one at all and then going into the grocery or tavern my voice would sound tinny and alien to me as if speech were not the natural fact that I had assumed it to be. Of course I had read the testimony of explorers, religious devotees, or adventurers who had been lost on land or sea, or had simply withdrawn from human concourse for long periods. In their accounts you quickly learn that what we think of as ordinary reality needs the contact with and reassurances from others. Even a man and dog alone for a month become each other in ways that are ordinarily thought improbable. I pushed away the thought of Donald’s time on the hillside.

  I poured a large whiskey to help me sleep and tiptoed up to my room. Down the hall there was light under Clare’s door and the sound of Clare either weeping or making love to K. I quickly entered my room and put a tape of Mexican music on low to drown out any noise of anguish or sex. I was completely packed except for a number of letters from my local lawyer, several of them still unopened. I never took this kind of mail to the cabin thinking business information to be blasphemous in the woods. I mean over the years I had become friends with this lawyer but that didn’t mean I wanted to deal with any problems. This had been especially true of the four months since Donald’s passing.

  I tried to further put off the mail by calling Vernice in Iowa City but she had people over and couldn’t talk. I asked if I should call later but she said it was pointless because I was stopping to see her the day after tomorrow. This was a little deflating after Polly turned me away. I took a gulp of the whiskey and read letters for fifteen minutes not so much with a sinking feeling but with a bleak confirmation of what I had already begun to suspect. I was slowly losing control of my Quixote survival-kit project to my assistant Jan, in Tucson, who had always liked to think of herself as a “facilitator,” one of those contemporary words of blurred meaning. Beginning five years ago she had helped me put together the survival kits in a motel room and we kept the material in a rented storage unit. She was a senior at the University of Tucson at the time and gradually became an ardent border activist though her work for me was part-time. I basically supported her partly because she had a network of friends, some a bit shady, who easily got my kits transferred through Mexican customs to Cananea, and later Magdalena, where I picked up five hundred at a time and was on my way. I began to lose control two years ago when she felt she needed some credentials to get work after I retired from the project, which as I said I totally financed. An activist lawyer friend of hers did the pro bono job of drawing up hokum papers for a not-for-profit corporation with Jan listed as president. I never attended any of the meetings of these border activists though I largely admired their diversity of efforts, which even included distributing barrels of fresh water along the border. All I wanted to do was to be directly involved in the relief of suffering. I was ill-suited temperamentally to be part of a larger “movement” however worthy. I had come to this conclusion on independent action even before my friend and analyst Coughlin had advised that since I had done a quantitative amount of damage to myself with my obsession over my father I should proceed slowly with hands-on activity and avoid simply brooding and writing the rest of my life away. The whole problem came to the surface the autumn before when I reached Tucson and was made to feel like a delivery boy by Jan and two of her friends when we got together for several days to assemble the survival kits. On the last day they gave me maps and contact numbers of where I should take the kits and I told them that I had already made commitments to certain church groups and labor unions in central Mexico. We came to a compromise but there were some unpleasant feelings. I felt like a soldier being sent off to battle by three young women who had no knowledge or direct contact with war. They were adamantly against the Catholic Church as a capitalist tool and had no real knowledge of the liberation theologians or the movement I had been familiar with in my year at the seminary twenty-five years before.

  What my lawyer was telling me is that I had effectively lost legal control of my project but should try to hang in there because Jan had on hand sixty thousand dollars of my money for gathering the equipment for this year’s survival kits. There had been seventy-five but Jan and a friend had gone to two conferences on Third World poverty, one in Maui and one in San Francisco. The lawyer had asked for expense accounts and Jan had hedged saying she might send them along but was not obliged to do so.

  When I finished the mail my brain felt tickled and itchy. I thought of going downstairs to get another drink but it was midnight and I hoped to leave at dawn. This was a distracting idea when I realized there was no reason to leave at that time. Americans like to say “Let’s get an early start” and so they do. This “segued” (K’s word) to general feelings of gibberish and garbage, both real and merely emotional. I had been dwelling on death and religion all summer and hadn’t paid any attention to business as evidenced by the lawyer’s letters, but before then my attention to such matters had always been scant. It was partly because the money was unearned but mostly because I had minus interest in business and numbers. Part of me was the university sophomore who reads Dostoyevsky’s statement “Two plus two is the beginning of death” and never gets over it.

  The tickle and itch in my brain followed me into bed and increased when I turned out the lights. I thou
ght that what Jan was doing is the way the world works. Nothing should be as it is without growing larger, which is the central content of business discourse. I couldn’t very well blame her for being a child of her time especially when I ignored the warning signs and then the near mutiny last year. Jan could never admit that there would be no migration problem if businesses in the U.S. were legally required to identify their workers but then businesses thrived on paying the minimum wage or less to their workers. It still seemed a lot to Mexicans who were averaging between three and five dollars a day. If you were making five bucks a day at an American-owned maquiladora plant in Sonoran Nogales and stood on a hill outside your cardboard hut you could see a Pizza Hut in American Nogales where you could make more than five bucks an hour. It was a no-brainer why people crossed the border.

  I dozed off for a while but awoke abruptly with a dream of a bear I had seen at the bird feeder at the cabin. It was an old male with patchy fur. I awoke when the bear started talking in the dream and I didn’t want to hear what it had to say. Just before I awoke the bear had receded into a small cavelike hole in the universe. I didn’t know what to make of this and there was an urge to call Coughlin for a psychoanalytic reading and anyway he was still in Montana likely packing up for his return to Chicago in the late fall. He fished and wandered out of Twin Bridges from mid-May to late October, and then returned to Chicago, where he worked part-time for an alcohol and drug clinic. He needed Montana but he also needed Chicago for her museums, libraries, theaters, bookstores, and most of all classical music, which he preferred to hear live.

  I woke again before daylight in a curious state near laughter. This frankly amazed me and it occurred to me it was because Jan presented an actual problem rather than one of my somewhat airy periods of obsession with sex, religion, the chaos of history, or death. I gave up. I said aloud, “I don’t care.” There was nothing I could do about Jan for the time being. I could always start over if I wished. Meanwhile, it was pointless to eat up my own guts.

  I went downstairs and made coffee and heated my thermos with boiling water. While sipping coffee I wondered if “I don’t care” was the hole that my dream bear had disappeared into. I felt wondrously light looking out the kitchen window into the darkness. Naturally I doubted if this good feeling would last but as Vernice says, “Kiss the joy as it flies.”

  While shivering in my packed car I remembered something Cynthia had said in passing to the effect that she knew very well that Vera didn’t need any financial help for her son but that she wanted to feel that there was some sort of contact between us and our half brother. It was obviously not her son’s fault the way he came into being. Cynthia had also said that it’s not infrequent that someone who had experienced a closed-head injury like our brother ends up exhibiting violent behavior. I’m ignorant on the structure of the human brain but recalled reading that such niceties as the knowledge of right and wrong are in the frontal lobes and that damage to this area can cast one adrift.

  “What are you doing?” K was suddenly outside the driver-side window dressed for a hike.

  “I’m thinking,” I said, rolling down the window.

  “If you’d start the car and turn on the heater you might stop shivering,” he suggested.

  “Excellent idea.” Five winters in Mexico had stolen my tolerance for cold weather. “Is Clare okay?”

  “Of course not. She thinks her father is alive in some form but she won’t say how.”

  “Maybe the Ghost Supper will help.” I was referring to the ceremony that Cynthia was taking Clare to where you throw tobacco onto a bonfire and release the spirits of the dead you’ve been clinging to. The event would be held in a couple of weeks over near Bay Mills.

  When I drove away K looked as if he was bearing up under too much of the weight of the world but then I reflected on my own insufferable tendencies in that direction, which Coughlin had said was a form of megalomania, of hubris, for me to think that I could do something beneficial way beyond the powers of any single human. At least K was dealing with the reality of a somewhat deranged lover. In July I had spent the afternoon with a brilliant forestry professor from Michigan Tech over in Houghton discussing the history of logging in the Upper Peninsula. At the cabin over a glass of wine he had looked at me askance and said, “Nearly all of the ill effects that you’ve traced to your family took place a hundred years ago or more. You’re talking as if it was yesterday and still going on today and that you can do something to ameliorate the situation. You remind me of some of my save-the-world environmental students. I have great sympathy with their earnestness but such purity of heart can lead to radical self-deception. You have to learn to ignore the disastrous big picture and come down to the singular wetland or piece of forest you might wish to rescue. Of course you have to comprehend the science, the details of the whole picture, but cast your role as a screwdriver rather than a tank.”

  After an initial hollow stomach I found a trace of amusement in the idea that if through the miracle of time travel I had been able to murder my great-grandfather or grandfather their competitors would be ready for the same job of greed and destruction and there was the additional problem that I wouldn’t exist.

  I stopped near Witch Lake for a quick look at two hundred acres I was thinking of selling but came to no conclusions. Years before I had found a dead wolf in a dense thicket near a marsh and inspected the smelly carcass for gunshot wounds. There were none. It was rangier than the largest German shepherd but quite thin with a gray muzzle and bad teeth. I was relieved that it had obviously died of old age. Now I turned the car around when I saw the spot down a steep hill in the distance.

  In a motel in Iowa City I looked at the journal of the first day and a half of my trip. I’ve learned to write down certain things I’ve seen rather than the banal thoughts that don’t bear rereading, or when you do reread them your soul yawns in the stuffy air:

  Noted that south of Witch Lake my peripheral vision has expanded doubtless because of the dream. All of the birch and hardwood and aspen leaves are gone from the three-day northwester and there are patches of snow in the shade beneath gigantic outcrops. The Michigamme River is low from the fall drought and scarcely remembers that it drowned so many miners long ago.

  Near disaster west of Iron Mountain, where I should have headed south but was thinking of Polly so many years ago when we were high school seniors and on a wintry dawn I was staying in a second-floor room at the Best Western. She visited on her walk to school. Her knees were cold but the thigh draped across my face was moistly warm, my first time going down. This sexual trance causes me to go off the road near Florence, Wisconsin. Luckily the ditch isn’t deep but I clip off the right side-view mirror on a poplar tree. I churn out of the ditch in four-wheel drive. A trucker behind me stops to see if I’m okay and gives me a cup from his thermos of coffee assuming I fell asleep. I don’t say, “No, I had my face in divine-memory pussy.” A few miles down the road I stop at a tourist picnic area and doze for an hour, still shaky with my brush with injury or worse. The sun through the windows of the car is too weak for warmth and I wake up shivering and remembering when I fell through pond ice with Glenn while skating but the water was only chest-deep.

  At a motel just north of Davenport I stand out back thinking of the thin scimitar shape of the new moon, also about Jesus and all of the semitrucks roaring past on Inter state 80 a mile to the north of me. In reference to Jesus I couldn’t quite remember the words of admonition to take care of the poor since it had been so long since I had opened the New Testament. I certainly wasn’t doing an inclusive job but it was a tad better than nothing. I thought of the curious and energetic jubilance of Mexican children playing with their makeshift toys, something I see less of in the U.S. with our children in the highly organized play that has been devised for them by bored adults. K collects used baseballs and mitts for me to haul south and give away. K is amazingly athletic. When he visited me in Zacatecas he played in a local pickup game and jumped ov
er the head of a stooping shortstop. The moon is moving. I can see it. Unlike in the U.P. there is a warmish wind from the south. What is ghastly is to see these Mexican children become careworn adults making three bucks a day. Two hours ago I ate an enormous pork chop called a “porkerhouse.” In Torreón when I sponsored a barbacoa I was amazed at the amount of meat people ate, a dozen roasted cabritos (young goats) and a couple of beef quarters organized through a Catholic church in a very poor barrio. The girls dancing remind me painfully of the way Vera and Cynthia used to dance. After my accident this morning I kept returning all day long to the absurd power of sex. Some author wondered at the nature of us as animals in human clothing. At a bad diner lunch while looking out the window at the Mississippi River near La Crosse, Wisconsin, I nevertheless found the sallow, grumpy waitress sexy. She was extremely busy with too many tables and when she served me I could feel the heat from her body. I took three car naps and each time I awoke delighted with life on earth despite its desperately compromised nature.

  Vernice came over to my Iowa City motel shortly after my arrival at midafternoon. For the first time in more than a decade she looked truly healthy. She was at her nadir a year and a half ago when I met her in Florence, Italy, for the purpose of seeing a retired doctor who had been a specialist in tropical medicine. She had been on a year’s fellowship in Glasgow, Scotland, and was cold, weak, and utterly miserable. It was in mid-March and I was in Zacatecas at the time but her voice sounded so small and remote that I decided to meet her. I flew from Mexico City to Rome, which was a not altogether pleasant reminder of an earlier trip to France in search of Vernice. Most of us know that medicine is scarcely a precise science but Vernice had been lucky to meet a doctor in Glasgow who had been a colleague of the Italian doctor when they had both worked for the United Nations in Arusha in Tanzania. The Italian doctor was a sprightly old man who looked like Sigmund Freud. The first few days we stayed in an inexpensive pensione where if I leaned precariously out the window I could see a half inch of the Arno River. When the doctor put Vernice in the hospital for tests I moved to a nice hotel where I could get room service. Vernice had been treated previously for liver flukes she’d encountered on a budget trip to Morocco when she was living in the south of France with her lesbian partner. The Italian doctor, however, determined that she has two additional parasites, including one she had caught walking barefoot on a Jamaican beach; the third was of indeterminate tropical origin and the doctor explained to me that such parasites, though anyone can get them, are more typical in those on budget travel funds. After Florence Vernice was on the road back to health continuing her treatment with a specialist at the medical school in Ames, Iowa. Always a leftist bully she insisted I fly to Rome tourist class but after ten days in Florence and a night in Rome, when she was safely on a flight back to Glasgow, I changed my ticket to business class, proving, I suppose, that there was some of my parents left in me. Understandably in Florence our only physical contact was holding hands and it was like holding hands with a wraith.