by Jim Harrison
It had often come to me that I had let alcohol begin to destroy my dreams after the death of Adelle. It was as if the dreams needed to be sedated in this atmosphere of turbulent darkness, and then alcohol in such vast quantity had so diminished their clarity that by the time I joined up for World War I, I was robotic, following the structure of a hope rather than feeling hope herself. I certainly hadn’t the wit to understand that I was trying to die, though if I had had any confidence in an afterlife in which I’d see Adelle I would have put a bullet through my skull in a moment.
At first alcohol gave me an illusion of coherence because it kept everything, including grief, in its specific place where it could be relentlessly and inefficiently mulled over. At such times we drink so as not to go mad, but then we have only found another sort of madness. I have also speculated that my Lakota half predisposed me to this fatal and terrifying thirst with an emphasis on the fatalism. Of course it is presumptuous to identify with another culture if it is unthinkable to live their life, but then Davis had upbraided me around the campfire a few nights before he pitched off the cliff with the idea that I “paint like an Indian.” What he meant was that I was doing what in modern terms would be near abstracts from the natural world without a touch of the illustrator in them. There were no reassuring forms in my prairies and skies and they were a bit reminiscent of the contemporary work of Ad Reinhardt and Robert Motherwell that I have seen in current art magazines. I have never viewed nature as a homily to prod our tired asses toward heaven, or as a relief from grooming the fleas off each other’s skins, a balm for a life spent buying cheap or selling dear. My father’s Bible was dead wrong. The earth was not made for our solace but for her own evolving magnificence of which we are a small part. I prate like Naomi who frequently wonders aloud why every acre of the West must be made comfortable for cows at the expense of all other creatures. My mother’s people were sacrificed, in toto, for cows when they happily could have lived among them if the land had been shared rather than seized.
I was quite helpless a few days ago when Dalva spent the night and asked me why “nothing went together.” She had lost the ability to make sense out of a moment, let alone an hour or a day. I did not interpret this as a slump caused by the biology of her pregnancy, remembering how my own wife, Neena, had thrived on this condition, liberating her as it did to spend all of her hours reading rather than only half. At the time we could find no help she could abide more than a few days so I shipped in dozens of cookbooks and learned to fend for us in the kitchen. I told Dalva this which amused her, but then I added on, out of honesty, my own questioning. Your world fails to make sense, I said, because it doesn’t for the present time. We have been taught for various religious, social, and economic reasons to keep our consciousness running on a track, somewhat in the manner of a train. This was clumsy indeed but I wanted it to be clear to her. It is convenient for us to agree to stay on this track, but then your lover runs off and you are fifteen and pregnant and all of the reality you consented to falls into shambles, mostly because it wasn’t very real in the first place, just the most comfortable way to regard life. “Then what can I fall back on?” she asked, and I wished Smith had been there then rather than a few days later. Your “spirit,” I said, rather than “nothing.” It was still a lame response so I cast it in the light of how we can feel on first waking with the remnants of good dreams still with us, and how the world then is so lovely before our minds misconstrue its lack of intention for us. At this point I could feel Adelle in the pit of my stomach and rising slowly to my mind. I turned away then quite overcome. We were in the kitchen and I opened a cupboard and spied a jar of popcorn Naomi had grown. She read my desperation through the back of my head. “I’m not going to kill myself because it would disappoint everyone.” I’d never heard a sentence in my life that so made me shudder.
We had an inescapably sodden Thanksgiving dinner at Naomi’s with the roast turkey looking quite forlorn and barely touched. We could not rise above our collective sorrow as Naomi and Dalva will leave early in the morning on the long drive to Marquette, Michigan, where Naomi’s cousin, a game biologist, and his wife will look after Dalva until her child is due in late April. The evening was nearly unbearable with no one able to speak with a full voice, and Ruth so overcome that she skittered off to the parlor where she practiced, unsuccessfully, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata under a portrait of her father. Finally we gave up, embraced each other, and I left for home. We doubtless would have been far better off if we had wailed aloud as a family of Lakota would have felt free to do.
That thought jogged my mind and when I got home I looked in a journal for my recollection of what Rosenthal had said during our picnic years ago. It had been occasioned by my telling him a story about when I was seven years old, in fact the day before my birthday, and my mother had gotten word that her eldest brother had died up near Buffalo Gap. She lit a small fire out in the yard and sat there, covering herself with gray ashes, chanting and wailing all night long. I stood by my bedroom window and watched, quite frightened, my world delaminating from her grief and the eerie sounds she sang. My father came out and tried to wrap a shawl around her which she threw off. At dawn my father came for me and I sat next to her in my pajamas until the sun came up over the trees and she stopped abruptly. She then walked over to the full horse trough, doused herself, came back to us smiling and said it was time for breakfast. I was overjoyed as it seemed to mean that my birthday would not be overlooked.
Rosenthal was a bit melancholy at first with the anecdote and then spoke at length. My journal owns none of his fast-paced eloquence, but he said that I was fortunate to have seen something that has largely passed with modernity, an event that is now thought to be archaic since nearly all of us have distanced and sequestered ourselves from all of the highly evolved rituals and experiences surrounding birth, death, sexuality, animals, active religion, nature, even art and insanity. I felt I largely understood what he meant except in the realm of art, but he elaborated by saying that in primitive cultures everyone was an artist and storyteller, only some, quite obviously to all, were much better at it than others.
I could see the fair-sized waxing moon out the window and turned out the den lights to experience its peculiar warmth, remembering with amusement the alarmed reaction to my tales of moonlit walks at art school. Davis and I had made a sketching trip with his wild-eyed girlfriend, to the Upper Peninsula late one May, much further east than Ishpeming, staying in a seaside lumbering town called Grand Marais, quite unlike the Grand Marais in Minnesota, and far east of Ishpeming. It was there that I had a moonlit walk that was more alarming than any back on the farm.
At the time I was having great difficulty at school with an obligatory drawing class where we had spent day after wintry day sketching the marble busts of Greek and Roman heroes. It was progressive and you couldn’t go on to the next bust until you got the current one correct, so I was stuck on Tacitus until my soul screamed while others had moved on well past Pliny and Virgil. The teacher was an Englishman of a militaristic nature who was particularly ruthless with me after I had asked aloud why we must draw from a work of art rather than life itself. For that impertinence I was made to spend a full week on a marble foot. Finally I walked out and flunked the course, which got me an audience with the director, William M. R. French, who was kind enough to move me on to the third or top form despite my incompetencies. This was my third slow year, but then I was a full paying student and was generally useful for my ability to write descriptions for brochures on the student shows, not a generally respected gift but then someone had to do it, and few were capable. In the top form I was finally liberated from the antique busts, fragments of sculpture, architectural ornaments, and moved on to painting and drawing from what was locally called “Life.”
But it was spring, and my hand, which had finally been freed to do what it loved, froze itself into uncooperative meat. I had the briefest love affair with a supremely talented girl, who, along wi
th Davis, was considered the most promising of the five hundred or so students. It was sad indeed to admit to myself that my resentment of her talent broke us apart. If it were not for the attention, however eccentric, of my friend Davis I would have chucked the whole thing, tucked tail and gone home for good.
When I proposed the week’s trip north Davis was enthused but broke as was his girlfriend. That wasn’t a problem as, again, my father was overgenerous with the allowance he sent. Later on I supposed that this was because he had little occasion to spend any of the money he was gathering from his tree nursery business and it was a way of spreading the general guilt over money. I did the same with my own sons.
By the time the three of us boarded the train that May afternoon I felt suffocated with people and was trembling with the sort of acute homesickness known best to nineteen-year-olds. If I couldn’t have the grand void of the prairie I would at least have a week of the dense northern forests. I suspect the wild calls the loudest when it has largely disappeared from our lives and at that time I dearly ached for a peopleless landscape, averting my eyes and sipping from a jug of wine as the train passed by the fire-belching hell and smoke of the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, and headed north. Davis’s girlfriend Sarah tried to tease me with peeks up her skirt but I was far too drawn and quartered to respond. I kept staring at my hand around the neck of the wine jug, wondering why it couldn’t perform the feats of genius my mind envisioned. The hands of Gauguin and Cßzanne doubtless did their minds’ bidding, and were probably keyed to levels of perception of which the mind itself lacks consciousness. I was still a boy throwing a ball straight up in the air and catching it far less than half the time. For solace I had been attending symphony and chamber music concerts and had speculated that probably very few had been able to write down the melodies that the mind willfully concocted. There was nothing in the two volumes of William James that accounted for this phenomenon and I thought of writing a mock Emerson essay called “On the Disobedience of the Hand.” I went so far as to speculate that my hand had broken too many horses, pitched too much hay, dug too many irrigation ditches and those chores had made it inept for this higher calling. Even the fistfights I was occasionally prone to couldn’t have helped. A month earlier a very large butcher at a saloon near the school had swatted Davis unjustly, and I had hammered him prone with difficulty and my swollen fist had been unable to draw for a week.
We arrived in Grand Marais late the next afternoon, sleeping off the wine for most of the way except for the brisk train ferry trip across the Straits of Mackinac. We were advised to go up to see the locks on the St. Marys River in Sault Ste. Marie but I was impatient for the wilderness. It was disturbing to see between the Straits and the hundred and twenty miles to Grand Marais that most of the great white pines had been cut, though there were occasional patches that were a remembrance of former glory.
We found a simple hotel in the village, then ate an excellent dinner of lake trout. Davis and Sarah went to the rooms for their lovers’ business, and I headed out east on foot, a fairly stiff breeze from Lake Superior keeping the clouds of mosquitoes at bay. Several miles from the village I paused in the twilight thinking I should return, but then I was alarmed by a great light through the forest which turned out to be a full moon rising. It was a reddish yellow from a forest fire far to the east that we had been told about on the train. I walked directly toward this spectacular moon and came upon the remains of a logging camp that was now inhabited by two old Chippewa men who were friendly and gave me a cup of their grotesque homemade wine. There was an old chestnut draft plug in their yard, a decrepit logging horse, and I offered them the generous sum of five dollars to take it for a ride. This vastly amused them but the older of the two somehow perceived my lineage and said “redskins” liked big moons. At their instruction I crossed a wooden bridge, then turned south with the moon on my left, riding on a log trail along the bluffs of the Sucker River. The horse trotted just fast enough to keep ahead of the swarms of mosquitoes. She was broad enough to make riding bareback nearly comfortable, though she was incapable of the ease of a lope.
I’m unsure of what to call the state I entered but that scarcely matters. I was entranced by the moon and the forest, the huge stumps that were the ghosts of trees. The night and the moon shed me of my troubles, and I felt then deeply I must continue as an artist even though I might be doomed to failure, but that ponderous thought fell away in the glory of the night ride. There was a strong scent of perfume pushed by the slightest of breezes and I entered a vast clearing of several thousand acres full of flowering bushes which I later learned were mostly chokecherry, dogwood, and sugar plum. Their blossoms were as white as the moon straight above, and the vision transfixed me as if the strong perfume were opium. I rode through these overpowering bushes on a trail for perhaps another half hour until I came to a creek. I got off the horse to let her water, inhaling deeply from a handful of crushed flowers I had grabbed from a bush. Holy God, I thought aloud, where am I and do I care? I am simply at this creek at this moment, kneeling and drinking, rinsing my face in the moonlight, my senses as fully alive as any ancient animal’s.
It was then I fell into a deep fit of laughter because the horse, after drinking deeply, had trotted off north on her long way back home. I tried to whistle as she disappeared back into the white-flowering bushes but couldn’t because of my laughter. I lit a match and checked my pocket watch, finding it to be two in the morning. I drank again at the creek in anticipation of my long walk back, which I judged might be a dozen miles, setting off at a dog trot to outpace the clouds of mosquitoes. I felt pleased that I had maintained my legs and wind by hours of daily walking in Chicago, mostly a device of curiosity and to ease my muddy brain which had drawn the conclusion that I had been called to be an artist but not necessarily a very good one.
I walked fairly briskly until the first light came before five and the mosquitoes then subsided a bit with a freshet of cool wind off Lake Superior. Far ahead, a hundred yards or so, I saw a dark movement on the logging trail and stopped, stock-still, with a jump in my heart, my eyes in distant focus on a very large bear sitting in the middle of the trail like an immense black Buddha. The wind was in my favor so she hadn’t scented me. I eased off to the side and sat on a big stump to wait her out. There was a single cub frolicking around her and I knew it was unwise to proceed, to put it in its mildest terms. Now the cub began to nurse and the huge mother flopped on her back, sawing her legs playfully in the air. Several blue jays arrived and then a single raven. The raven saw me and then circled above my stump with a crisp fluff in its wing beats, and a sequence of raucous squawks, perhaps warning the bear of my presence. My eyes turned from the raven back to the bear and she was standing now, testing the air. She whuffed and sped off in the brush with her cub in tow. I waited for another fifteen minutes for safety’s sake before proceeding. Quite suddenly my legs were nearly dead with fatigue, my mouth parched, and my head in a state of throbbing ache. The important thing was that my mind had settled itself and I had been witness to a consoling though utterly impersonal beauty. I had finally understood an idea that I still believe in that art is at the core of our most intimate being and a part of the nature of things as surely as is a tree, a lake, a cloud. When we ignore it, even as spectators, we deaden ourselves in this brief transit. The hand that swung by my side and earlier had plucked the flowers and reined the sorry horse would try its damnedest before falling still as all hands must. It was my nature.
When I reached the deserted lumber camp the Chippewas were asleep in the yard, doubtless having walked to town for a jug or two with my five dollars. The horse peered out from the shadows of a clump of trees and when I waved to her she retreated further into the shadows. On the stoop of the shack there was a half bottle of whiskey and I took a deep slug before continuing on toward the village.
Later, when I told the story to both Davis and Sarah, and my acquaintances among the art students back in Chicago, they were appalled at m
y lack of common sense, but it occurred to me it is largely a matter of birth and disposition. The prairie and the forest on a moonlit night are not threatening to me but Chicago and New York are, with Paris a little less so. In these cities, even among polite company, my skull tightens, and I sweat nervously from the degree of attention required to keep oneself out of a thousand varieties of trouble. My father often railed against “common sense” which he viewed as most often an essentially petty mixture of greed and self-interest, the inanity of the “Onward, Christian Soldiers” attitude that propelled millions of nitwits westward, utterly destroying much of the earth and all of the Native cultures. Of course he was a bit of a madman, but then he was knowledgeable of both the sound agricultural practices and the true Christian virtues that would have made the western movement other than the prolonged tragedy it became. On a much smaller and individual scale there is nothing quite so destructive as an artist acquiring common sense before he has utterly blown up the world of his perceptions and acquired the grace to put it back together again. I’ve read in Harper’s that it’s fashionable nowadays for universities to acquire living painters, poets, and novelists, to teach the young their craft, which will require of them a great deal of common sense while they drown in the deceitful morass of institutions. May the gods of art take pity on them. Art would have thrived better if they had become beggars or common criminals.
Hackleford has called to tell me we have two days of good weather in the offing. I’ve been waiting a number of days to get this Omaha trip over with, preferring to drive the seven hours or so with Lundquist, spend the evening and come back the next morning, but Frieda of late has so submerged herself in the world of television violence that she is too frightened to stay alone. If I am near her more than a split second she begins a tale of mayhem she has lately watched, whether of a fictional nature or on the news. Her preacher, a part-time furniture salesman from Tennessee, has also assured his parishioners that the blacks have fully armed themselves to strike back at their imagined oppressors. She is modestly outraged when I say, “One can scarcely blame them,” but I reassure her by pointing to the old county map that there are very few, if any, blacks within two hundred miles and it is more reasonable to prepare for an attack from the Lakota from the northwest.