The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  I only made it as far as Broken Bow that evening. I was so preoccupied by J.M. that I forgot to eat until it was too late, curling up in my sleeping bag in an alfalfa field while there was still a trace of light in the west. I disturbed what had to be the second nesting of a meadowlark but she finally calmed down, approaching my head quite closely out of curiosity in the gathering dark.

  At first light I was as hungry as I had ever been, plus soaked and shivering with dew, my protective tarp still in the truck. This stupidity made me feel generally raw and I was quite blind to the beauty of the morning, forgetting to inspect the windbreak for the owl I had heard throughout the night, doubtless a barn owl because of its wheezy cry.

  A very large farmer stared at me from the window of a diner as I pulled up. When I entered he said I owed him a cup of coffee as rent for the square yard of his alfalfa I had slept upon. I nodded in agreement and sat with him for breakfast when he gestured me over. I told him I had been sleepy and if I had rolled the truck and it had caught fire I would have helped spread the noxious weed, leafy spurge, that I had seen in his ditch. He laughed at that, then we ate in silence as he listened to the dawn farm and stock report with the habitual melancholy of farmers listening to prices.

  I reached my assigned location, a very large ranch up north of Bassett, by midmorning. I was shown into a den by a middle-aged woman whom I took to be the wife of a hired hand. The owner was an old gent in a wheelchair who immediately said I bore a resemblance to a long-dead friend of his. This made me a tad uncomfortable as I knew the girl who bore me had been raised within seventy miles of this ranch. I was startled to hear that the owner was ninety-one but then the Sandhills area is renowned for the longevity of its inhabitants. His voice was bell clear and he was amused and curious about the project. He resisted having government people on his property but something as benign as counting birds appealed to him. I thought of explaining that I wasn’t actually an ornithologist, a profession as territorial as the species they study, but realized this would be a moot point to him. He said that one of his few regrets was that eighty years ago he had shot a golden eagle but that a half-breed Ponca cowboy had been joyous to accept the feathered carcass. He added that Poncas were more reliable cowboys than Sioux or Pawnee, but not nearly the horsemen that the Sioux were. It occurred to me that history was collapsing into the form of an old man who had been born a few years after Wounded Knee and had served in World War I. By contemporary standards he was wealthy with the ranch totaling close to a hundred thousand acres but there were few signs of it except an expensive telescope on the open front porch. He liked to look at the stars which had frightened him as a child for reasons he didn’t explain. He offered the loan of a horse when I showed him the location I was aiming at on a topographical map. The closest two-track was a couple of miles away and the rangeland’s underpinnings of sand were too fragile for my pick-up. I said I’d hoof it, not wanting to look after a horse. When we said good-bye he asked for a report on the numbers of the birds I was looking for on an eleven-mile stretch of the Niobrara, which were kingfishers, American bitterns and green-backed herons.

  While I was gathering my gear a youngish cowboy you wouldn’t want to jump in the ring with approached and tried to tease me about birds but then I said birds were real attractive compared to staring at a cow’s ass all day. Any wimping out encourages the bully in such people so you have to draw a line. Rather than being pissed he agreed and marked out a spring on my topo and what he thought might be the best camping spot. He described his favorite bird, fluttering his arms to show the way it landed on a fence post. I figured it to be an upland plover, and then he asked how many kinds of birds there were on earth and when I told him he said, “Holy moley, don’t that beat all hell.”

  On the fairly rough hike in I felt a little wobbly but still suspected nothing. My perceptions were slightly askew so when I came upon a yellow-headed blackbird it didn’t look quite right and I paused to think it over beside a small slough. The bird was fine and maybe my mind wasn’t. An otherwise dense early college roommate used to prate that “reality is mankind’s greatest illusion,” something he cribbed from a psych professor who got it from Erik Erikson. This bird looked newly minted in the dullish and cloudy afternoon light and there was the additional illusion that I could see it holographically, that all sides of the bird were simultaneously visible, a not infrequent experience earlier in my life due to a cognitive disorder (usual inane football injury).

  I had also botched up the fairly short hike, about five miles or so, by being inattentive to my topo, scrambling up an escarpment when there was an easier way around. In the rumply West a compass is deceptive without a topo map and ignoring the latter often means you bust your ass when a lower route would be simple. I was also thinking of J.M. enough that I was a little inattentive, though just on the edge of my consciousness I knew I was in first-rate western diamond-back habitat. A scant moment later I heard a staccato whir from a rock jumble and leapt sideways despite my heavy pack. It was a big sucker and without the leap my left leg would have been in range. I stood there admiring his irritability—some are relatively passive—then moved on.

  I made camp about five and promptly fell asleep for several hours which told me I was becoming ill. I usually make a wide circle to study my location, noting its peculiarities, its geology and flora, the possible fauna, but this time I flopped on a bench formation on the hillside, stared down at the green and turbulent Niobrara for a few minutes and fell asleep with distorted dreams of a haggard J.M. and my adoptive mother making martinis from a gallon of discolored vodka.

  It was nearly dark when I built a fire and fried myself a bacon and onion sandwich, adding a handful of peppery watercress I’d plucked from the cowboy’s spring, but was only able to eat a few bites. I added a few green boughs for a smudge fire to discourage the overwhelming mosquitoes, cursing my ineptness for not camping well up the hill. Now, to be frank, I felt like fresh dogshit and the sight of thunderclouds in the west meant that I should set up my small tent when I much preferred sleeping in the wide open due to acute claustrophobia. More on that later, if ever; phobias are pathetically explicable but still hard to cure.

  In the smoky firelight I almost regretted my impulse to see J.M., partly because my dick was so raw I couldn’t sleep on my stomach, my accustomed position, and in part because I could feel my rising fever, my aching skin and joints. It was as good a place as any to have flu, the usual Nebraska euphemism. The sound of the river far below me became dizzying and my mind made colors of the surge of the water through riffles, the subsiding in eddies, the regathering of force as the river narrowed going into a bend.

  Around midnight I checked my temperature which was just short of a hundred and three and the tent had become suffocating with sweat stinging my eyes. I crawled out and stood under a quarter moon with a whippoorwill’s music coming from downstream. Not even Mozart could do that, the loon either. The last thundercloud was disappearing east and I was burning up and half enjoying it. Like my singular, youthful peyote trip it wasn’t something you would bother futilely resisting. Then there were two coyotes and the whippoorwill again. They are intrigued and often respond to each other. Now my scalp ached more than my dick and I told the mosquitoes gathered on my skin to enjoy themselves. Only the soles of my feet felt good in the cool dew on the grass.

  It was then that I lay down naked on the grass facing east. The cold grass was delicious on my hot back and I studied the constellations which were luridly brilliant this far from any ambient light. The stars were glossy, and the Milky Way was a milky broad belt across the sky. For the first time, no doubt due to my enfevered state, I felt palpably that I was moving rather than the stars, not the less startling for being true. Time closed down shop. It went away. I felt the earth moving ever so gently beneath my spine. There was a specific vertigo but I couldn’t very well stop the earth from moving, could I?

  The next day was negatively memorable. I couldn’t keep wate
r down for long, much less food. The breeze clocked down to the southwest and it became very warm and muggy. I was forced into my tent to get out of the sun but I left the flaps wide open to avoid any sense of confinement. Among my sparse collection of heroes is Loren Eiseley and he said, “At night one must sustain reality without help.” This can also be true of noon, I thought. I kept recalling a minor spate of food poisoning I had while camped south of Deming, New Mexico. I’m rarely ever ill and Ralph had been extremely upset to the point that he had nosed into my sleeping bag in the middle of the night when I was cold and shivering from dehydration though well short, as now, of wanting the company of my mother.

  In my fever I couldn’t quite glue the several weeks together since Ralph’s disappearance. Now I shed tears, conscious of delaying just as I had with my father five years before. He died at his desk from an aneurysm in Omaha and I dutifully came home for a couple of weeks from the east end of Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. I returned to my lair, as I call a number of places, and it was a full month after his death before its import struck me and I was able to roll around in the dirt and weep.

  Ralph’s absence began to overwhelm me there in the hot tent, partly because so often in the past I had set up the selfsame tent to shade him from the sun, his dark coat too absorbent of the heat. He was a marvelous coward and on hikes would bark, then scoot around behind me at any sign of danger, real or imagined. Several times on especially long hikes he’d balk and lay down and I’d have to carry his fifty-pound weight over my shoulder. I knew the odds were against it but if the truck thief had released him and he had been taken in by someone he could possibly be quite happy as long as he was fed by three in the afternoon. He wouldn’t tolerate waiting past three for his grub. This loneliness for my dog welled up in my throat along with the half gallon of water I had just drunk. Tears and vomit. What could be added but blood? The memory of a lost dog was so clear and strong compared to a lost mother whom had been idly imagined dozens of times. Our dreams seem able to invent new people but it was no more than that.

  I wandered clumsily down the steep hill to the river, sliding once on my ass a dozen feet, the fevered state making a joke of my coordination. I slipped into a coolish eddy grabbing a protruding tree root for security. It was sobering enough to let me notice a kingfisher flying downstream not all that far above my head. He landed on a branch and chattered at my intrusion. I pulled myself out of the river and crawled and scrambled back up to the tent. Before I slept it occurred to me I was at the end of a line, the nature of which I wasn’t quite sure.

  I awoke a bit after four A.M., an hour or so before first light, having slept nearly fifteen hours. I thought I heard Ralph bark but it was the yip of a coyote across the Niobrara. My stomach felt peeled but the nausea had passed and I wondered idly what I could have to eat that was harmless. There was a slight breeze from the west but enough to drive away the mosquitoes as I built a campfire. I glanced off at the setting moon and wished that J.M. were there with me, then tried to accept the fact that it was an unlikely idea. When the coals were right I cooked up rice and tea, thinking my gut wasn’t quite ready for coffee, and dozed again. Now the coyotes across the river were in full chase and the yips had become a chorus, something I normally would have noted in my journal. I wondered when the disappointment would arrive over my missing journals but then doubted it would happen. I recalled that the last entry was campsite number 403 south of Ajo, Arizona, where I had somewhat shamefully followed my mother, then thought better of it when she turned back west on a two-track into the Cabeza Prieta. Up until that point I had convinced myself that I was simply overseeing her drive home from Santa Monica to Nebraska in her somewhat battered Subaru, an eccentric vehicle for someone who came from a moneyed background. It occurred to me well before I gave up the chase that her old car was a pleasant character point.

  While drinking my tea and eating the rice I looked down the hill and saw a long-billed avocet wading on a reedy shallow flat in the first fuzzy light of dawn with mist curling around its spindly legs. I reached involuntarily for a missing journal and laughed for the first time in days. Our names are hoaxes! Agreed-upon sounds. That’s it. Christian names, Muslim names, Buddhist names. I imagined my boxes of journals along a Sonoran roadside where they had been tossed having been thought worthless. No emotions arose. They represented an irrational human phenology: arrivals, departures, latitudes, longitudes, place names, fauna, flora, weather, an endless stream of thoughts wandering over the locations of nine years and questions about books being read, snippets of overheard conversations, descriptions of people met, the occasional woman bedded, infatuations, supposed wisdom, discarded ideas, word sketches of landscapes, clumsy geologies (never cared for the science), musings about my private and somewhat incoherent religion.

  But it was my name itself that caused the sore belly laugh in the mental clarity of dehydration and an enforced two-day fast, a kind of trip in its own right. And after some snooping and research I found myself with two complete names which are worth exactly any slip of paper they might be written on. The long-dead patriarch of one family, dying, in fact, a few months or so after my birth, insists on giving me a legal name even though I, as a one-day-old infant, was passed on to an adoptive mother. My parents, properly enough, gave me their own invention, but this is neither here nor there within the absurdity of names.

  Inside each journal cover in the upper left-hand corner is my name and my mother’s phone number in Omaha. The whole idea of the journal came from my father one April when I finally and totally quit the university as a senior. There was a small item of violence, or so they called it. I tipped over a professor’s desk, hopefully on him, but he pushed his chair back in the nick of time. A paperweight supposedly worth one thousand dollars was shattered and I spent the night in the Lincoln jail having modestly resisted the arresting officers. My father and a junior member of the Omaha law firm of which he was a senior partner came over in the morning. The young lawyer was a mouthy hotshot while my father only dealt with corporate law. For my senior paper in anthropology I had surveyed coyote stories among Nebraska natives, especially the Ponca, the Pawnee and the Omahas; several of the latter I had known since I had been drummed out of the Boy Scouts at age thirteen when I had brought a rather drunk Omaha to a troop meeting. My adviser, a melancholy young assistant professor who soon thereafter went back to his own father’s auto dealership in Texas, had told me that I’d get in trouble for doing something so unscientific as talking to actual Natives when there was ample research material available written by qualified people. To make a dreary story short, a senior professor insisted that I do the paper over or he’d flunk it. He actually sneeringly called me a romantic humanist. I lamely said that I was a mixed-blood Lakota (really only about thirty percent which means next to nothing), a fact I had insisted on discovering at age eighteen to the dismay of my adoptive parents. The professor was one of those pathetic souls whose life was devoted to trying to establish anthropology as a true science, perhaps out of jealousy for the grant money available to archeologists, or the purer sciences. He said that my genes had nothing to do with it and neither was the obvious emotion I was betraying. Since I had had straight A’s in anthropology and wished to go on to graduate school it was time I learned scientific discipline which hadn’t been sullied by emotion. For some reason it was the sullied that lit the fire and I found myself tipping over the desk. He shrieked you little fool but I wasn’t so little or I wouldn’t have been able to tip over the ponderous desk with its stacks of books, papers and mementos. Naturally he pressed charges and said I also threatened to pitch him out the window which I may have said but didn’t recall.

  To be frank, it was quite a mess, but a suitable end to an academic career that had been already disintegrating. Only a week before the event a Ph.D. candidate had seen me reading Loren Eiseley in the front corner of the Zoo Bar and made a lame joke about my hero being a romantic humanist. It was evidently the curse of the season and I
had also been too direct on that occasion. Probably the word had gotten around that I needed a comeuppance. It all seems pathetically comic in retrospect. The senior professor wasn’t mentally ready for a sharp young Omaha lawyer at a private hearing before a judge. He was accused of racism, ethnic slurs, academic fascism and whatever. I got off by paying for the antique paperweight.

  But not with my father who was terribly embarrassed both by my behavior and that of the young lawyer. On the way out of the courthouse he apologized to the professor who had gone from the apoplectic to the merely flustered and sad. I watched them out of earshot and my father’s decorum angered me because I still felt I was the wronged party. The young lawyer was nervous because he thought he might have gone too far in his zeal to win for the son of one of his bosses. And he certainly had, according to my father.

  At lunch, to which the young lawyer wasn’t invited, I tried to sink in the hard chair in shit-heel shame when he reminded me that when I had been filled in on my ethnic background a bit at age twelve, more fully at age eighteen and without the names of course, it was to be the final discussion of the matter, and certainly not to be used as a weapon against a “smug old fool but a learned man.” Tipping over a desk was more disgusting than anything the professor had done to me, or so my father thought. I countered with the question of whether when someone is unfairly breaking your balls should you just go ahead and let them? We didn’t make it through the impasse and maybe we never did. The lunch ended with “Now what are you going to do with your life?” He had liked the idea of graduate school as it ran soothingly counter to the various scrapes I had been involved in. I said I didn’t know but would try to find out. He asked if I’d come home so we could talk it over at length and I said no. This hurt his feelings but I sensed waves of claustrophobia coming at me from every direction in the restaurant, actually a club for Lincoln’s high and mighty, and I needed to get out of there. Of course I understood his disappointment with my blowing the whole thing up when I was ninety-five percent done with the work toward my degree. I stood up abruptly, we shook hands and I was out the door with no protest from him because he could see I was on the verge of a phobic attack. I didn’t see him until seven months later at Christmas. I hit the road, free, pretty much white and twenty-one.