by Jim Harrison
Nine years later what had seemed like a heart thumper, with me drenched with sweat running to my apartment, clumsily packing the truck and heading northwest, now has become quite comic. And I doubt I’ll see a green-backed heron this far west, more than a little out of their range. That’s the immediate problem, though a mere overlay to Ralph and the fact that I’m about seventy miles from my actual mother whom I saw walking past while I sat on a park bench on Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica. She was attractive though she wore the loose bulky clothes that many attractive women wear to hide their attractiveness.
What my father was referring to about my ethnic background came about in an odd way. Back in the late sixties I was riding my bicycle around a slummish area of Omaha against parental wishes. I didn’t mean to be contrary but it apparently was part of my nature. A warning against anything made that thing an interesting probability. I was helpless before my impulses at the time. Even J.M. said the other day that my so-called inner and outer child were the same. I said to cut that psychobabble shit out and she got teary. That’s what I mean, she said, you only like nouns. Life can’t just be nouns. Dog, earth, truck, birds, pussy. Am I just a pussy? I’d never thought about it quite this way before and it stopped me cold. That’s what I meant about J.M. being more intelligent in an original way than she thinks she is. I can imagine her husband loathes many of her perceptions.
Anyway, I was riding my bicycle through this semi-slum and I stopped for a Popsicle at a small store and two Native Americans, probably Omahas, were standing out in front laughing at a fire hydrant. I was curious and went over to see what was so funny about this particular fire hydrant. They were ragged and smelled of sweat and my mother’s sherry. One turned to me and said, “Go back to the rez, you little dickhead.” That evening I asked my father what “rez” meant and he said “Indian reservation,” and that possibly meant that one of the men laughing at the fire hydrant thought I was one of them or somehow connected. I should add that this wasn’t a big deal at the time. Two of my classmate friends were also adopted and didn’t make much of it. I was quite dark complected and my two sisters were tow-headed. My parents thought they were sterile when they adopted me but a couple of years later my mother had two daughters in two years which evidently happens sometimes when the parents relax.
The ethnic question came up comically while we were having our habitual Sunday dinner at the Happy Hollow Country Club (actual name!). Rather than our usual table we had to wait for a table right in front of a window because of another of my problems. A few months before while at a Boy Scout spring camp an older boy had given me a painful kick in the ass for not obeying orders and I had thumped on him. Boys are sensitive to age and a seventh grader is not supposed to beat up a ninth grader. A group of older boys got together and captured me after a chase through the woods. My punishment was a faux-Indian custom where they buried me with a supposedly hollow reed in my mouth. The reed wasn’t hollow enough and by the time they dug me up I was bluish and went into convulsions. An ambulance came and I spent three days in the hospital. There was no permanent damage other than claustrophobia, a minor infirmity, and rather boringly one on one with the cause.
So my parents had to greatly enlarge the windows which looked out into our backyard, I had to sit near the door in the classroom, near the window at the country club, and the movies now were out except for a drive-in at the edge of the city which was splendidly tacky. But the Sunday dinner mudbath came about while my parents were gabbing with table-hopping friends and I told my sisters the fire hydrant story as if it were a scary mystery. Lucy, the youngest, shrieked, “That’s why you get a better tan,” and Marianne whispered, “This is just some more of your bullshit.” Lucy prodded my parents who were startled and I had repeat the hydrant story. My parents were quite nervous and I was willing to drop the matter but that wasn’t the inclination of my sisters who, no matter how often they were shushed, were experts at getting in digs. Lucy laughed too loudly, patted her mouth and went woo-woo-woo like a cartoon Indian. My mother reddened and grabbed Lucy’s wrist, then my father spoke very softly which he always did when he wanted our total attention. Yes there was a bit of Indian in my background, maybe a quarter, but that was neither here nor there and he forbade us to talk about it again. Marianne who was a dog lover (she now has seven) said to me, patting my arm, “The very best dogs are mongrels.” My mother ordered a second Bloody Mary in defiance of my father who thought one drink a day was quite enough.
Perhaps I was a blockhead or simply not very sensitive but I didn’t think about it much again until my eighteenth birthday when my father took me for a ride for an hour or so up the Missouri. That’s when he told me about the six hundred a month “the other people” had left for me, oddly worth about half as much now as it was twelve years ago. The money was a sore point to him as if it implied he wasn’t a capable wage earner, or perhaps that there was a string tugging on the legality of his fatherhood, or maybe that his control which was anyway diminishing would disappear. He continued by saying that I had another name if I wished to know it and I think I consoled him a bit by answering that the name I already had was quite enough and since I’d grown up with it I couldn’t imagine ever changing it. My first name, Nelse, was his own father’s name, a man I had cared for deeply, a former game warden and unsuccessful farmer up in Minnesota who had died when I was fourteen.
He parked and we walked down a hill to a small park known as Adelle’s Point after a girl from a prominent Omaha family who had drowned herself there over love back before World War I. (The name meant nothing to me then but certainly did after I did some research last winter.) It was humid and sprinkling and the mosquitoes along the Missouri swarmed in great blurry clouds. Along the banks there was the litter fishermen leave, worm containers and beer bottles, tangled birds’ nests of monofilament, chunks of broken Styrofoam coolers. He said that while he knew I despised our fancy neighborhood, a vast understatement, he hoped that wouldn’t keep me from coming home for a visit. I was too self-sunken at the moment to understand what he was saying: when I was graduating in a month I was leaving forever, first to Absarokee, Montana, for a summer job at the ranch of one of my mother’s cousins, then in the fall to college. The son is leaving and can’t wait to do so. The father understands this rationally but his emotions are a jumble. No more fishing trips, Saturday hikes, no more football or baseball games though the latter two had been out for quite a while. No more helping out with youthful legal blemishes that could be overcome due to political influence in Nebraska: a drunk-driving charge, marijuana possession, assault and battery (I was actually attacked by two servicemen from the Strategic Air Command base but the patriotic judge figured a conviction was less injurious to my record than theirs. All they were trying to do was to drag a doped-up girl I knew into a car outside a disco for a little fun).
We stood by the Missouri swatting at the mosquitoes and talking idly about the fact that mosquitoes never seemed to bother Grandpa who could manage a canoe standing up with a long paddle. Once while we were fishing up in the Quetico Superior area along the Canadian border he told us over the campfire about a Chippewa friend who was a flier. This was from his early game-warden days in the thirties. I was about ten during this fishing trip and was quite disturbed when it occurred to me that the Chippewa flier didn’t use planes but simply flew his body around this wilderness, according to my grandpa who swigged at his pint of Guckenheimer. My father was amused by my discomfort but said “Nonsense” to reassure me that this was a fib. I wasn’t sure while I stood by the Missouri, which in the seventies we had only begun to determine the weight of its filth. Grandpa was filtering off into the haze above the river and we had turned back toward the car when my father said that since I had turned eighteen I had the right to know more about my background. I said, “No thank you” because one set of parents was quite enough at the time and the memory of my grandfather’s marginal life was at that moment quite appealing.
I was wo
ndering if this kind of truth about my life is no longer very interesting because it’s not really the truth, or is the truth of a very limited sort. A girlfriend of mine in college called this monkey brain. She was appealing in an ethereal way and was raised by two bachelor uncles in Minneapolis who were not very appealing. They were preciously ascetic and wouldn’t let me smoke in their house, worked as computer programmers during the day and were mostly involved in Buddhist activities after work. The uncles were bony faced and I suspected she would eventually become so. She took me to the local Zendo and I rather enjoyed sitting on a cushion (they call it a zafu) for nearly an hour in silence. She was pleased over this but I ruined it by saying that as an amateur naturalist I often sat still out in the boondocks a great deal longer. It’s not the same thing, she said, and it probably isn’t though I’m not sure what the difference is. In the natural world you don’t think about anything while you’re sitting there as it prevents you from being attentive to what’s happening. She wouldn’t make love at home but at a cheapish motel near the airport she hooted with an uncanny likeness to a barred owl though she didn’t care for this comparison. We broke up because she wanted me to take a summer group trip with her and other Zen students to Japan, a country poorly suited for a claustrophobic. But then according to her I maintained this phobia because it suited my purposes, which probably it did and still does. I said you don’t cure someone’s fear of snakes by dropping them into a snake pit. She took this as an implication that Japan was a snake pit. She was just coming out of the shower when she said we were all through, giving me a gander at what I’d be missing. But then I rather like the monkey-brain notion to the effect that one part of our brain can’t reliably observe another part. It’s a nice idea except that reliable strikes me as an economic term, something like stand on your own two feet. Who wants to be reliable in this shitstorm? She left behind a pair of blue underpants as a memento, or out of forgetfulness, a perfect dinner napkin. I must add that a permanent memory of our affair came about in an odd way. The bald master of the Zendo in Minneapolis told us during his brief sermon not to try to change reality to suit the self. What a monstrous notion. It still comes up at least once a day along with the vision of her bare bottom when she stood on a chair to fix the venetian blinds in the motel.
Incomprehension can be pretty interesting. Once something can be seen from all sides, figured out, resolved, whether location or idea, it seems to lose its juice for me. Of course I frequently discover I’ve been shortsighted and have to go back for another examination. For instance I had some difficulty in the northern forests of Minnesota with my grandpa after being buried in the scouts (I can still smell that earth packed in my nose). I began to dread the closeness of the forest while I followed him and my father to our brook-trout creeks and beaver ponds. But the creeks and ponds themselves broke up the density of the woods and I would breathe more deeply and my nervous sweat would dry. This was only a tentative solution and I stayed away from northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan for a full decade until I had an absurd dream that I should walk the edges of the forests and either natural clearings or plains or abandoned farm areas. So I did, being without other instructions from the gods, like, get a good job.
Ralph’s collar has a brass tag with my mother’s Omaha phone number. Why has no one called? Does this mean he’s been carted off to Sonora, destroyed by a dog catcher, is with a family with no phone or conscience, is with a family who loves him, or is plain dead in a weedy ditch? Ralph’s name is less a hoax than our own because there’s no real attachment. You could teach him his name was Bob in a day or so with proper treats. His favorites are beef jerky, fried fish skin and, for inscrutable reasons, marshmallows for which he will spin in a circle.
* * *
It’s evening on the Niobrara and I’ve caught a rainbow trout to go with my rice and beans. I saw two kingfishers today on a mile hike and will be ready for a full day’s outing at dawn. You can get quite a mental jolt from the recovery of even a short illness. I missed discovering the location of the kingfisher’s nest in a hole in a claybank because of two questions J.M. had asked during a rest in the Garland woodlot. Did I still feel lucky that I met her during a nervous breakdown, hence available? Yes I did, but then I looked at her closely. Was I so obtuse that I didn’t realize she was having a nervous breakdown?
The second question which quickly followed the first was whether I ever got tired of being so peculiar. I wanted to reply, “No, Mom,” but sensed she was coming from a different slant than my mother so I said that I had spent a lot of time being reasonably invisible, or not sticking out like a sore thumb, a mediocre idiom, so that not that many people noticed that I was peculiar. I bet I’m not your first affair so someone sure as hell noticed, she said. I pondered this and said that she lived in an academic community which is obsessive about scrutiny. Why don’t you write down a hundred of your peculiarities and I’ll decide for myself from a simple farm girl’s perspective, she said. A farm girl who was thrilled when I bought her the collected Octavio Paz, I said. She tweaked my balls for vengeance, then said that when she was a girl both pig nuts and bull nuts struck her as the silliest things in creation. Later on, she said, I added men’s nuts though you’re only my third set. It was neither here nor there if I believed her but I had to defend nuts though they are visually pathetic. A cunt is not exactly the Mona Lisa, I quipped lamely. But it is if you think about it, she replied so seriously that my brain spun. She stood up then, a child’s-eye view of a naked aunt or mother, not bad at all. She shook a finger at me like a schoolmarm and demanded five peculiarities, if not a hundred, which she admitted might be giving too much of my heart to a virtual stranger.
I looked in my mind for something harmless with her sitting down on my lap facing me, and pretended that I was revealing dire secrets. Since I was nine, I said, and an erstwhile member of Junior Audubon I’ve worn greenish clothes in summer, brown and dark yellow in the fall, black and white in the winter, pale green and light brown in spring. She whistled at this one and I explained that our leader, Miss Fetzer, was my first love, albeit rather homely, totally ordinary at nineteen but owning a luscious body. I would not dream of obeying my parents at the time but Miss Fetzer said these colors would help us blend into the natural settings. I told my mother this and since she loved to shop it was quickly accomplished. I still stick to the same regimen depending, of course, on where I am in North America (or Central).
“What happened to Miss Fetzer?” J.M. rearranged herself on my lap, feeling my arousal.
“Who knows?” I said, in that I didn’t want to admit that I had tracked Miss Fetzer down to Wyoming where she was married to a game biologist for the Park Service. I was twenty-four at the time and cracking up, though that’s an inadequate excuse but an adequate explanation. She was happily married and had eight-year-old twin boys. It took a week to seduce her after which she sucker-punched me in the nose, then left the motel room in Jackson Hole to get ice to help stop the bleeding. I still think of this as one of the more shameful items in my life because it plainly is.
“I tend to count the birds I see during a day and jot down the meaningless number before I sleep.”
“That’s no big deal. You’re getting away with an easy one.”
“I walked thirty hours in a row including a bright, cold moonlit night near Canyon de Chelly when I fully comprehended my father was dead and I wouldn’t see him again. It was a long walk.”
She felt my legs as if to check if this were possible, noting that the mention of death had an immediate wilting effect on my dick. We looked down at this peculiar organ and I rushed on.
“When I was twelve, that was in 1970 I think, I was leafing through my mother’s Vogue for the underwear ads, which had a great effect on my pecker, and after I relieved myself I read an article by a writer named Bruce Chatwin on nomads. Parents are always so worried about the effect of pornography on their children that they forget the other stuff. Well, I read this article a d
ozen times with the help of the dictionary and Britannica. Much of it was fairly easy like, The best thing is to walk, or Drugs are vehicles for people who have forgotten how to walk. I didn’t always obey the last one but it was a good reminder.
“What’s peculiar about reading an article?”
I was irked enough that I began to wilt again. My heart actually beat faster as I explained that after reading the article I had discovered my mission in life which, simply enough, was to be a nomad. Chatwin even referred to children which struck home to me and I was able to quote a whole paragraph, not that hard when you’ve read something dozens of times when young. Think of the feeble-minded “be good” poems we had to memorize, the prayers, the banal songs, even the Pledge of Allegiance. “Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on the earth in which they live, as a navigator takes bearings on familiar landmarks. If we excavate the memories of childhood, we remember the paths first, things and people second—paths down the garden, the way to school, the way round the house, corridors through the bracken or long grass. Tracking the paths of animals was the first and most important element in the education of early man.”
She became opaque as if carried away by the quote into a location invisible to me. She sighed and leaned back so far that we became disconnected but she seemed not to notice, and then she spoke. “I know what he means. The path around the back of the barn to where cow bones were. The path to the apple trees. The path to the vegetable garden. The path in the woodlot to the secret place I had with the neighbor girl. My dad who is pretty much a dipshit told me when I was a kid that if I was lost just follow a path. Well I got lost at a family reunion on a farm up near the river getting away from my boy cousins who were wagging their dinks at me and a girl cousin who just laughed. I ran for it and followed a path like my dad said but the path just led to the river. I was pissed off at both the river and my dad.”