The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  After hearing this I wondered at my ability to ignore the dimensions of other humans. It was only the barest beginning that she was an attractive female, that I saw her flexed butt in splits and my skull popped. Now what did I have here beside me? I picked a mosquito off her breast leaving a tiny blood smear. I resisted the pointless urge to locate us anthropologically drifting backward in time to mating primates. Licking faces and rumps. A shaft of sunlight grazing her shoulder. Her full lips open and the consensual sounds of language through teeth good at both bones and vegetables. A Cooper’s hawk shot by a hundred yards behind her left shoulder.

  “Is that four or five? I could use one more before we go,” she said, glancing at her watch, her only adornment.

  “Twice a year I stop at a big urban library and read the Sunday edition of the New York Times to see what the world thinks is happening to itself.”

  “Oh bullshit. You know very well that’s not enough.”

  “It probably is. Didn’t you do current events in school? It was repetitious.”

  “I don’t want you to end with something that lame.” Her fanny made a circular grinding movement and the whole business of talk had become a little abstract. I reached for her and she pushed back. “One more. But nothing dirty. I want something to think about tonight while I’m dancing. There’s a convention of grain-elevator owners in town and I want to ignore their big, beaming faces.”

  “After my sophomore year I took a summer course in wetlands botany which turned out to be six weeks in a vast swamp helping a Ph.D. candidate collect plant specimens. It was at the Seney Wildlife Refuge on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Before we left I imagined the locale to be rolling hills with both hardwoods and pines broken by idyllic tamarack marshes. Instead, it was bug hell with about seventy of the hundred thousand acres mostly covered with water and mosquitoes and black flies blurring the air. We heard a wolf one night and our leader said it wasn’t supposed to be there according to his information. We also saw a moose and he said the same thing. He was strictly a plant guy and rarely looked up from the ground. The local rangers of the refuge didn’t care for him which pretty much cut us off from contact with others. There were eight of us counting the teacher and we were his Linnaean slaves. It had none of the grace of an archeological dig which, according to my major, was where I belonged but then the only one available to me was in Arkansas and I didn’t want to go south in the summer. The following year I was on the Norden dig on the Niobrara, an archeological survey because the government was thinking of building a dam and it was totally wonderful. Anyway, the bugs were obnoxious and sometimes I’d just lay down in the water to avoid them, and the leader would say, ‘Get serious or you’ll flunk.’ I made a call to my sister and had her mail a couple of Niobrara plants that I slipped in with my specimens to fuck up this creep. He sat there under a Coleman lamp in a state of confusion, glancing at me suspiciously. Of the seven students only two were girls, lumpish botany majors who seemed fond of each other. However these junior lesbians were wittier and more fun than the others and we formed our own little group. They both advised against my plan when I showed them my material, a dozen peyote buttons, small dried hallucinogenic cacti a friend from Albuquerque had wangled for me. As was my habit I slept outside a good hundred yards from the others who quartered in a nasty Quonset hut. The stars are the most soothing objects for the claustrophobe. Anyway, an hour before dawn I restarted my small campfire and gobbled up the peyote buttons, all of them which was a foolhardy dose, also nauseating. At daylight my voyage into the nonrational began and I still had the wit to put a few miles between myself and the others. I was actually eleven miles away when they found me just before dark.”

  I stopped then and watched J.M. draw on her undies and glance at her watch.

  “Hurry up. What happened anyway? I never tripped so how would I know?” Something had made her irritable.

  “Nothing much happened. I wandered around all day, in and out of the water. I ate some water weeds and vomited. I became a turtle for several hours at least. I got fairly close to a group of otters that were driving suckers into a reed bed and gobbling them down with choking sounds. I chewed on a piece of sucker left behind and three of them stared at me questioningly. Later I talked to a big fat bear out on a slender peninsula of a deeper lake. He was probably just trying to get back past me but I gurgled and babbled so that after he walked by he paused and listened carefully for a minute. I saw all animals and birds holographically, I mean all sides of them at once even from the top. I had had the experience before but never this intensely. It started after I had two concussions playing football in my sophomore year in high school. When a ranger found me I was just coming down from being a sandhill crane.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, that’s peculiar.” She French-kissed me and quickly finished dressing.

  “Why were you pissed a minute ago?”

  “I was jealous that you had enough money to go wandering around the country while I’m stuck in marriage and showing my butt to morons.”

  “Seven grand a year isn’t much money. I bet you pay that much for your apartment in a year.”

  “Oh fuck you,” she said, then blushed. “I can tell there’s money somewhere in there. It’s in your speech, your manners. Your hiking boots.”

  “I haven’t taken any money from my family for nine years. I sleep outside and mostly cook for myself. If it’s raining I sleep in the back of the truck. Why fault me for my birth? I was a foundling, a bastard who was adopted because two teenagers fucked. Why blame anyone for their parents? I’ve got two whole names and so do you. You want to get married?” That left me sucking wind as I had never said such a thing before.

  “I don’t want to get married. I’m already married. I’m just being a pissed-off kid. Why did I get married at nineteen? Maybe I’m a dumb shit and I have to accept that.”

  Dawn. A yellow day. I’m off as soon as I can see to walk. I forgot to tell J.M. about the marsh marigolds and swamp irises when I was weaving and floundering on peyote seeing the backside of the moon behind me in the first hour so that I was frightened and had to douse myself. When I came up from under the water a loon cried. Hard to tell her if she won’t see me again. Who wants their life blown up? Not her. Keeps me from a seventy-mile trip to see the woman who conceived me, evidently at fifteen or so my mother said this spring.

  I saw the kingfisher enter the hole below a sod overhang with protruding roots. An hour later she emerged during which time I entered my dreaded fugal state and a few tears fell. It was only the second time that year, the first while camped under a full moon down on the Seri coast of the Sea of Cortez near Desemboque. Sat up on a mountainside on a crunching shell midden and stared at the moonlight glimmering off the windy and rumpled water of the strait, and off the mountainous island of Tiburon itself. Eiseley came up again, saying, “At night one must sustain reality without help.” But now my brain was welcome to wheel as convulsively as it wished because I wasn’t leaving the thicket from which I could see the kingfisher emerge, if ever. This life is perhaps coming to an end. My brain began to clock the prospectors I’d met in the outback of the West in my search for a niche, the perfect lair, a peerless thicket, an ultimate hideout, so childish as I had lived my life so no one would look, trying to make up the soul’s habitat as I go.

  I glanced backward and saw a rare daylight badger well upwind and then he, she, hit my track and vamoosed down a gully in a blur. It sometimes is discouraging to be the eternal enemy. Speeding up with marsh wren’s song from the sloughs off the flat of cattails. In a blowout on the hill across the river I glass reddish penstemon. My mother in the backyard kept saying, “What kind of bird is that?” but she couldn’t remember a single one save the robin. “I guess that’s my bird,” she said. My sisters fled upstairs when she came home crying from the shrink. Willa who worked for us, a Latvian woman with thin chest and a huge butt, went into the pantry and closed the door. Why are you crying, I asked, curious rather than sy
mpathetic. I think I was eleven and was eating a jar of strawberry jam. She said my doctor said I must quit drinking forever. Her mind doctor. I patted her sobbing back, jam on my Peterson opened to wrens. I kept a Polaroid photo of a naked girl on the brown thrasher page. The night before, sleeping as always in the backyard even before my suffocation, the stars sucked me up into the sky. Dad put his foot down when he woke me for school one morning and there was snow on my sleeping bag. So angry in his tight, white-pursed-lip way. She kept crying and I went into the pantry, where Willa just stood there, and poured a glass of vodka. I gave it to Mother and said, “Tell him to mind his own goddamned business.” She really sobbed then and poured the vodka in the sink with me beside her, fumes rising into my nose. Whew. Isn’t drinking better than crying, I asked. But I do both, she said.

  The avocet again. Jesus I’ve become lousy at this and sometimes I cheat a little. I should quit. I asked my boss if I could do Northridge’s and he said that quadrant is out for years to come. I said please make the inquiry for me anyway because I’m curious and he said okay but it’s on your dime. I did an aerial reconnaissance with an osteopath named Hackshaw, of all odd names, who lives in Grand Island. I knew him in college and he thinks I’m enviously worthless. The owner’s name is Naomi. She’s my grandmother but won’t know it. She teaches at a country school.

  What I meant about prospectors is that they have the disease of secrets and I’m too much like that, or becoming so. They’re alone so much as the nonromantic heroes of minerals they lose their peripheries and become self-babblers. I remember clearly having a beer with one in Fallon, Nevada, in a tavern where there were fados on the jukebox because the owner was second-generation Portuguese. To the somewhat wrenching love-and-death music I listened to a geezer named Mike talk about his secret mines that were going to pay off big. I ruined it a tad by asking him what he was going to do with all of the money. He said he was going to buy a big ship and pilot it through the Panama Canal where he had been stationed in the army from 1947 to 1949. Then he resumed his jawing about his hidden gold, sluices, screens, and the fact that they don’t make shovels like the hundred-year-old Ames shovel he used to own. The bar owner sat down with us and teased Mike about his odor which resembled oily rags, then I bought Mike lunch which moistened his eyes and made me embarrassed. He implied that life was all in the digging. The owner played a truly remarkable Portuguese song called a saudade and the voice of the singer, Cesara Ivora, was that of a vibrant ghost. At my insistence we listened to the song three times so I could commit the music to memory. Saudade means homesickness for a place, a woman, an experience that can’t be returned to. Perhaps more.

  The kingfisher emerged. Victory in our time. Christmas on earth (some poet said). I hiked on upstream making a slight jump for a bull snake which has the coloration of a crotalid but is not poisonous. I’ve heard that like king snakes bull snakes kill rattlers but am not sure. I walk and walk, a round-trip of eleven hours, fording the river in order to come back on the other side. Three kingfishers and nary a green-backed heron though a single black-crowned night heron and a bittern in which you see the remote connection between bird and snake, almost as much as the profligate-shaped anhinga in the South, certainly a winged reptile. Jesus, almost back to camp, and there’s a sora, plus a rare ferruginous hawk. In the last hour or so before dark a few rain clouds and a light sprinkle enliven snipe, a dickcissel, a redstart. Sitting still I see more but that’s a compromise to checking out varied habitat. Sardines and rice are penance. I’m getting the fuck out of here though it’s gorgeous. I’ll call J.M. and tell her she owes me five peculiarities and that I’ll keep a weather eye out for passing mailmen. Call mother and see if there’s word about Ralph. My sisters don’t call often to avoid instructions but she has forever dropped that with me. I’ll say to J.M., let’s run away and ruin your life as my own is impervious to any definition of ruin. You can’t hit a moving target and no one is aiming. I began packing up in the dark for early departure, hoping that the stars wouldn’t draw me upward, as they often did for an involuntary flying expedition. My occasional sanity problems are harmless but that wasn’t always so. I dream too vividly of the Omaha Indians well north of the city. I don’t even like to tell a piece of paper about them.

  I hiked out double-time starting at dawn, glad to be back within my body unlike on the trip in. Near a small alkaline lake I saw a huge flock of crows and made a brief detour to determine the nature of their gathering. No clue. Near a playa south of Wilcox, Arizona, there were thousands feeding on emerging salt-tolerant worms. Give me the Corvidae: ravens, crows, magpies, jays, opportunistic scavengers, whom I feel akin to as a mongrel. Look it all over and take what it gives you assuming you maintain the wit to recognize a gift.

  I made the ranch in a couple of hours and the old gent had his help cook me breakfast. Steak and eggs and potatoes and a cold beer. He sat in his wheelchair with an afghan around him despite the warm morning. We chatted about his ranch, the birds, the Niobrara. He mentioned again that I reminded him of an old friend who died in the late fifties that he used to bird hunt with, then wondered if I’d like a few months’ work come fall, the upshot being that he had trouble with poachers and trespassers. His regular hands were busy then with fall round-up. It wasn’t so much that the outsiders shot up the game but that they had cut fences a few times and tore up some fragile pasture with their ORVs.

  “You look tough enough,” he said with a twinkle.

  “Maybe at one time but I retired from it.” I went ahead and told him about it when he raised his eyes questioningly. I had been camped over near Devils Tower in northeast Wyoming two years ago and returning to my site after a hike I discovered three natty rock climbers drinking up all my water supply. Two of them were embarrassed but the largest one merely said, “Tough shit.” I was getting the best of him when one of the others hit me over the head with his walking stick and the big one booted me in the groin when I was down. That was enough for me. I didn’t tell the old rancher that the head whack had more than rattled my composure and that between swollen nuts and jumbled lobes it took a while to recover.

  “You just let it go? I doubt that,” he prodded.

  I looked at him closely, then figured he was a safe bet. “The next evening someone, possibly a Native American, built a campfire under the gas tank of their Volvo station wagon while they were singing folk songs with some ladies at another camp.”

  “Sounds fair to me,” he said, trembling with laughter. By then I was looking at a curious landscape on the wall, an oil of bluish gray sky and prairie, half and half. It was rather eerie in its simplicity. He said he didn’t care for art in general but the locale was a place he used to bird hunt with the friend who had done the painting. Then he said he needed a nap and I was free to use his phone and please stop by whenever I wished. He began to wheel off, then swiveled and asked if I needed money. I said, “No, sir. Thank you.” He tipped his imaginary Stetson and left.

  I had an immediate head-snapper while dialing the wall phone. I could see through the partially open door of the den and there above a littered roll-top desk was a photo of the ranch owner and “J. W. Northridge” with their English setters beside a Model A Ford raising whiskey pints and a brace of sharp-tailed grouse. Relative indeed. He didn’t look so kindly, this man who helped raise the sixteen-year-old who released me into this life. Nowadays it wouldn’t have happened at all, I thought, dialing my Omaha mother who sounded sprightly, a morning phenomenon. It was a bit much added to the photo but there was a note with a Green Valley return address saying that they had found the dog I had “abandoned” and had given him a nice home a month ago. Ralph’s name was now “Sweetie” and he was accompanying them to their summer home near Port Townsend, Washington, until November. It had lately occurred to them that maybe the dog hadn’t been abandoned because some people down the street in Green Valley, a retirement colony, were also from Omaha and told them the address on Ralph’s collar was “well heeled.” M
y mother thought this term antique and funny. She also said that the note’s handwriting was “squiggly” as if written by a palsied old hand. I told her I’d get the address later as I had had some minor difficulties in the state of Washington and couldn’t very well roam the Port Townsend area. Attentive cops notice roamers. Ralph a.k.a. Sweetie would have to wait for November though I was delighted he was alive. Last year I had taken up with a pleasant though neurotic woman in Seattle for a few days. She had a bunch of fine paintings in an otherwise modest apartment and I was simpleminded enough to drop one off outside of Bozeman, Montana, for her at one of those immense, absurd log cabins they’re building in the West these days. When she was arrested and made bail she was polite enough to write a warning note that they had been tracking her for months and I could possibly be implicated for the delivery of stolen goods. She was a desperately paranoid pot smoker and I wasn’t, but however unlikely the possibility of arrest I certainly wasn’t going to tempt it.

  I then called J.M.’s number in Lincoln but got her ogre of a husband.

  “This is Vernon Schultz. Regional Director of the 4-H. You know, Head, Heart, Hands and Health.”

  “We’re having lunch,” he said after a pause.

  “I trust it’s Nebraska beef. Could you put on the little woman? We used to call her Miss Blue Ribbon.”