by Jim Harrison
It was a minute before J.M. came on the phone and I felt a touch of hyperventilation. She was quick when she caught my voice, saying, “Sorry I can’t see you and the gang, Vernon. I’ve got to work the next two nights.”
“Do you want to see me?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I got finals next week. Maybe. Maybe not.” She whispered, then he bellowed in the background, “Lunch!” She had told me he’s an awful cook but thinks of himself as inventive and beyond cookbooks.
“I love you,” I said.
“Don’t say that!” She hung up the phone.
On the long drive toward the southeast I had another spate of mind whirls, and there was the not infrequent temptation to give a week’s time to the study of the human brain. Since one professor told me years back that I was a Pleistocene holdover maybe I should begin with primates. My aversion came from my mother’s addiction to various therapies which she passed on to my sisters. My father was appalled at their frequent overhauls, as he called them, the cost equaling what would support a normal family and it seemed to come to nothing. She clearly thought of herself as too special for something simple like Alcoholics Anonymous about which I’m unsure.
I swerved for a gopher but heard the mortal thunk. And regret. There’s the usual quarrel among ornithologists but it’s commonly agreed that at least a hundred million birds die hitting windows every year. The evolutionary curve has been too slow to make windows comprehensible to them, somewhat like deer and car headlights. This wasn’t the habitual needle in the eye and I wondered what I was still interested in with the poignancy of my feelings for J.M. My father told me in my early teens that I was saved from the problems of my mother and sisters by my “healthy interests,” avoiding on his part any genetic assumptions since they are clearly impossible to deal with. Nature and nurture versus each other is a can of inextricable worms that raises all sorts of suppurating ethical and political questions. The simple fact back then was that I was obsessed with the world we haven’t made: birds, mammals, botany, and I began getting a subscription to the Journal of Plains Anthropology when I was fifteen. Absurdly enough, I very early could chant out the whole expanded Linnaean hierarchy which I memorized while listening to the Rolling Stones: kingdom phylum subphylum superclass class subclass infraclass cohort superorder order suborder infraorder superfamily family subfamily tribe subtribe genus subgenus species subspecies.
So what? I can’t see the virtue in studying the natural world, just that everybody should do it. It’s the only world you’re going to get as far as we know. You read up a bit then look at it closely. Why are people adverse to it? I’m not sure but suspect it’s because it’s not immediately functional in the economy. Of course my obsessions are mostly my obsessions. My parents’ trump card of admonition used to be, “What if everyone were like you?” I wanted to say, “But they’re not” or “What if everyone were like you?” but I never did. My dad’s implicit politeness seeped into me and still is there in a slightly crazy form.
I stopped to watch a prairie falcon trying to stir up a meadow-lark for lunch east of Brewster, still nagged at what I’m still interested in and whether this infatuation with J.M. would be a short phase. I’ve thought inanely that I’m impervious but ventilated, like a first-class raincoat. Also, that periods of doubt have kept me from going off deeper ends, such as becoming a guerrilla in any of a number of locations in the world. The fact that going off a deep end appears to be a requisite to doing anything of consequence in this life has not escaped me. My anthropology tells me in a pukey little whisper that I’m feeling a late mating urge, that my nine years of wandering around and looking things over were a ritual I had devised to frame reality, that the search for secret places was basically a primitive religious impulse. My mother’s analyst who ran a tight ship would tell me briefly (I only stayed fifteen minutes) that my penchant for sleeping outdoors was totally caused by my phobia though I told him I did it a great deal before my near suffocation. My point was that I’d rather look at the moon and stars than a neutral ceiling.
My primary fuel for this wandering seemed to be simple curiosity. During my boyhood all late fall and winter my father would take me to the public library on Saturday mornings and at least once a month to a bookstore, both breeding a unilateral curiosity which isn’t always a “blessing” (one of my mother’s favorite words). Frankly, it was a grace note a few years back when I figured out I was quite ordinary, especially compared to all the creeps and flotsam I run into on the road, or to the all too normal folks whose lives are utterly blinded by the green of money and whose singular motive seems to be simple greed. As a formerly devout student of anthropology I can’t say that I detect any connection between my modus operandi and blood or genes. Historically and in the present we’ve always had lots of wanderers in America. There’s a sweet, vaguely scary feeling in disappearance.
I headed for the freeway south of Grand Island, something I usually avoid. Most of my driving is done by a dashboard-mounted compass as the freeways and the speed required to not be a pain in the ass to other drivers kills your attentiveness to the landscape. There was a memory jolt when I passed a sign for the Stuhr Pioneer Museum and Village, a fascinating place in that the way our grandparents lived has pretty much vanished. The jolt came when I thought of S.C., a girl who lived down the street from us. She was thin and if anything her parents were thinner. I only mention this because it’s a rarity in Nebraska (I checked it out and Wisconsin and Missouri are also porcine states). S.C.’s mother had supposedly been a ballerina in Chicago but I had my doubts as my own mother’s art life had only been of a year’s total in New York and Paris. Anyway, S.C. had a flair for acting spooky and was precociously interested in witchcraft. On a field trip to the Stuhr in Grand Island for we so-called bright students when we were sophomores I sat next to S.C. because no one else ever would and I was quite sunken in my dad’s sense of politeness, though I already had reservations about our first sex talk, “Treat every girl like your sisters.” Despite my kindness S.C. liked to poke fun and mimic my formal speech which came from my reading in natural history and from my father who was a third-generation Swede. My mother occasionally mimicked him when she was drinking, one of the few things that pissed him off. S.C. liked to think of herself as quite naughty and had given me Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn which my sisters had swiped and turned over to my irate mother who threw them in the fireplace, saying “Don’t make a beautiful thing dirty.” Of course I bought fresh copies and was urged on to read them promptly, thinking, This guy is sure alive. In return I gave S.C. a copy of Clyde Kluckhohn’s scholarly Navaho Witchcraft, a key book in my burgeoning interest in anthropology.
I had some distance from the material and S.C. didn’t and the book put her over the edge for a period. Her haughty father stopped me on the street and told me not to give any more creepy books to his daughter. He was walking their Tibetan dog and wearing his sport coat over his shoulders with his arms not in the sleeves and a robin’s-egg-blue ascot. I was irked and thought about crushing the skinny shitsucker. That night, a warm breezy September evening, S.C. snuck over through the backyards and I actually smelled her coming by the scent of the patchouli incense she used in her witchcraft rites. Now she was crying with rage because she’d been told her father gave me a tongue lashing. I consoled her by saying I didn’t give a shit. She slipped into my sleeping bag without asking. She was the end of the line for any girl who made me feel turned on and she was distracting me from a meteor shower. I was, however, startled to discover that her butt that looked too thin in clothes was what we called “nifty.” She said she had read a book about Oriental sex and I must say we had quite a time, the first full-fledged all the way for both of us. After quite a spell she whispered she had been able to seduce me by stealing one of my footprints, a technique she had read in Navaho Witchcraft. At the time I didn’t doubt it because she was scarcely what my friends called “boner material.” We perform
ed these essential services for each other about once a month until we went off to college, she to Bennington and me to a humbler place predicated by my bad behavior. I had heard she was now married to a guru of some sort and living in New Hampshire.
I began to feel a specific despair the closer I got to J.M. and Lincoln. It was difficult to interpret her phone voice as encouraging no matter how confined the circumstances with hubby braying for his liver or whatever. I was a half hour from town and it was still several hours before she was due at the club so I pulled off an exit to a spot near the West Fork of the Big Blue to perhaps watch birds and take a snooze. There was a sudden impulse to head for Manitoba but I had made quite the study of the insubstantiality of moods, the way they float in and out of us from a thousand origins. My Zen girlfriend used to say that we paint our own lives to which I replied that there are lot of hands on the brush. This irked her and made her resemble more closely her clenched-assed uncles, one of whom had lived in California and was quite relentless in his psychologisms and other silliness, so that once when I entered their house he said, “We are what we eat and I smell a poisonous hamburger,” to which I replied, stupidly of course, “We aren’t what we shit, and if we didn’t we’d weigh thousands of pounds.” In that company it was one of my best lead balloons. After we broke up and just before she went to Japan I ran into her at an environmental protest and she had shaved her head. She teased me that her appearance made her look nonsexy which it, in a curious way, didn’t but rather more feminine. I was feeling sentimental and admitted I was the main hand on the brush as far as painting my life, but then her new boyfriend emerged from the crowd and I was nonplussed to see that he looked like her uncles though he seemed very good humored.
Off the exit I slowed to a stop beside a sandy-haired young man in his twenties working on a decrepit Dodge with the hood up and grease to his elbows. He appeared to be dismantling the carburetor while his wife walked and dandled a plump baby in diapers and a girl about five was chasing dragonflies in the ditch. I asked if he needed help and he shouted a kind of liturgy. “No help! You can’t help! I don’t need help! No help!” It was harshly loony but I noted both the wife and daughter ignored his shouting as if accustomed to it. When he finished his chant he buried his face in his dirty hands and wouldn’t peek out. There was a rose tattooed on his bicep rather than the usual snake, panther, bleeding dagger. I drove slowly past his wife who wore jeans and a soiled Coors T-shirt. She looked off at a cornfield but the baby smiled at me. The man had resembled so many you see holding cardboard signs saying, “Will work for food,” but then they usually didn’t have visible families, or were well past that juncture where the family is abandoned with relatives, if any. It struck me for the thousandth time that when you were on the move you noted the bottom third, at least a third it seemed had become social mutants and were scratching along as minimum-wage menial laborers and without any reliable way to get anyplace else for a fresh look; those in Washington who could help simply had never noticed these people, that there was something about the xenophobic power trance in politics that made them unable to extrapolate any other reality than the effort toward reelection. They were making a mighty effort to rigidify the society to protect the top, and the bottom third were being openly sacrificed.
I thought without humor that consciousness of others is a very big hand on the paintbrush besides your own unless you hide out in a toilet. I admit I was trying to focus on the family with the broken-down car to try to get rid of them. My father who instigated my journal writing in the first place so I wouldn’t simply “drift” didn’t much care for my social commentary when he read the first few years’ worth. The passages admittedly weren’t very astute and came under xenophobic highlights, basically an anthro-oriented rundown of human behavior in a locale. He said I was too full of cynical “nay-saying” and I shouldn’t write about people as if I were Jane Goodall writing about chimps.
I made my way into a thicket along the creek not quite fully prepared for memories of the other times I had sat in this thicket but not really giving a shit. The little girl chasing dragonflies while her father wailed tended to minimalize my interior quibbling. We are all trapped but some a great deal more than others, I thought, applying my mosquito dope and getting some painfully in my left eye. Jesus, pay attention. How limited am I and what limits me? I felt a rather startling wave of fear over the idea that J.M. would never again have anything to do with me. The fear was as palpable as when I was fishing the Bechler River in the southwest corner of Yellowstone, a breeze across the water covering my scent, and a grizzly had strolled by. My bowels trembled but he decided to ignore me and ambled on, the breeze rumpling the fur along his hump, the fur not really concealing the vastness of his musculature. J.M. fading in the gathering twilight may as well have been a grizzly. Would she be physically involved again in my personal phenology, my wanderings that were directed by bird migrations, available sunlight, the births and deaths of wild-flowers, the activities and movements and hibernations of mammals, or the slightest urge of curiosity while studying maps by flashlight, or at dawn, or while listening to the rain rattling off my pick-up camper, crawling toward my huge now missing map folder. J.M. hadn’t so much rattled my cage (we are truly zoo inhabitants) but had tipped it over and she, along with Ralph, the flu, and my long-delayed intention of looking up my original mother, had derailed nearly nine years of habit. I had experienced three clinical depressions, one in high school and two in my nomadic life, and they all seemed to have their inception in a sense that I had worn out a way of being. Naturally I didn’t seek professional help as the modern-living pages of newspapers call it. The main thing I noted at depression’s core, which rather than red hot is more an ice sculpture, was that the brain grows very tired of the accouterments of its zoo cage. High school and college students are obviously susceptible to depression (buzz term!) because of lively hormones and the utterly repetitive strictures of their existence which also pisses in the whiskey of them learning anything durable. Some adapt, and some are strikingly less evolved and can’t quite wear the armor. They tend to be neither more nor less intelligent than the successful ones.
But later, on the road, seeking out those empty areas cartographers call sleeping beauties, during two enormous pratfalls, I had to learn and relearn that my self-appointed nomad state wasn’t enough. You also had to be a mental nomad, and your curiosity had to stay as lively as your movement. Ethnology can become as banal as sporting events. The creatures you study lose their inherent dimensions. The mind minimizes and codifies, and the journals become slack and dreary. Before that point I try to anticipate and take a job however menial, once as extreme as washing pots and pans in a Laramie, Wyoming, restaurant which was soothing for a scant week. Hard physical work was generally the best, whether bucking hay bales, digging cement forms, or as a shovel man for contract archeologists which was more in line with my training. You usually worked in advance of the building of a highway or a gas line (the best as they frequently traveled through uninhabited areas) to make sure that nothing of archeological value was going to be destroyed, but the site had to be awfully good to slow down commerce. Hard labor fatigues the entire body except the mind which is allowed to rest from the frittering endgames which precede depression. Of course there are comic aspects. My mother once told me during her pre-dinner martini session that she hoped I wouldn’t become an artist because life was treacherous and artists were “sensitive plants.” I was on the sofa a few feet from her marking time before dinner by leafing through a large pictorial botanical guide which she couldn’t have noticed other than subliminally. My sisters didn’t look up from the carpet where they were cheating each other at Scrabble. My father peeked at me with a frown from behind his New York Times—he was a news junkie and Omaha newspapers weren’t enough. I had the clear choice of baiting my mother about “sensitive plants” about which I was the family authority or deferring to my father whose frown meant he was anxious for the pot roast.
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I was trapped in the thicket for longer than I wished for fear of driving back past the woebegone family. I looked in my wallet and found eighty bucks and last month’s check. If they were still there I intended to pitch the cash out the window toward the woman and keep driving. I looked at a patch of burdock and milkweed, not very sensitive plants which I’d like to identify with: ubiquitous, homely in their plenitude. It’s not very unique to set out to find out what you want to do with your life but then only find out clearly what you don’t want to do. My fragility irked the shit out of me. One of the big problems about the so-called open road is that you don’t get to wear a horse’s blinders. The bird through the binoculars doesn’t exclude what you saw on the way to the swamp, the crippled kid stacking firewood near the shabbiest of mobile homes. We waved at each other. Who knows if he’s interested in my sentimentality? How much melancholy did I get from my father who got it from his diabetic mother who saw woe buried in the bluest of skies. Dad again. Not to speak of mother. When your mind races you see the speed at which your parents aged, somewhat less accurately in yourself, and you wonder why bother doing anything you don’t want to. Not very pure and not very simple.
Lucky for me I was saved by an image of J.M’s butt under my rain slicker and I recalled the sound of the rain on its oilcloth. Feet, ankles, knees, thighs. The image was more real than my sodden thicket, and the warbler right behind me whose voice I couldn’t quite identify would vamoose the moment I moved. Had one land on my head in Canada and couldn’t see that one either. Wish I could say a physical prayer to that bottom. I stood up abruptly to the disappeared warbler and my lower legs had gone to sleep so that I stumbled the first few steps out of the thicket.
* * *
My true father was a real piece of work, or so they say. This information kept rising to the surface no matter how hard I struggled to ignore it which, of course, encouraged its presence. Samuels, the retired senior partner, told me that and a great deal more not long after my father’s death four years ago. Who would care to think about such a thing? Samuels’s knowledge, though, ended at my birth in Tucson where I’d lost Ralph, of all places.