by Jim Harrison
“We used to pray every night you’d settle down.”
“No you didn’t.” This prayer stuff was new. “But if you did now and then it was an intrusion. Maybe I pray that I have the balls to keep looking things over.”
I could see she was on the verge of deciding to be offended by “balls” and I regretted baiting her with it. What was the point anymore? Evidently I had reached a phase where some of my behavior was becoming tiresome.
“I was thinking of getting eighty acres and eighty books I need to read. And some cows. I’d build a three-sided cabin with an open front.”
“Why cows? You always said cows were destructive.” She was hesitant, not wanting to be tricked into believing me. She was referring to years ago when I was a little involved with an environmental group in trying to get cattle off public land.
“I’m trying to be honest. I can’t give up beef. After ten thousand cans I can’t deal with sardines anymore.” She actually believed that at one point I had attended Michigan State to study cattle when I’d actually only spent a month working in their research cattle barn cleaning pens and stalls.
She unclenched a hand and stared at a piece of paper, recalling what it was for, then said a nice-sounding young woman had called me about an hour before. I fairly leapt from the bed in my skivvies which made her titter as she left.
I don’t recall a more difficult conversation in my life. It was by turns endearing, angry, hesitant. She and her parents doubted if it was wise if I came up the next day. In addition to an ugly black eye, an X-ray had revealed a slight crack in the upper part of the cheekbone. Her husband had called several times in apology and her father had grabbed the phone and said if he called again he was driving to Lincoln with a shotgun to blow his fucking head off. Her mother was worried over the idea that they couldn’t afford a decent lawyer. I lied then and said a close friend was the best divorce lawyer in Omaha and would handle the matter free. This lightened her up and she asked several times if it was so. Then her mother came on the phone and expressed crisply her doubts about my visit. We compromised by my agreeing to just stop by for an hour, and she said maybe two hours as it was a long drive. J.M. came back on and I told her I loved her and she didn’t tell me to shut up. There was a long pause and a breathing sigh and that was that.
I called my dad’s friend and retired senior partner, Samuels, and he told me to stop by and we’d discuss it, and that I was lucky I caught him because he was going back to France in two days. It was utterly against my nature to ask favors but then I’d never been against the wall in quite this way before. Samuels was as close as I had to a godfather and had been involved in one of my “scrapes,” my father’s term, when Lucy’s doped-up musician boyfriend had beaten her up and my father had been too overwrought to deal with it. I had called home from Browning, Montana, near the Blackfoot Reservation, to get my check sent only to have my sobbing mother tell me about the incident. I drove straight through to Omaha in thirty hours, found the creep and demolished his guitar collection against his body. His friends tried to interfere with one of them nicking me on the hipbone with a kitchen knife. A neighbor had called the cops and I resisted somewhat. Samuels got me exonerated as I had what the judge called a justifiable cause in my sister’s beating, plus had been knifed. The fact that Lucy began seeing the guy again a few months later is one of life’s mysteries. Now she is apparently happily married to a young State Department guy and lives in Maryland.
I walked the few blocks over to Samuels’s home with the unpleasant sensation that the sidewalk was thin ice, but then sidewalks are an infrequent experience for me. I was plainly wavering in the face of a larger picture than I was accustomed to. You can convince yourself that you’re brilliant when you’re by yourself, but then a few blocks in the old neighborhood bring on the same vertigo as a Utah cliff. The only tonic was in the humor implicit in the houses themselves. Big houses for people with real big principles, enacted to their satisfaction on the job, at the brokerage, church, country club, part of the current Republican trance that required of the poor only that they behave and keep out of the way of the money-making possibilities. The whole country had apparently become comfortable with the greed frenzy of its top one percent.
Samuels was not what I expected him to be. I had known him closely since childhood and always thought of him as my father’s best friend. The year before, when I stopped to see him he had been strong and jaunty though he was in his mid-seventies, but now he was querulous and distant. Yes, he would arrange a divorce lawyer for J.M. but why had I fallen for a married woman? I was so disappointed in his response that I almost ran for it. He stared at me long and hard with his rheumy eyes, then quite suddenly admitted that his second wife, twenty years younger, was quite ill at a hospital in Lyons, France. He had only one more day to tidy up his affairs in Omaha and was getting out for good. This struck me as so improbable that I was unable to say anything. He had retired shortly after his first wife’s death which took place the same year as my father’s. She, like Samuels, had been a Francophile and was a close friend of the Frenchwoman he had married. His disappointment was so palpable in the air that I felt drawn to console him but was helpless to say anything. He shook his head to break his reverie, then abruptly told me that now that I was older I more closely resembled my relatives, which further put me off balance. I said that I was sorry he was having such a hard time of it, at which he finally smiled and said he doubted if anyone accurately foresaw what it was like to become old. He then asked about J.M’s “character” and background and I talked about her a few minutes. He was suddenly afraid he’d forget my favor and called the law office, during which I scanned a few shelves of his library which had impressed me mightily when I was young. He poured two small glasses of brandy and smiled again saying I probably avoided liquor because of my mother but, properly used, it wasn’t bad stuff. We drank and I was overwhelmed by his age and the way time had passed for both of us. Always a dapper man he looked critically at my clothes, then asked when I was going to stop acting like a poor boy, if ever. I said I didn’t want anything to ever interfere with what I had hoped to do which had been basically an effort to understand the world, especially the natural world as I seemed to draw up short on human beings. He pondered this and poured us another brandy and I recalled I hadn’t eaten yet and the first drink had already made my skin prickle. We clicked glasses and he said this was good-bye, and to go ahead and hang out with my goddamned peopleless nature as there were quite enough folks messing up the world. I nodded and then he searched for words coming up with the idea that if I married J.M. I should listen to her carefully as everyone was nearly deaf to each other but men tended to be deafer than women. I was amazed at this and got up to go. He stood and we shook hands and then he gave me a hug. I was overcome though it occurred to me again that wealth and power didn’t mean shit except on a temporary basis. The question of why we had to grow old and die is an evident one to an amateur of natural history. Because everything does, including Aldebaran.
Back home I ate an unsightly mess of fried beef and scrambled eggs under the watchful eye of my mother who was amused at my booziness which she hadn’t seen since I was a teenager. She mentioned the time my dad had been away in Kansas City on business and she had been called to the police station to pick me up whereupon I vomited in her new station wagon. This memory stopped me halfway through my lunch, though I remembered Samuels’s admonition to listen carefully. She then said that she wondered why her children thought they were so special that they couldn’t even give her a grandchild. I said I didn’t know, went up to bed and slept for five hours, the solidest sleep I had had in the house since my teens. I reckoned that though I still might loathe the neighborhood it had somehow become disarmed and that over a decade later I was finally safe from its debilitating influence.
* * *
I awoke in a dank sludge from the brandy and lunch and entertained and rejected the notion of a city hike. Because of a toad dream I loo
ked through my haphazard college journals until I found the record of a field trip I had taken for a term paper for an ornithology course taught by the famed Paul Johnsgard. Naturally I had to travel the furthest, a critical failing in my dad’s view. Drink the most. Fight the hardest. Smoke the grandest joints. Bring a drunk Native to Boy Scouts. Chase the prettiest girls. Hit the most violently in football so that my brain became perhaps permanently rattled, all of which bores the piss out of me now. This can be filed under fatigue rather than wisdom.
Anyway, I was fascinated by goshawks and drove some twenty hours to a location in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, about thirty miles north of my ill-fated peyote summer session near Seney. There was a record of a local birder, Brody Block, having located a goshawk nest near a fairly dense riverine system that, however, abutted an open area of several thousand acres. My obsession had begun with an old article, found for me by a high school teacher, by Frank and John Craighead called “The Ecology of Raptor Predation.” I only had had two scant and fleeting sightings of the goshawk, one near McLeod, Montana, and the other near Bear Butte, north of Sturgis in South Dakota. I bypassed a clot of dreary notes vis-à-vis latitude and longitude, local flora, weather, the nearby river severely ravaged when used to transport logs nearly a century before.
May 23, 1977. Maybe the best day ever? Started early after a miserably wet, cool night with a stiff wind NW off Lake Superior. Misdirected myself by forgetting the nature of the horseshoe bends of rivers so that I was nearly a mile off the next mark on my topo map. I was scrambling through an alder thicket into a small clearing when I was startled by the hind end of a large black bear (Ursus americanus) thrashing into another alder thicket just ahead. I had surprised him at toilet and there was a large steaming scat between two young aspens with the scat showing signs of fawn predation (white spotted chunk of brown fur). My eye was then caught by a movement a few feet away. A largish garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) was swallowing a very large toad (Bufo americanus) with the toad’s head and forelegs still protruding from the snake’s mouth. I curled up with my eyes only a few inches away with the toad and I blinking at each other but the snake’s eyes steadfast. I judged it a mortal predator attempt as the snake’s jaws were cracked and bleeding profusely. A raccoon or coyote would certainly have a feast. Two hours of meandering later I came upon a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) carcass splayed on its back with the breast missing plumb in the center of a logging trail. The carcass had no sharp odor so was reasonably fresh. I guessed myself to be within a few hundred yards of the goshawk (Accipter gentilis) nest and clapped my hands to irritate it to the point it would make itself visible. It did so, a female, within seconds and I felt it necessary to drop to my hands and knees to save my scalp. I dodged into the shelter of a sugar plum bush and she made several passes at me with a loud kek-kek-kek. It was easy to see why this creature is the bane of grouse, rabbits or any other bird in its path.
Not included in the journal was a manic evening in a bar, driving my pick-up in a ditch, a short romance, running out of gas which entitled me to a ten-mile round-trip walk, sleeping with a protruding bare foot and waking to find it swollen with blackfly stings, eating damp bread and cold spaghetti out of a can. I knew even then that a real naturalist tended to be prudent, ruminative, disciplined and my own manic energies were better suited to anthropology though I proved to be a flop at that also. With the passing of years, and arriving at the not very ripe age of twenty-nine, it certainly occurred to me that the weight of mental idiosyncrasies will prevent me from having what the culture refers to as a profession. Until I met J.M. I wasn’t upset at the prospect of carrying on my modus operandi until I dropped dead.
Derek (not his real name) cooked us an elaborate dinner, the likes of which I do not recall having had since I accompanied my mother to France for two weeks during my junior year of high school. The bribe was the Jeep I got for my sixteenth birthday as a trip to France with my mother would have been the end of their marriage, or so my father said. She was in her late forties at the time, a menopausal stage that included her heaviest drinking and a free-floating goofiness that tended to chase the whole family to their separate rooms which did not prevent her from knocking.
I had met Derek only once before and thought he was English and gay, though he turned out to be from New Hampshire and straight. So much for thinking you can discern the mystery of another’s personality after a brief meeting while you were loading your truck with a case each of refried beans and sardines. This time I sat in the kitchen while he floated around preparing dinner and chatting with the irritating presumption that we were quite alike. He had spent the sixties in London so I wasn’t really wrong on the accent. He meant that we were alike in that he had left his family for a decade because all of their presumptions about reality ran contrary to his own. This piqued my interest somewhat as I had made close observations while still in high school on how my parents, Lucy and Marianne each lived within quite different perceptions of reality. Derek had hoped to become a painter like Francis Bacon but ended up as an Omaha art dealer. He regarded this as quite a plunge in his aspirations but had accepted the limits of his artistic talent which he viewed as nonexistent after working hard in London for ten years. The only painting that survived in his care was a seascape done in a hurry on the ferry from England to St.-Malo in Brittany. His mother had stored a number of others in an attic in New Hampshire in the family home now lived in by his sister but he had no curiosity about them in that he could remember every square inch of each of the paintings and found the memory “flatulent.”
We talked from seven until midnight, certainly a record for me since college. At first I felt a little simpleminded but we examined the feeling together. The core of his thinking was art and the art world while mine tended to be nature and the study and observation of the natural world, thus our discourse was structured by the character of what we knew. People are limited by their central obsessions, from which the nature of their language emerges, whether it is sports, raising cattle, the stock market, anthropology, art history or whatever. I added location, thinking of the xenophobia notes from the four hundred or so locales in my journals. It certainly wasn’t a matter of states or their governments but fairly intact regions. Derek had assumed that television had leveled the differences but I insisted this was true only in the minds of television people. My mother was bored with this conversation so I rushed through a litany of distinct regional differences with some states such as Texas and California having at least a half dozen apiece. Derek wanted to hang onto the train of thought as he had limited himself to a specific class of art buyers in Omaha, memories of New Hampshire, New York City and Europe. My mother interrupted by asking of what practical use was my knowledge of four hundred locations and I said, “None whatsoever.” Derek disagreed and said the main effort in life was to keep yourself from being brain-dead and visual images did the job as well as other considerations including natural history. This put me in a reflective trance and it occurred to me he was right and I said so. Everything was based at the start of experience by the senses all primates shared. Conclusions could come later. I gave the approximate latitude and longitude of Caborca in Sonora, meaningless data, and said Navajo know where they are by bowing to the six directions every dawn. I visually described the landscape, the flora and fauna, on an imaginary line from Caborca southwest to the Seri area south of El Desemboque on the Sea of Cortez. I even described visually some of the hundreds of plants used by the Seri in their enthnobotany. It was oddly hard work to think in strictly visual terms but for the first time I could imagine a shred of what it might be like to be an artist. My mother shyly said that she made visual squares or rectangles of everything interesting she saw and Derek leaned over and kissed her forehead.
The kiss was oddly uncomfortable for me. A man not my father kissing my mother! A lump formed in my throat as my mind saw J.M.’s bruised eye. I was now thirteen hours away from seeing her. I was further kicked off my feet w
hen it turned out that Derek had known Bruce Chatwin in England, the man who had written the nomad article that had helped fuel so much of my behavior. Derek also quoted William Blake, saying, “Still water breeds pestilence.” I was pleased that I knew a Blake quote given me by a goofy ornithologist in Mississippi, “How do we know that every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed to our senses five.” At least that’s how I remembered it. Derek wanted me to go deeper about what I saw southwest of Caborca so I described the underbellies of dead scorpions, also a rattler run over on a gravel road, the lateral scaly lines and the one eye that still moved. I also described the three stomachs of a corriente cow I’d helped an old Mexican couple butcher, the cow so starved and scrawny that the tripe for menudo would be the best thing her death could offer. We rubbed the strips of tough meat with salt and crushed chiles and hung them up to dry in the sun and I got the idea that the old couple was mostly Papago (T’ohono Odom).
It was getting late and I didn’t want to drink more wine so I led them out in the backyard and tried to teach them how to tell specific time by the star clock beneath the North Star, and near the pointer stars that lead to the Little Dipper. This twenty-four-hour clock, of course, runs counterclockwise. There was too much ambient light in Omaha for me to do a good job and I wondered what the fuck I was doing in a place you couldn’t clearly see the stars and then I remembered. They both liked the idea of a clock running counterclockwise and the act of subtracting four minutes a day, but that was the limit of their interest other than that the star clock has only two days when it doesn’t need this adjustment, September 2nd and March 4th.
It was a pretty good evening partly because it helped pass some of the time until I could see J.M. Near the end my mother reached for the brandy bottle and Derek said, “Ta-ta-ta” and took it from her. She only smiled and shrugged, a pleasant reaction. Derek said I probably talked about Mexico because he had served shrimp ceviche as a first course, and that our minds are limited to one thing leading to another unless we can mentally jump around like true intellectuals. The roasted striped bass with fennel should have reminded me of Italy but I had never been there. He was appalled at this but my one European trip had been the mostly cantankerous trip around France by train with my mother to see what she called her “old haunts.” I had climbed Mont Ste.-Victoire near Aix-en-Provence while she spent a hungover day in bed. At dinner she lectured me on Cézanne’s painting of this mountain and I pissed her off by saying it was a successful mountain far before Cézanne painted it.