The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  A trace of orange now stayed with me when my eyes were open, a frame for the immense star clock above me. I thought hard about my old favorite anthropological writers, Mary Douglas and Loren Eiseley. If ritual is the framing of reality what am I doing now with bats fluttering between my body and the stars? Jesus. In Sarlat down in the Dordogne, my favorite place in France, I tried to go in the narrow caves to see the rock paintings but couldn’t for the usual reasons, so settled for the museum while my mother was back in the hotel sleeping off her wine. At dinner she had been careful to only drink a single bottle out of which I had asked for a rare glass to irritate her, but that night from my adjoining room I heard a room-service waiter bring another. At the museum a very bright visiting Parisian told me I was in the area of the birthplace of the Occident. I was as impressed as a junior in high school could be, that is, I was knocked off my pins but didn’t show it.

  Jesus, again. I had a good twenty-minute doze with a dream of J.M. draped over my face laughing, then awoke to what I thought was an orange sob and it was actual lightning from a storm coming up fast from the west where the sky was a starless black lit by intermittent yellow light. Bullbats croaking. A poor-will upriver. Saved by nouns which J.M. teased me about, and the western sky split by lightning, closer now. This time I have my cocoon-shaped tarp with only my face clear to get wet.

  The first drops of rain help questions fade, like will I resent slowing down, or better yet, if I don’t believe in the reality of others what do I do when my own disappears? The answer comes when the rain beats down so hard I have to turn my face to the east. One Christmas afternoon before the aneurysm sent him into the void my dad said in anger during a snowy walk that if I wasn’t careful I would disappear up my own asshole. Maybe so but nouns will be my savior. Or so I hope with lightning a vast strobe on a mile of river, the glow so strong tree and bush shadows are still crisply lighted despite the blur of rain.

  Dawn. My nose near pokeweed (Phytolacca americana!) but I’m not sure it’s supposed to be here. I saw a coral snake in pokeweed in Arkansas. Clouds still roiling low as if I were sleeping at altitude. I thought it was the day to see my brand-new grandmother but a brief look in the truck’s outside mirror was homely indeed with an ugly lump partly emerging from hairline and eyes as red as a tertiary drunk’s. A kingfisher. A heron. Common mergansers. Pied-billed grebe. A wild turkey up the hill a half mile away.

  I made coffee with a gizmo machine powered by the cigarette lighter. Another gift from my mother, ordered from one of the three hundred and thirty three catalogs the mail brings her. I could ask, Where am I to go and what am I to do but then my effort has been to be at home anywhere, most of all a riverbank on a June dawn with nary a squeak from humankind in the air. Just birds and clouds.

  I burned my tongue and spilled some hot coffee on my dick which betrayed cloud intelligence. My dad gave up on me well before he died. Not that he didn’t love me but that he knew I wouldn’t pan out as the gold-miner idiom goes. I could see the realization in his face one late evening around Christmastime when the overspiked eggnog had put my mother and sisters to bed early. He was reading my journals and, other than being mildly disturbed by what he figured out was the sexual code, he was fascinated by the southwest entries, an area he had never seen. What pissed in the whiskey that evening was a journal quote from my revered Mary Douglas, “The more that society is vested with power, the more it despises the organic processes on which it rests.” Like any boy who came to full consciousness in the Great Depression my father was a devout believer in progress, but he still loved the memories of a simple, utterly basic life. Did Douglas mean that everything we deem natural was going to disappear under societal pressure? Of course, I said, probably too flippantly, adding that it certainly had in this house where the bathrooms are carpeted in white and the merest mention of sex is taboo. He said the old life is still everywhere, though he admitted mostly among the poor. Or in Mexico I added, but whatever is left is passing with your generation as a boy. You had a huge garden, chickens, three pigs and a steer for fall butchering. A lot of people who eat them now have never had any actual contact with a cow, chicken or pig. They’re supermarket abstractions. Even when I was small you had a vegetable garden and now it’s only flowers a black man comes in once a week to tend. I became too busy, he said, and I said, Maybe ignoring is equal in a way to despising. No it isn’t, he said, I goddamn hate the way you despise the way we live. I don’t really despise it so much as I simply don’t want to live this way myself, I said, then added, You don’t seem that happy yourself working seventy hours a week when I think mother already has some money. This struck home but was probably impolite. He said, I pay the bills around here and besides it’s natural to want to be successful. I disagreed, at least for myself, and he implied that the exception proves the rule, a notion I find absurd. We were at an impasse where neither of us wanted to be. I wished that we were back when he asked me why there were three different kinds of quail in New Mexico while there was only one kind in Georgia. He abruptly poured a rare drink for us and asked why I didn’t become a game warden like Grandpa had become in his thirties when he became tired of farming. This calmed us down for a short while and we laughed about how Grandpa had been reprimanded for punching out a man who had shot two bearcubs. I said I couldn’t be a game warden because I probably would have gone further. This brought him up quite short and he gave me the briefest look as if it were occurring to him that I wasn’t a blood relative after all.

  We rushed to another subject and he asked with a smile if I’d think it was ludicrous if he started going back to the Lutheran church again which he had done rarely since I was a young boy. I said not at all. One thing I did learn in anthropology, I said, was that religion at the very least frames reality for we poor lost souls, not mentioning again the dread name of Mary Douglas. I also said our civilization is its own religion and that’s why we’re such a total mess. But we’re not a mess, he said, it’s the fact that you think it’s a mess that makes your life so problematical.

  I called Derek from Springview. He gave me a little lecture, doubtless rehearsed, about the dangers of blackmail, especially a lengthy jail term for a claustrophobe like myself. “I’m pleased you know my history but they’ll never take me alive,” I joked. He wanted me to say more but it’s long since been a habit to let the other commit first. Finally he allowed that he understood my motive in wanting to protect my mother but the loan had been freely offered. “By a pleasant nitwit,” I said, “no doubt under the influence.” There was a longish pause and then he offered to return half the loan assuming I FedExed the Rolodex. I liked all the X’s and said I might do so after a secretary in a real estate office finished xeroxing it so that I had a copy to protect myself. He said that the other half was already invested in paintings for resale and for me to call my mother who was outraged at my behavior. “She always has been,” I said, suddenly feeling that if I did win the victory would be Pyrrhic. This caused a dose of despair and I suggested that I’d settle if he’d return three-quarters of the money and from now on he could deal with my charming sister Marianne. He had met her several times and said, “I’d rather not,” and I answered, “I don’t blame you” and hung up. I was sick of the whole matter and a grocer helped me pack up the Rolodex for the UPS pick-up even though it didn’t entail an X. I imagined that Marianne’s main worry was that Mother was loaning money that would otherwise eventually end up in her own pocket and I certainly didn’t give a shit about that. How much is enough?

  I set up camp near the Niobrara south of Norden resolved to regain my good appearance for my next day’s meeting with my new grandma. I even stretched out some clothes on a line to smooth the wrinkles. The area was the scene of my greatest temporary happiness during college and I felt a bit of heat in my ears over the fact that I had been excommunicated from the project for causing “morale” problems. The university had been engaged to do an exhaustive archeological survey of the area prefatory to the Army
Corps of Engineers overseeing the building of a large dam for the usual phony reasons of flood control, irrigation, recreation. Moving water offends the developer in certain souls while lakes thrill them. It was the spring of my freshman year and I thought I was chosen for the crew because I had straight A’s, and was sturdy enough for hard outdoor work. I didn’t know at the time that I was the youngest member of the group because my father had interceded with the university president. This justifiably pissed off some of the professors and graduate students in charge. I think my dad only wanted to avoid the pratfall of the summer before when I had worked on the ranch of my mother’s cousin and had sucker-punched the foreman for clubbing a horse. He was a big guy and I had to get the drop on him. I left in a hurry and roamed Montana for a month in my Jeep, neglecting to get in touch with my parents, and coming to a halt when I got in a tiff with a Yellowstone Park ranger for camping in an illegal place (I didn’t realize to my later embarrassment that I was in an area of troublesome grizzlies).

  But up at the Norden site I was still, a year later, an overly hormonal stripling, a bit quick to anger. I was relegated to the lowest job, a pure shovel man, though I knew quite a bit about the simple artifacts, including a number of buffalo-hide scrapers I improperly pocketed, thinking these might have been owned by some of my ancestors. The knowledgeable graduate students would walk up the river valley in front of me and stick in transact flags at likely sites. I would then dig until they decided if the site was worth further looking into. The digging was quite wonderful as I got to burn off the irritations a young man is heir to.

  Unfortunately it rained hard for two days in a row and I was discovered having a love bout with the girlfriend of one the graduate students and this caused an argument. I was accused of smoking wild hemp I had gathered, also taking acid which wasn’t true as my goofiness came from some quaaludes I had brought along. I drove over to Valentine with a couple of girls who were crew members, got drunk, and wrecked the vehicle. Luckily we weren’t hurt other than some bruises but I was arrested for drunk driving. A local lawyer friend of my father’s named Quigley got me out of jail and shipped me back to Omaha in a rancher’s Piper Cub. I spent the rest of the summer on foot in Omaha working on a landscape crew, still behind a shovel but not happily as I had been up on the Niobrara. I felt a general navy blue shame but couldn’t think of an adequate penance in my parents’ terms. My dad’s probing question was how could I be at the same time so dumb and so smart, while my mother made a project out of finding me an appropriate shrink. Of the three we tried the only one I could deal with was a Jewish fellow from New York who was just starting out. He was hyperintelligent and seemed daffier than I was. We only talked for three sessions but at the time he made me feel less freakish though it was a disappointment when he said that he thought my talents were more metaphorical than taxonomical, thus I was a poor prospect for the sciences. Though I liked him I refused to go to him any longer after he became too intrusive by asking what I seemed to think was so virtuous about being an “outsider.”

  Fortunately they never built the dam at the Norden site. It wouldn’t have been a crime on the order of Glen Canyon but would have constituted, nevertheless, a criminal act worthy of explosives. There I go again, while sitting out the midday heat and planning an evening hike. I’ve been glassing a buckskin across the river who fades in and out of a willow thicket. He or she, I haven’t determined yet if it’s a mare or gelding, wears a halter and I suspect it’s a runaway as the immediate area is fenceless. For the past hour there’s been a miniature ice cube in my brain that says that rather than having gone too far I haven’t gone far enough. It’s been months since my brain has extended itself into one of those prolonged voyages into the bodies of a mammal, a bird, the stars, a creek or river, even a wild field where I could imagine everything that was happening upon myself. It’s probably fear holding me back. But then I’d read enough on the subject, perhaps too much, especially back in my anthropology days, to know it’s foolhardy in the sense that you are supposed to have a teacher, and my own self-taught methods plus books are not quite enough. Once while camped near Grassy Butte in western North Dakota I spent the whole of a cool, blustery May afternoon being a goshawk and had difficulty finding my actual body and reentering it. I slowed down on these practices for a while after that because it is an all-or-nothing proposition and I shied away from the final threshold. It’s not wishy-washy spiritualism but a specifically physical process. Say you see a goshawk quartering into a stiff spring wind and the bird draws upon you. You sit still for an hour or so and empty out all your mental contents and then let your imagination enter the bird. It does so completely and you easily leave where you already were. For obvious reasons it’s much more vertiginous than becoming a badger, a mammal I’ve always admired for its capacity to bury itself in minutes. Also, you can’t get anywhere unless you truly know the nature of what you are entering. For instance, I’ve flunked on white-tailed deer, mountain lions and Cooper’s hawks, because I don’t know them as well as mule deer, bobcats or prairie falcons which have been notable successes.

  Dear J.M.,

  I’m sitting on a grassy bank on the south side of the Niobrara near Norden where I was a pain in the ass as a worker on an archeological site. My parents never thought I was very good at self-judgment but I’ve had some regrets. For instance, yesterday morning I didn’t get to see your mare Vinnie you’ve talked about. I’ve also wanted to own a horse or two but have never stayed in one place long enough. Right now there’s a loose buckskin across the river staring out of a dark thicket at me. I don’t stare back because I don’t want to make it feel uncomfortable.

  Frankly my heart is way up in my throat and I seem to be feeding on it over what I’m going to do tomorrow morning. It’s not so much the primitive but normal emotional stuff like, “Why was I given away?” Maybe it’s a bit of that, but more so it’s the idea that my view of the world and my life will alter. That can’t help but happen. It’s like one of those terrifyingly emotional Spanish poems you are fond of. I’ve somewhat avoided that sort of thing in favor of the natural world though it often has occurred to me that that’s part of the natural world too. I remember in ninth grade English I was reprimanded after a teacher read a Keats poem for saying, “If that guy really means it we’re in a whole lot of trouble.” I only meant that if Keats’s world is the real one then we’re not living in it.

  I miss you a lot and keep thinking of your gorgeous bare knee poking through your jeans. I could have used a whole lot more. Love, Nelse.

  P.S. If we get hitched up I promise you horses, dogs, cats, and I will learn to endure your musical taste.

  Before my late-afternoon hike I checked the truck mirror again and other than seeing I was improving I wondered at the actual connection of what we look like and what we are. I mean beyond my parents’ usual insistence that the durable impression we make on others depends on our grooming and tailoring. My sisters kept watching the Planet of the Apes series with amazed delight though my mother would prattle at them that evolution wasn’t a proven theory as if changing species care about our conclusions. In the same sense I couldn’t draw any conclusions from the mirror or lift myself up off the ground to determine my mammalian density. Lift your dick slightly to avoid peeing on your pant leg. Human limitations were suddenly consoling. Perhaps I’m ten percent too fucking dumb to save my hide. I do know that one hour ago I ate the last mixture of sardines and rice in this life. The easiest eating move becomes sufficient. I’m dumping the contents of the remainder of the sardine case on a likely raccoon path by the river. It will be their first taste of a saltwater species.

  I was a scant hundred yards into my hike when tears formed from an unlikely direction. I had come back from the Sandhills to visit my sister Marianne who was in a hospital clinic that treated bulimia and anorexia. I brought a fading mixed bouquet of wildflowers including violet wood sorrel, show peavine and spreading pasque flower. She was a senior in high school at the t
ime, about five foot eight and down to less than ninety pounds. She refused to let my mother enter the room and only tolerated my father and Lucy for the briefest visits. I sat with her for a full three days and made a great effort to teach her how to tell the entire world to kiss her ass. This included refusing to go to Macalester, my mother’s alma mater, and instead going to Stephens in Missouri where she could take her horses. Dogs and cats were taboo in our house because of my mother’s nonimaginary allergies. By the third day I went out and got cheeseburgers and spaghetti which made her vomit but improved her morale. Her recovery was longish but she began to live a great deal more on her own terms. I didn’t get blamed for her new rebelliousness because my parents preferred a live daughter and she had been going in the other direction.

  I had supposed the tears came because it was the singular successful act in someone else’s behalf in my life, certainly not counting beating up Lucy’s boyfriend, or doling out my limited funds to other wanderers down on their luck. Instead, as I made my way down a deer path along the river, the tears increased and surrounded the idea that J.M. might finally say no to me. No to my existence in her life. I finally had to sit down and try to compose myself with the idea that she hadn’t yet said no. Something underneath was arising and it was the somewhat blurred features of my real mother walking down the sidewalk of the Pacific side of Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica. I couldn’t quite accurately reconstruct her features. I didn’t feel I could endure the sort of weeping collapse that had happened over my father’s death when I was well up Canyon de Chelly flopping around under a crabapple tree.