The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  At this sodden point I was lucky to hear far-off crows and stalked my way downriver toward the growing cacophony, moving up into the high-bank brush to conceal my approach. Crows are difficult to stalk unless they’re quarreling, though less so than their Corvidae relatives the ravens. I was startled by what appeared to be a rattler but turned out to be a hognose which flopped over in a parody of death, their main defense other than their rattler appearance. I glassed down a rock and scrub-strewn bank to see the crows feeding between a closer patch of rice cut-grass and the river bulrush tight to the Niobrara. The prey looked to be a smallish mule deer that perhaps had stumbled on the steep slope while being chased by a coyote pack. In any event the carcass had to be torn open by coyotes first in order for the crows to feed as they are unable to penetrate a deer’s tough hide by themselves.

  There were enough glances up the hill in my direction for me to know they knew I was here, doubtless alerted by the scout crow in a tall pine across the river. I pulled myself into a seated position and watched them bully each other noisily to be in the prime feeding place. It wasn’t as quarrelsome as it could be because there was plenty to eat. For some reason Ralph hadn’t liked crows and when they flew over he’d run in circles, his head craned straight up, barking, and frequently running into something.

  I used to be a little nervous about this Sioux country. I’d made a foray northwest of here on a day off back during my archeological dig mudbath, driving from Wewela over to Keyapaha, up toward Mission, then on Route 18 west past Parmelee all the way to Pine Ridge. I had left at dawn in a mood of great enthusiasm, returning by nightfall with my brain clubbed to jelly by what I’d seen. I had read a great deal and should have known better but then I almost never do. The question in mind was, How could I think my less than a third blood had any meaningful connection to the people of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge? The poverty formed the main energy in this lesson of humiliation. How could this have been allowed in the United States? Easy, evidently, I was to learn as my road life progressed well off the main traveled routes and their deceptive prosperity.

  Of course I was nineteen at the time, an age of intense vulnerability when the heart is usually either soaring or plummeting, or mine was anyway. You think you’re meant to understand everything and when you don’t you stew dankly in your own juices. But now, after a dozen or so trips into the area, I tend to think of genes as a scientific artificiality and my only connection to the original culture might be my nomad’s life and my attention to the natural world. Growing up the way I did I probably had a solider relationship with photos of Marilyn Monroe. I was pleased after my father’s death to find a nude photo of her in a locked desk drawer in the den. The enjoyment of this was leavened by an envelope bearing my name with a recent date. I’m not sure, of course, if it was a premonition or an act of a doubting conscience. “Dear Nelse, Why not live the way you want to? What do any of us really know about how our children should live, short of trying to prevent them from ending up in prison. Keep an eye on your mother whom we both know doesn’t have both oars in the water. Love, Dad.”

  I sat on the bank until it was nearly dark and the crows had long since disappeared weighted by full bellies with the soft flap of their wings fading in the twilight air. Among other things, I’d rehearsed my arrival at the Northridge place. I recalled that in the letter I’d asked my boss to write, tomorrow was the actual day so I’d been inadvertently right. I’d be strong and silent and let this Naomi do the talking. We’d spend two days on the bird survey and my new grandmother would doubtless introduce me to my mother and neither of them would have any idea of who I was. Whether I divulged this would be up to me and it would obviously depend on the emotional content of the meeting. Were they vaguely compatible? Were they intelligent? That sort of thing. Samuels had told me in his usual guarded, lawyerly way that they had some money and this was a strike against them to me, though he had added that they had never been “spenders.” At the time he said this I thought I might look at these people as an anthropologist would a freshly discovered culture which I now realized was a fundamentally creepy attempt to build some armor around myself.

  I made my way back carefully in the near dark to my campsite, my stomach fluttering with butterflies as if it were the eve of being shipped off to war. I’d thought about the insubstantiality of moods numberless times but there was no denying the real weight of this one. I mean especially the triggers of moods as thoughts and images arise in your brain: first mother, second one, Ralph, J.M. looming in the gathering night, before or after lunch when the brain is duller, shit-stained politics, overgrazed land, the first naked girl you saw other than your sisters, pointed out by her brother as you hid in the shrubbery and peeked in the window where she lay pinkly bare the hair thatch twisting as she turned over on the bed, three days of cloud cover interrupted by a flash of sunlight that primally lifts the spirit, a new birdcall a blessed question mark in your ears. For instance, I look up at the stars which are normally a friendly sight, but tonight they look cold, remote, almost brutal, utterly inexplicable, and it will be gentler to look at my pocket watch than to tell time by these alien lights. I lie there talking to myself, adding mental words to each side of the scale, trying to balance what I’m going to do in the morning. If only I could nudge Ralph during his dog snores or calm him when a noise would make him scramble to get into my sleeping bag but then that wouldn’t help tonight. J.M. alone could soothe my brain until at least dawn but then neither of them are here except in spirit. And maybe this mood of relentless talking to myself is schizophrenic. Who am I talking to? I am my own cattle prod. The brilliant black graduate assistant liked to quote an Englishman named Laing who said, “The mind of which we are unaware is aware of us.” I remember this because after ten years it still puzzles me, as much so as the fact of stars. In Sonora while gazing at the clearest stars ever I put an old palo verde log on my fire and black scorpions scooted out of the holes. Oh to be for a while a scrawny bear in June feeding on beach peas and wild strawberries, nosing the flowery air near the beach. Time is a slug or snail tonight. Let’s have a hearty smile from the stars so I can note the time without a flashlight. What is J.M. wearing in bed? Tricksters trick themselves. Coyote burned off his balls chasing a Ponca girl, or so the dead man said. Will I screech when I die? When we flew over the Northridge place coming way up from Grand Island I saw a good, mixed square mile for phenology, the dated arrivals and departures of all flora and fauna, mammal mating and whelping, flowering of plants, leafing of trees, time without artifice, time without the vulgarity of clocks. Two merging creeks, a pond and slough, the creek emptying into the Niobrara. As a junior anthro I was always ready to reduce the dimensions of people in order to see the pattern but that is also done with birds. That temporary shrink way back when said our predominant emotion is dislocation. Yes or no? I don’t know. God might be a he or she but is definitely not human if I can trust my own authority which I can’t. Julian Jaynes said that when early man talked to the gods they were certain he could hear their words. I suppose that in this century since we no longer believe in evil as a force we can’t believe God listens. A whippoorwill! Just what I was waiting for. Even the implacable stars warm up a bit, soften.

  I left an hour before dawn, having given up on the idea of more sleep. I was clutching at my sleeping bag as if it were my anchor on earth and maybe it is, the anchor worn to a big lumpy rag like a child’s favorite blanket. Just get in your truck and drive, you dickhead, I thought, before your stomach creeps up past the heart already in your throat. I even turned on the despised radio for the livestock and weather report followed by lachrymose country songs, including an old one by Merle Haggard with an improbably fatal line, “I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole.” Here was a call for empathy I couldn’t begin to muster.

  I arrived too early with just a tinge of light in the northeastern sky, so I drove down a dwindling gravel road north toward the Niobrara for a few miles, passing the driv
eway to the old homestead, the location recalled from my aerial reconnaissance. The gravel road dead-ended at the river where curling, diaphanous mist moved over the water and a heron decided to ignore me near an eddy bordered by cattails. I made coffee in my cigarette-lighter gizmo and had momentary praise for modernity.

  After making my guts raw with coffee I doubled back and on a sudden impulse headed up the drive toward the homestead, passing through a rather grand acre or so of lilac bushes that must have been overwhelming in bloom. The shelterbelt trees that had lined the gravel road continued to confuse me on my way up the driveway and into the yard though I knew there had been many European introductions in the late nineteenth century, sold as rootstock by nurseries in Illinois and Iowa. I noted deciduous caragana, wild plum, Russian olive, and the larger green ash, black walnut, European larch, and a great deal more. How eccentric.

  My stomach was thumping as I made a quick turn around the oval drive noting my mother’s battered Subaru, and an old aqua-colored Ford convertible without a top. The house was largish and resembled a Connecticut farmhouse, again from the nineteenth century, with a broad porch, and the paint faded to the point you couldn’t quite determine the color though it was probably white. Despite this everything was in crisp repair with multiple flower beds, and a tire swing hanging from an elm branch. When was there last a child here, I wondered. It certainly wasn’t me. I sped up as a pen of geese started honking wildly. Further back there was a corral of four glaring horses against the big barn, several outbuildings, including a bunkhouse with curtains. My skin prickled and my heart fluttered at my sense of trespass so I stepped on the gas and the gravel in the drive rattled under my fenders. My mother might be a late sleeper like the other one and these pinging stones wouldn’t help.

  Back on the country road I was still hyperventilating and slowed to watch a group of red-winged blackbirds, one of my favorites. Above their chatter there was the melodious trill of meadowlarks announcing day. The air was coolish but I was beginning to sweat. Onward and presumably upward, goddammit!

  Naomi, my grandmother, was sitting on a porch swing drinking coffee when I came up the drive. The house looked nearly a replica of the other but vaguely newer, with a largish vegetable garden off to the side and the trees not so large. The outbuildings were in trim shape but looked as if they had been unused for a long time.

  I pulled up behind a ten-year-old Plymouth sedan, the typical schoolteacher’s car, and nearly stumbled as I got out. There was a single noisy crow above me in an ash tree and I paused to look at it and regather what was left of myself. As I came up the porch steps the crow glided close to my back and I nearly stumbled again.

  “I raised him,” she said, smiling and standing up, offering her hand, but looking at me rather closely.

  “Nelse Carlson,” I said, “and you’re Naomi. I hope I’m not bothering you. It shouldn’t take over two days at the most and then I’m off.”

  We spoke briefly about the Breeding Bird Survey and I was more than a little unnerved by her sidelong glances which, though restrained, seemed to hold more than ordinary curiosity. There was a suppressed urge to babble out the whole business but I was sure this wasn’t the right move and besides, how did I know I’d be welcome? I mean if your fifteen-year-old daughter got pregnant by whomever you might wish to keep the memory forever in a well-locked closet. I glanced down at an open bird book on the porch swing where she had been having coffee and the sight of a green jay on the open page helped lessen the prickling on my scalp. It turned out we had both seen the bird in the vicinity of Harlingen, Texas, where she had once been to observe migrating warblers, though only briefly as the spring vacation at the country school where she had taught was a short one.

  She insisted on making breakfast and inside the house there was the problem of tunnel vision. I couldn’t make myself look around the parlor but followed her to the dining room where she had laid out maps of the farm, including aerial photos, and a few monographs by ornithologists dealing with the immediate area. One was quite recent which betrayed the fraud of my invented project but she didn’t mention it when she returned silently from the kitchen with coffee and orange juice and caught me flipping the pages. One end of the dining room was solid books including a library ladder to reach the highest shelves. I got up and looked them over, feeling melancholy over the collection in my stolen truck when I saw so many of my old favorites, including William Bartram, Audubon, Thomas Nuttall, John Muir, Bent, Beston, and Matthiessen. A nitwit high school English teacher had said the prose in my essay assignments was “oldtimey” and wondered why. I said I thought it was because I had spent so much time with this kind of book but he wasn’t familiar with many of the names which was an eye-opener. I wondered at the time and still do why they allow people to teach who don’t read.

  She called out to ask whether I wanted my eggs over or up and when I turned I saw three portraits of three men at the far end of the room, obviously three consecutive generations and I couldn’t tell at this distance if they were photographs or painted. None of them looked particularly friendly but then that was probably my mood which resembled that during my visits to the Haida up on the Queen Charlotte Islands, and to the Hopi. These were people who taught me that this is truly not one world. Their legacies were ancient, their customs particularly their own, and without our intervention they would have remained virgo intacta in their unique traditions. They had no need for the slightest incursion from the rest of us. I only became a bit agreeable to them by keeping my mouth shut and loving the landscape in which they lived, and by knowing the animals to which they were drawn.

  I was still twisted in my chair and staring at the portraits when Naomi put my breakfast before me. She politely broke my trance by going over to the portraits and telling me who was who as a mock schoolmarm might. The first John Wesley Northridge started the farm in 1891, the second spent his life here, and the third, her husband, had died as a pilot in the Korean War. Of course I was the prodigal by no fault of my own but my eyes had turned to a photo of two young women on a fireplace mantel. They were sitting on the porch swing raising wine glasses, and Naomi said, “These are my daughters, Ruth and Dalva.”

  Now I’m alone at twilight, camped near the pond and creek I had noted from the air in the heart of the property. Naomi said it had never been touched to any degree by cattle but was from the beginning the family camping spot, two hundred acres or so bordered by thickets and shelterbelts, and composed mostly of marsh with a few hummocks of higher ground that held trees, a pond on the south side, and a slow creek moving north toward the Niobrara.

  I don’t recall spending a less focused day. I refused dinner saying I had to collect my notes and she had freely offered the camping spot when we had lunch on the sandbank of the pond. Now in the evening I admit to the sudden weight of resentment when it occurs to me that this marvelous habitat could have been my own to grow up in. This thought is really pissing in the wind but is, nevertheless, there to tug at heart and mind.

  I was so inept today that I’m sure this woman thinks I’m clumsy as hell as a birder. Warblers were never my strong point but I wouldn’t have normally fucked up the yellow warbler, yellow-rumped warbler and yellow-throated warbler. All of her corrections came in the form of a polite question. “Mightn’t that be a spotted sandpiper rather than a western sandpiper?” Why yes, of course, and I’ll try to get my head out of my ass before I run head-on into a cottonwood. She was amused when I told her a story from my college ornithology course about how the girls in the class had T-shirts made in honor of the female spotted sandpiper which is energetically promiscuous for a bird. The young men in the class were irritated. When she teasingly asked me if I had been irritated I said I was only an exception because there were hundreds of things that irritated me more than the ordinary squabbles between the sexes. For instance, outside the classroom building which was nearly all glass I found dozens of songbirds that had bashed themselves to death against the windows. She had hea
rd estimates as high as over a hundred million a year of birds that had died thusly, adding as threats broadcasting towers, power lines, pollution, cars. We dwelt on the evolutionary curve and wondered jointly if birds would ever learn about windows. We doubted it as we with our very large brains had never learned about war. She said that way back in the Middle Ages in Europe hell was envisioned as a place without birds. To lighten up she told me an entertaining story from two weeks back about how a visiting historian from Stanford had gotten very lost in this area and had to be rescued by a makeshift posse of locals.

  Dear J.M.,

  I’m sitting here at twilight by a pond eating a very large pot roast sandwich with mustard and raw onion, possibly the best sandwich of my life. It was made for me by my new grandmother, Naomi, who is an interesting woman. I have grave doubts about how I’m handling this like I’m acting with too much backspin. This has caused me to have doubts while I’m sitting here about having to stay away from you for a whole month. As an old song goes, my heart cries for you, sighs for you, etc., that kind of romantic malarkey. But it does. It’s the solstice and my thoughts are not on planetary specifics but you. Today I was strictly Daffy Duck, my boyhood comic favorite who was arrogant, inept, pretentious, in short I was a fuckup. I tried to cover some avian misidentifications by being more theoretical, blabbing about bark glean, commensal eating, possible migratory strategies, and lekking species. That sort of thing. I suspect she thinks I’m peculiar. Aren’t we all? But then that’s a cop-out. She’s a Scandinavian of some sort and her husband, my grandfather, died way back when in the Korean War. I saw a nice photo of my mother and her sister at your age. I think she’s suspicious, but pleasantly so, as this kind of nesting survey should have been done several weeks ago. My mother is a couple of miles away on the ranch at a house Naomi calls the old place. I drove in the yard for a quick look at dawn. Countless thousands of trees were planted around the turn of the century because the ancestor was from New England and wanted his pastures and tilled fields protected from the wind and also as a source of wood for heat and lumber. Naomi’s house itself spooked me for a number of reasons I can’t locate. The furnishings and decorations appear to be from back around World War II or older. It reminded me of the furnishings of our neighbor Samuels who was always sort of my godfather. Did I tell you she’s been a schoolteacher for forty years at a country school? Perhaps I can see why you want to be a teacher. For instance, I pretend to hate anthropology but it should be taught in high schools so young people know who the hell they are other than money-grubbing Nebraskans. Anyway, I’m going to call you because I can’t stand not to. Why should we be limited by a bunch of perimeters? It’s your business if you won’t talk to me. I love you. Nelse.