The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

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  I must say I slept like an actual log, not so much from the long day’s walk but that I had begun to resolve the core of my life. A big item! At dawn I had barely stirred the coals in my fire while watching a blue heron spear frogs, and was thinking of a cryptic statement of my Zen girlfriend’s to the effect that ashes don’t return to wood, when Naomi showed up with a thermos of coffee and a fried sausage sandwich. While I ate the sandwich she modestly identified the dozen or so birds we could hear while we sat there with the sun rising through a thicket fifty feet away so that we were speckled with pieces of gold light. We were quiet for ten minutes as this golden light also burnished a section of the pond, diffusing itself as it rose through the canopy of thicket until the top looked like it was burning with sun and rising ground mist. Three mallards came in for a clumsy landing when they saw us and tried to reverse course, bawling us out with their nasal quacks and hisses. We talked about preferences in birds, which one can’t help having, and hers were for the ordinary local residents, meadowlarks, bobolinks and longspurs. My own, goshawks and northern shrikes, seemed pointlessly masculine, except for the canyon wren of the Southwest.

  We finished the checklist by early afternoon when we were at the edge of a mile-long pasture near the old place. She wanted me to meet her daughter and her houseguest which put my heart back in my throat. I hoped she hadn’t sensed this but I entered a stream of fibs to the effect that I wished to pay her for her time, and that I had to drive way up to Minneapolis to file a report. This was barely out of my mouth when I realized she’d know that the survey was headquartered in Lincoln. I tried to cover up two fibs with yet another by saying that if she was interested there might be more work in a week or so.

  She stopped me in the middle of the pasture and asked if something was wrong with me. I blurted out that I was terribly afraid that the girl I loved didn’t love me as much. She nodded, paused, then continued walking without saying anything.

  Luckily no one was home but a large ungainly housekeeper woman named Frieda who was picking lettuce and peas. She was a cranky sort but gave us a ride back to Naomi’s in an overpowered Dodge pick-up which she drove straight-armed like a race-car driver, her big right arm deftly speed shifting. I was afflicted with pounding temples and couldn’t say a thing when Frieda nearly spun out, swerving to miss a hen pheasant. Naomi gripped my arm, then gave my hand a squeeze, whispering in my ear that she was sure my girlfriend would come to her senses. The delayed reaction was poignant to me as it seemed meaningful.

  I went immediately to retrieve my gear back at the pond, running most of the way in a mixture of anxiety and rage at myself. All of my rehearsals for this visit which had begun when I saw Dalva walking in Santa Monica, and in other forms before that, had come down to a self-administered mudbath. What the hell did I have in mind. All I wanted to do now was cut and run back to the safety of the cab of my pick-up.

  I quickly packed up my gear with my lungs struggling for breath, then sat myself down unintentionally hard on the sandy bank of the pond somewhat, I thought, like a child will injure itself during a tantrum. Holy shit, what a fool. I stripped to my skin and dove into the pond. How did I think reality would match my intentions for it? And with me in control as if I was godlike at the steering wheel, as absurd as Frieda squealing the tires from gravel to blacktop. I had all of the rapacity of the culture I assumed I loathed. I’ll see if they’re worthy of me, indeed.

  I swam underwater along the bottom of the pond, noting in the sand the indentations of small springs, until I reached the area that had been burnished by the rising sun, then came up at the last possible moment when my eyes had begun to darken. The question was why didn’t I during those lovely moments at dawn merely say, “I am your grandson.” The worst she could have said was, “Go away,” and I would have been better off, or so I supposed with the usual all-or-nothing absurdity.

  When I reached the house Naomi was back on her porch swing with classical music coming through the screen door, drinking lemonade. She offered me some and I refused, now itching to call J.M. and certainly not from here. I thanked her and said I hoped we could work together again. She smiled, then had a disturbingly quizzical look that said without words, “Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking.” But I didn’t. I left.

  I called J.M.’s home from a pay phone outside a tavern in a county seat a couple dozen miles down the road, waiting first for two teenage girls who were shrieking into the phone to boyfriends. They wagged their asses at me as they left. Ample asses, at that. After five rings which reverberated nastily on my brainpan, J.M.’s mother answered and said that J.M. was out haying with her father. Naturally I had expected J.M. to be sitting there politely by the phone. Then her mother asked, “Did you get to meet your people?” and I answered “Just the grandmother but I didn’t admit who I was because I couldn’t.” There was a long pause and then she said, “Oh for Christ’s sake, it’s not my business but you should clear this up. I trust my daughter and from what I hear you’re a good man. Maybe a little peculiar but that’s up to her.” There was another pause and then I said 1 had to see J.M. soon if it was possible. This brought on full laughter and she said that I had twenty-eight days to go but that tomorrow was Sunday and relatives were coming though Monday would be fine. My ears still rung with the twenty-eight days for a few moments before it occurred to me that she was saying I could see her daughter in a day and a half. I said, “Thank you” and then her voice came on cool, almost harsh, saying that if I wished to prevent J.M. from finishing her last year of college she would do all she could to make my life unpleasant. I promised I wouldn’t and her voice softened again saying she looked forward to seeing me on Monday.

  I’m not much of a drinker for obvious reasons but I headed into the saloon after looking up and down the heat-shimmering main street, noting all the bustle of ranchers and farmers and their families in town on Saturday afternoon shopping and visiting. It might seem quaint to some but it wasn’t.

  The tavern was quite crowded with burly types in whose hands beer bottles looked small. Out of habit I listened to the collection of voices to trace accents, coming up with mostly Czech and Scandinavian and one brash metallic voice with a trace of a whine from a red-nosed man in his late thirties with a very old farmer who, despite the heat, wore his denim jacket buttoned to his Adam’s apple. The younger man was being teased a bit by others and it occurred to me he was the Northridge houseguest, the Stanford historian, who had been quite lost in the not very challenging landscape. He drank beer straight from the bottle, tipping the bottle up and chugging as if he had been weaned too early. He was an extreme form of my favorite kind of college teacher, one who broke through all polite academic restraints by the force of his obsession with his field of study. In common parlance they were fools but give me a fool anytime, like the poor young ornithology graduate student who rode a bicycle thousands of miles around America for three years toting up his species count. This scholar and houseguest, Michael by name, told me, as we played a game of pool, that some of the soil in the area was still likely moist with Native blood, and that other than southern New Mexico with its remnant Apache and Comanche conflicts at the end of the century, this was the last area in America where the full collision of cultures had taken place.

  I’m not exactly an amateur in this area of study but it wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to talk about in that I was still savoring the prospect of J.M. come Monday. I moved over to a corner with a fresh beer and watched the old man in the denim jacket bounce around playing a miniature violin and singing. This must have been a common occurrence as others joined in. Through the window I could see women and children sitting on a long bench chatting animatedly, doubtless waiting for their beer-drinking husbands and fathers. I left when two behemoths started bellowing about shipping fever and cattle, then began wrestling and knocking over tables. I crossed the street to Lena’s Cafe which, just short of five o’clock, was already full of senior citizens e
ating their dinners with the slow relish of the older. I sat at the counter where I was waited on by a young Viking woman whose pink name badge spelled Karen. She had taken in her waitress dress so that it was tight across her fanny and I missed my mouth with a forkful of mashed potatoes looking at it. She bent over twice to fetch coffee cups directly in front of me. Even antelopes would leap and fight over this butt. Dear J.M., I’m only looking. When I left she gave me the pouty look favored by females in skin magazines that dweebs look at to pulverize their weenies.

  I headed toward the southeast, lacking the energy for driving fast which would have been for no good reason. Suddenly I felt immensely burned out but then the day had started long ago at the pond with Naomi’s soft footfalls coming up behind me. She scarcely fit my preconception of grandma and I guessed her to be in her mid-sixties though her appearance was well short of that. She was quite the walker and she said she generally walked before and after school, in the morning to compose her mind and in the afternoon to let her mind settle back down after a day of teaching. A few summers back she had taken a Lindblad voyage up the Amazon but the lack of walking possibilities had made her irritable, and besides it would have taken a lifetime to learn the area like she had her “homeground.” I felt slightly addled about this notion as I had just been somewhat bragging up my hundreds of varied camping spots. She was curious about my favorites and I rattled them off and she was pleased they included this part of Nebraska. She was also curious about Ekalaka in the area of the Powder River in southeast Montana, the state highway coming in from the south still gravel. I had to describe the place for her in detail which made me wish I hadn’t lost my journals. Reading a few sections might impress her and then she would say, “I wish you were my grandson” and I’d say, “I am.”

  This was goofy enough that I blushed and drove off the road east of Brewster for a doze, recalling our discussion of birds as miniature flying dinosaurs, a current ornithological quarrel. Naomi also didn’t care for airplanes, partly because her husband died flying one, and in part because she wanted the bird’s-eye view to remain in her imagination. I admitted then that I had had to limit myself and wear blinders as the world I loved tended to exist in only small pieces here and there. National parks were far too crowded and one dared not fall in love with any beautiful national forest land as on returning it would likely have been clear-cut. Washington and Oregon might look good from the ground but from an airliner window you could see they had cheated and much of the land was a savage mess. This had made her somber but then she teased me that as a nomad I certainly had enough hideouts to last a lifetime.

  I had fallen asleep deeply enough to pitch my head forward and thunk it against the steering wheel. The small orange fire that erupted was a bonfire my grandfather started for me in a blizzard up in Minnesota on a family trip to see my grandmother after she became ill. I liked the idea of grandparents and regretted the idea that my mother’s parents had died rather early, from too much booze my father later told me. Anyway, my mother was hysterical that she was trapped by a blizzard in a log cabin. My father and I failed to soothe her and my sisters were luckily always able to ignore her by playing double solitaire. My grandfather took me outside and we roasted bratwurst over a fire in the driving snow. He had a shed full of dry cedar kindling which smelled wonderful.

  I sat there yawning and made a cup of coffee in my lighter gizmo. With my binoculars I could see across the Loup River to where I’d camped for a few days back in college when I was writing a paper on native grasses. A rather progressive young rancher had let me camp on his property and suggested a ten-acre niche near the Loup which had been fenced off from cattle for a family camping spot for generations. It certainly hadn’t been as splendid as the Northridge holy ground but I had found a number of my favorite grasses: sawbeak sedge and slender flatsedge, reed canary grass, porcupine grass, redtop, prairie dropseed. The grasses diminished and the view through the binoculars faded with the image of J.M. squirming out of her jeans in the warbler woodlot near Garland. I could be as angry as I wished over not being raised by the family I belonged to but then I would inevitably be swept away by the fragilities of time and location and how minutely it is broken down to the series of accidents and coincidences known as life. It was ironical to forgive those who gave me up because otherwise I wouldn’t have met J.M. I wondered what side of this interior argument was irrational, or were both? The fact of our existence is so inalterably raw that you cringe when you look at it too closely. An infant is given away and at that moment its familial predestination is radically changed. And no doubt the mother, however young, keeps mapping the child’s possibilities in her imagination.

  Another hour down the road and it occurred to me I didn’t know where I was headed. This addled me in the twilight and I stopped to check the map as if to confirm my existence. For some reason a truck cab didn’t seem as safe since I’d met Naomi and it had already diminished a lot after my second meeting with J.M. when I perceived I was a goner.

  Just before dark I reached Dannebrog and figured I’d camp along the Loup (splendid name) on the property of a professor I liked way back when. He was a huge burly fellow, an expert on the Omaha Indians and also a folklorist in an age wherein actual folks were disappearing at a startling rate unless you knew how to look for them. There were no recent tire marks on his two-track so I concealed the pick-up in the bushes and made my way to an ancient log cabin he had moved there and reconstructed. There was a proper fire ring and I spread my sleeping bag beside it and made a minimal campfire. I expected insomnia because I had been hit hard by an obvious question: Why had I been such a chickenshit and not simply sat in that yard until my mother returned? The grandmother wasn’t the point. I felt like the goddamned coward I must be when it came to my deeper emotions which now were crawling around on the surface of my skin. I lay there drifting for hours, pleased that the foliage above was thick enough to keep me from tracking my star clock. I’d trotted to this thicket like a wounded lapdog and I don’t know enough about her to speculate an ounce other than where she lives now and her photo on the mantel from when she was younger than me. Maybe she’s like her mother which would be fine. Give it up. See J.M., then go back you goddamned fool. Back to that inland sea, Lake Superior, so fresh it smelled like flowers rising up with faraway ducks bobbing in this estaurine wave lap. You don’t have to lift the binoculars every time, with clouds, mare’s tails they call them, highly scudding, then stretched until they can no longer elongate without disappearing. Dad and Samuels took me fishing in the ocean way down in Islamorada but all the birds were near shore in the mangrove islets intersected by aqua and greenish tidal channels. They just brought up fish that were clubbed and died. A single sailfish, amber-jack, one wahoo. The old book calls it mare tenebrosum, the sea of darkness when you look over the side straight down, but I like the in-betweens of everything where life is, the edges between field and forest, the edges of green clots of mangrove and low-tide nearby sandspits where birds feed. On the night of the third day eating weird new fish I asked if 1 could see birds and Samuels went to the desk of the lodge. Maybe I was eleven years old. Next dawn a lady made of leather showed me all day long thousands of birds. The sun made her into leather though she wasn’t Indian. The roseate spoonbills popped my young skull. She peed over the side of the boat, then said fish are like underwater birds so I leaned over the skiff deck and watched the passing creatures in the tidal thrust. J.M. has never seen the ocean. Will you take me there, big shot, the first time anyone called me that. Are you upset all those men have seen my butt? Testing me I guess. No, I’m the only one in the cosmos who really understands your butt, dear. I added dear which pissed her off. That’s for when we’re over fifty. Every shred and ounce of nature equals mortality. We must not stand up to this but absorb it. I dread J.M.’s records though perhaps I could use some music. Lucy was good at the flute which wasn’t bad from the next room. I shined a flashlight up at my ceiling constellations in the worst depths of
winter when I couldn’t sleep outside. Dad sent off for the best sleeping bag, good enough for Tibet, and I’d awake to the early Omaha traffic in the distance with snow covering my sleeping bag where I was warm as a womb baby. Who are we in the dark anyhow.

  Sunday morning and spiffy people coming home from church. I approach Mother’s house so slow the truck lugs in low gear. A dapper man squints at my lightning strokes, sees my face and waves. That man was always trying to give boys a squeeze which we thought was funny but it’s somehow serious now. There’s a new BMW which you don’t see in Nebraska outside of Omaha. Money is a terrifying problem. People with a lot are always trying to get more and when you ask them they’re not sure why. When they run out of things to spend on they even insist their kids look rich. But then the country isn’t at all what it largely thinks it is. The money is too thin and unevenly spread. People crave to be what they see they’re supposed to be on television and few of them can. Of course in other cultures this money could be green stones rather than greenbacks, or cows or horses, camels, ivory, grain, goats, whatever. There was the sudden errant thought that my six hundred dollars a month wouldn’t take us very far if J.M. married me. The concern was jumping the gun a bit but still there. That amount was food and gas money with not much left over. There was some insurance money left by my dad in a bank account but my sister Marianne looked after that sort of thing. She’s a business whiz and along with her girlfriend they’ve bought and redone a number of houses, and lately an apartment house, down in Lawrence, Kansas, which is also the location of the Corvus Society. Of course Marianne has told me that I’m the “biggest fucking neurotic in the world” about money. Maybe so. It’s always been an unpleasant abstraction to me, a tool of control. Is the house where I’m parking my truck worth ten years of a well-paid person’s salary? Ten years of time which has a tendency not to replace itself.