by Jim Harrison
When I reached the school the students seemed terribly happy to be back in bondage for the New Year. I couldn’t blame them as it seemed the same delightful place I remembered as a child. A half-shed windbreak had been built for the horses and three wore blankets while the other two were quite shaggy. Despite my being charmed there was a smallish streak of petulance in me that wanted to burn the place down and run off with the teacher. This feeling amused me. John Wesley had been dead for over thirty-five years, we were now into our sixties and had never gotten around to it. I had always cerebrally mocked the old saying “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” but this might be what it actually meant. It was less my inertia than her unspoken feeling that why couldn’t I just come back home? In the small foyer after I entered I first touched, then smelled her coat as a child would. So much for growing older. I looked at posters about food groups and brushing your teeth. I was carrying a small case of rock samples I’d found in Ruth’s old bedroom where I had sat down for a moment to read a book about the torments of Mozart’s life, put it away, and then found similar mudbaths with Brahms and Mendelssohn. All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.
My little chat to the students seemed to go over quite well though it was an effort to divert their interest from silver and gold. I assumed this intensity came from television but didn’t inquire. I’ve never owned one myself though my housekeeper has a TV in her room and I can catch its soft and tinny sound through the walls. I certainly don’t object to this. I’m not buying her life and she’s curious about the world of which I’ve seen too much.
Naomi let the kids out for recess. I helped her bundle up a few of the smallest and then bade her good-bye. She kissed me full on the lips, which was a pleasant surprise, and promised she would come down and see me during her Easter vacation. I couldn’t help but tease her about her motives in that the area where I live near the Mexican border has an influx of bird-watchers each spring that might very well equal the number of birds migrating. She blushed and said that I have always been nearly as interesting as a meadowlark, pinching my butt at the same time. I drove south.
I have always kept what I call “field notes” on my life though I’m not prone to reread them. There is such a lure to meaningless meaning in the face of the incomprehensible. I was, however, amazed that Nelse seemed imperturbable over losing his journals when his pick-up was stolen, but then he said he had begun to view the journals as a form of slavery. Now he appears to be mostly redirecting his compulsions by beginning a phenology of the ranch.
I’m a poor humanist but I remember well an old Yeats scholar way back at Brown who several times quoted us “Byzantium” from memory and I was very much struck by the line “The fury and the mire of human veins.” It seemed more a throwaway line than a summing up. This professor, though from Missouri, spoke in an irksome Irish brogue. He was commonly referred to as a “daffy old fruit” by his students, but I was curious about the extent to which Yeats ruled his life. Driving away from the country school I struggled to remember another passage from another Yeats poem from more than forty years before, something about age making one paltry unless you’re up to forcing your soul to clap its hands and sing. Of course poetry must be rendered precisely but I wondered how the thought behind the line struck me so forcefully. Dalva had reminded me after dinner the day before of the time in my casita down in Baja when late one still night the entire secluded bay had been filled with the sound of dolphins surfacing and breathing. That certainly had made our souls clap hands and sing but I’ve always known you have to be resourceful in the matter. You can’t depend on dolphins.
I pulled off the country road onto the snowy shoulder for a moment to decide if too much of my life had been based on aversion. Driving will do that sort of thing to one. The vehicle contains your consciousness and it speaks to you in myriad voices. This has long since ceased to confuse me. I certainly wasn’t going to become a rancher. My mother was somewhat asthmatic so my childhood winters were spent in Arizona, leaving John Wesley and my father to man the ranch. Arizona is one of those places where the formation of the earth is quite transparent and I early became fascinated with geology. There is a mystery underfoot that is largely ignored because it is largely invisible. Ergo, I became a geologist. I didn’t want to sit around and read and drink like my mother so I became a traveling, freelance geologist after three unfortunate wartime years working for a large corporation. I specialized in uranium deposits during that short time, a matter of some importance in the war effort so I was considered too valuable to be cannon fodder like my impulsive brother later became. My mind can’t say “uranium” now without a shudder of revulsion. After the war I only worked for individuals, usually determining the value or validity of mineral rights in inherited estates, though much of this work was done in Mexico. I also did some pro bono work for several Indian tribes to see if they were being swindled. Jean Paul Getty once made the not all that funny remark, “The meek shall inherit the earth but not the mineral rights.”
I had barely reached forty when botany and a number of other subjects became more interesting than geology. Oil and mineral rights, even water rights in the West are matters of relentless contentiousness among humans. It often became too exhausting to endure but then I could easily fall back on what I inherited from my mother. I have always lived relatively close to the bone and certainly in places thought undesirable to others of my background. This is not a pointless eccentricity but came from my early distaste working for the abstraction known as a corporation. I have made brief visits to friends, male and female, in expensive enclaves from Beverly Hills to Palm Beach and these places always have seemed bleakly comic. I rather like the smells of goats, sheep, chickens, cows, the cries of street vendors, even the smells of what my neighbors are cooking, the sounds of their children. Now I live rather remotely but still simply. I like to be close to life processes, from flora and fauna to people. I like both my rich and poor friends but with the former I don’t care for the shields, the barriers, the distances that keep them from all but their equals in wealth. Life is short. Why not be familiar with all of it? One quite wealthy friend contends that life is really rather long, an amusing difference of opinion. He is quite peculiar but perhaps so am I. The mainstream of any culture tends to be less than admirable.
The weather became poor and I only made it to Limon, Colorado, where I had a wretched dinner but the start of a pleasant evening in my motel room thinking of the fine time I had had with Naomi. As always Dalva had been problematical, wondering aloud on a walk, “What if Nelse doesn’t want this place?” I tried to be diffident about the enormity of the question but then she drew me up short by asking if I didn’t much care why had I bought out Ruth’s son, Bradley? Of course, she was right but I said I had used what I call “dead money,” funds that there was no likely use for, and because there were so few of us I wanted the succession graceful. I couldn’t really add that despite the distance I had kept I couldn’t bear to see the homeplace carved up during my lifetime, or the thought of it being carved up after I fumbled my way into the void.
I fell asleep with the light on and a book of Stephen Jay Gould essays on my chest, waking at three A.M. when the book thunked to the floor and the light went off. The bathroom light wouldn’t work and the wind outside was shrieking. Out the window the mercury-vapor streetlight that had irritated me earlier was also out and the parking lot cars were covered with snow and ice and resembled dead sheep in the faint moonlight. I became pissed off as if the weather should make an exception for my trip back to the border. I felt the panels of the electric baseboard heat and noted it couldn’t have been off for long. There was a small trunk of emergency supplies out in my old Land Cruiser and I had spent a great deal of time in areas of faulty electricity south of the border. The prospect of being truly cold could make the mind play unpleasant games. My younger friend Douglas had left his tent to take a pee in a blizzard in the Wind River area of Wyoming
and had barely refound his tent before freezing to death, a rather astounding prospect for a man who only wished to relieve his bladder.
I took a feeble penlight from my briefcase but it served only to make my other hand look old. I was going to note down an odd dream, a college test in the usual ugly classroom where I couldn’t identify any of a table of botanical specimens because my mind had created flora in minute detail that didn’t exist. How could this be? This dream experience quickly transliterated itself into the thought that I was as capable as my father in presenting a false picture of myself. This caused a sensation that reminded me of what Naomi must have felt when she broke through the thin pond ice. I had scorned the false gentility in my father’s memoir, remembering clearly a man so volatile that when he entered a room you weren’t sure if he might walk through the far wall, blasting apart plaster and timber. Maybe he simply didn’t remember himself that way. Until he was sixty or so, rather than getting off a horse, he vaulted off. He drove everyone a bit crazy except his granddaughter Dalva and his son John Wesley who was so intent on his own course that he ignored nearly everything else. John Wesley acted rather than reacted.
Perhaps the mind instinctively creates a safe middle way for memory? This was thin ice indeed for one who thinks he values self-honesty above all else, as if you could look at the vast and cloudy self the way you studied a mineral specimen, say when the mind is closer to a creek. You can become as wry, laconic and bemused as you wish if you blind yourself to the peripheries. I don’t see the pile of raw meat in the corner because I’m fixed on the sunset over the Patagonia mountains.
Rachel wasn’t a canine with a litter so both J.W. and I couldn’t be the father of Duane. I made love to her but once and then she quickly fell for J.W. the moment she met him at the cabin. She was mine for a scant few hours. There were also suspicions about my father but Rachel insisted that J.W. was Duane’s father. What a vast amount of time I’ve spent wondering about this and whether it truly mattered. And the fact is that in a real sense Duane had no father and by the time he showed up he didn’t want one. My own father tried, knowing the whole story. And when Dalva arrived in Mexico to attempt to modestly recover, to whom could I say about Duane and his suicide that my son did this to her? A man is not entitled to fuck a woman, leave town, and insist on the title of father any more than a loaned-out Hereford bull can prate about his calves.
The night-table light came back on and with it the ticking of the baseboard heat. Anger can purify your enfeebled secrets. In over forty years I’ve been taken with thirteen women and five of them decidedly resembled Naomi in some respects. The idea that these five were the least pleasant of the affairs doesn’t speak highly for my intelligence even though the original impulse tended to be subconscious. How can the subconscious not be part of our intelligence? I’m less sure of the ancient notion that romantic love in itself is a mental disease. How comic that I’m still dealing with Rachel and Naomi nearly forty-five years after the obvious fact that my brother swept them both away. When I drove into Buffalo Gap that coolish autumn afternoon I was sick of looking after my father and brother who were well intentioned but clumsy and sloppy on our hunting trip. I bribed Rachel away from the diner where she was working, the contents of my wallet doubtless greater than her lifetime earnings. My father has a cigar box of cash in his den that we were always welcome to and that in itself repelled me into a simpler life, but then he thought his own father’s Christian penury to be quite absurd. Nelse said that when he felt too comfortable he thought he was missing something.
I had been uncommonly nervous when I drove Rachel out the twenty or so miles to the cabin. The primitive road was littered with sharp rocks and I had a flat tire. Rachel helped me change it and while we squatted there together I could see well up her skirt and, always the gentleman, I tried to keep my eyes averted. She was the polar opposite of my Eastern girls, with her skin quite dark and her hair in braids. Her body was strong but exquisitely trim. I lay on the couch in the cabin, jangled with a hangover because the cabin was always an excuse to drink too much, watching her clean up the kitchen. I asked for a glass of cold water and when my fingers touched her own wrapped around the glass we dropped it on my chest. She covered her face with her hands as if in fear and I drew her down to me. All quite wonderful indeed but the memory is unfortunately mixed with another, perhaps its metaphoric equivalent. I was quail hunting down on the border with a friend from the north and when he reached down into an old coyote den to retrieve a wounded bird I yelled out but too late. He jerked his hand out with a rattler attached to it and he spent a few weeks recovering. That was also a long time ago in the mid-fifties and when he died last year up in Vermont I suspect the memory was still quite vivid to him.
Perhaps oddly, I never felt any ill will toward John Wesley. Much has been made of sibling rivalry but I doubt either of us felt this. There was simply no arena in which we competed. He met Naomi first and his love for her was total. I met Rachel first and it made no difference. I never went anywhere with John Wesley, from hotels in Chicago to parties in Omaha or Lincoln, where both women and men weren’t drawn immediately to his honest charm.
I called Naomi just before I left the motel in Limon. The weather was bad enough there, the same front from the west, that she had just finished making calls to all her students to cancel the day’s school. She seemed a bit distant to me but then I wondered in a millisecond what would have compensated for my half-sleepless night when like a nitwit, psychic geologist I had stared for too long at the compressed and inescapable sediment of genes. I paused overlong on the phone and then she said she wished that I was with her today. I said thank you, feeling a nearly absurd, instant sense of well-being. I then asked her if she might ever want to get married and she laughed and replied we would be much better off “living in sin” when we wished to see each other, which she thought would be often. That has to be enough, I thought, after we bade good-bye.
The weather didn’t clear until well south of Raton and then the sun shone and it was glorious, cold and sharp against the Sangre de Cristos. By midafternoon I had entered the Bosque del Apache just south of Socorro, a wildlife refuge where out of a long habit I stopped to take a nap. I find it consoling and sweet to sleep within the cacophony of birds and what better place for a man with this odd predilection than to pull up his vehicle near fields full of thousands of snow geese and sandhill cranes, the latter producing a harsh prehistoric music, perhaps my favorite of all birdsongs. It calls you back to a life without history. I was kept awake awhile by a single, modestly troubling thought that I had worked over enough so that it had lost its power to jolt. A few years ago Naomi had insisted I read The Brothers Karamazov and had sent along Dalva’s college copy. Naomi is an absolute virago when it comes to her insisting you read a book and rather than enduring a long series of “did you read it yet” I went ahead during a week of hot July evenings in the San Rafael Valley where I live. My initial resistance had come from reading the same author’s The Possessed for a political science course back at Brown dealing with the roots of the Russian Revolution, and I can still think of no more troubling book I have ever read. The reading went along fine with the Karamazov family until Misha, I think that’s his name, the bully brother, beat up and dragged little Kolya’s father down the street by his beard right in front of his son. I hit this passage during a severe thunderstorm and I frankly admit that I wept because when I was seven, surely one of the most vulnerable ages, and John Wesley was six, we had gone to town with my father one Saturday during deer season. Going to town on Saturdays was quite a thrill for us because we got to stop at the tavern owned by my father’s bird-hunting crony and eat a hamburger, a menu item that was out of the question at home. On Saturdays the tavern was always filled with ranchers, cowboys, farmers and hired hands who drank while their wives shopped and the kids played in the vacant lot next door. On this particular Saturday there were also several groups of deer hunters, including a group of railroad employ
ees from over in Alliance whom my father had denied permission to hunt on his extensive, at the time, land holdings in the area. The ringleader and largest of the group, a real grain-belt monster, had stopped at our table and taunted my father, saying he had cut a fence and driven his vehicle onto the property to retrieve a wounded deer and since it was after the fact and he had mended the fence my father couldn’t do a damn thing about it. His booming voice made me fearful and I remember a french fry catching in my throat. My father put down his hamburger and without getting up drove a fist so hard into the man’s gut that his mouth exploded with vomit, much of which hit our table. My father then got up and walloped the man in the face two or three times with an open hand. The man dropped to his knees and my father kept booting his ass as the man scrambled frantically for the door. His friends jumped up but were told to keep their places by others in the bar. My father came back to the table and with what I remember as merry laughter asked the waitress to clean up the table and bring us a fresh meal. Can this be true? I remember it as if seeing a movie from the front row. I wept while John Wesley beamed.
I slept until twilight when my snow geese and cranes were flying in from every direction with their voices an intermittent din. Just before he died my father told me he had dreamt that the voice of God sounded like a billion birds. Other than its content the statement was surprising as I couldn’t recall his ever using the word “God” except in a curse. Since I savor such dreams I had told him he was lucky to have had it. Perhaps the reappearance of his friend Smith had been the most disturbing thing in this somewhat suspicious memoir with all the gentility I never noted while growing up. But then again, who has a better right to record our lives than ourselves? I suddenly regretted the anecdote I had told Nelse when he was down in the fall and had read the manuscript in a single day. In the winter of 1958 right after I had read the memoir I had been in New York City on business and spent an afternoon in the main branch of the splendid New York Public Library. After some effort and the help of a librarian I found items in two newspapers about the summer of 1913 incident when my father had “throttled” and “pitched” two assailants into the Hudson River. The police were searching for an “unknown man,” though the drowned and recovered bodies were those of “two known criminals.” At the time I tended to think of it as murder though later I was somewhat up in the air on the matter. Nelse, however, saw it as a case of clear self-defense. Both newspapers had mentioned that the man was “well dressed,” though one of them quoted a bystander from Iowa relating that the man was a “huge redskin.” My father never looked so to me but whenever as an experiment I showed his photo to a Native they invariably knew and tended to guess him as at least the half he was.