by Jim Harrison
No wonder that Nelse, Paul and Naomi became obsessed with the natural world, the grace of the divinely ordinary. Paul and Naomi made forays into the numinous, the metaphysical from that base, Nelse less so. Paul could take a four-hour walk, check a botanical text for certain details, then flop on his couch and read Chekhov stories, reread Steinbeck or Faulkner, or one of his newer passions, Garcia Márquez. Naomi watched birds but did not ignore the rigors of Emily Dickinson or Peter Matthiessen (a rare novelist who could identify more than five birds, she said, perhaps thousands, and years ago she sent me a book of his about shorebirds, also a novel set in South America which I could not finish because the doomed hero named Moon reminded me so much of Duane).
What I meant, too, by the ordinary was how Paul was laughing as he carved two of Lundquist’s chickens he had roasted with garlic, tarragon and lemon. The joke was the wine Naomi tended to buy at a supermarket in the county seat which came from the bottom of the California barrel. Life was too short to drink bad wine and what Paul had had shipped, Bandol, was only a few dollars more a bottle. She pinched his ear as she defatted the sauce. Nelse was talking about a black-headed grosbeak he had seen on the way over and had pointed out to me. I couldn’t see it in the windbreak but pretended I had. He had recently decided that when you’re close it was impolite to look at birds directly since staring is generally unliked by other creatures. Naomi wasn’t sure of this one, but then Nelse said if a black-headed grosbeak was as large as a grizzly bear you definitely wouldn’t stare. Paul said that was “tautological” but I had forgotten what the word meant. I was looking at a map of the Midwest that came out of one of Naomi’s National Geographies, though Nelse had already traced our route and there was no point in arguing with a confirmed map person. It was all so ordinary though I wanted to shoot the wall clock, over and over. Anything to make it stop or, better yet, keep backing up slowly.
When we got back home Nelse seemed vaguely cynical about putting a case of modest wine in the truck but I said it wasn’t unreasonable to split a bottle per evening while we camped, though I was mostly thinking about its good effect on my tender stomach. For some reason I kept remembering a very old character actress in Santa Monica who was one of my welfare clients. She had had four husbands but had refused to accept any money from them in the divorces. She had the same infirmity as myself but seemed rather happy in her last year. She thought of her acute discomfort as if she were on a train and her pain was being left behind in the landscape she passed. She lived in a single large rented room about five blocks from the ocean. She had been childless but spent her time corresponding with young friends she had known from when she taught acting classes. She read a great deal, went to Sunday mass, and toward the end when she had become quite ill and I was terribly upset she had asked, “How could you think it would be otherwise?” I had no ready response. I tended to visit her quite often because her presence was so soothing. On Saturday her landlord, a heavy-set Italian man in his mid-sixties, would bring lunch and then they would listen to the opera on the radio. She was seventy-five and this had been going on for over twenty years. If you leaned out the window you could look down a slight hill to the ocean. Now I wondered if I had found it soothing because it was so ordinary? She was intelligent and extremely nonsentimental and her memories of the movies had none of the wishy-washy aspects of the old who insist that the present is a pale shadow of the past. She had lived in New York City in the late forties and thought that period to be “glorious” but she did not add that other periods were less glorious. She had also lived in Paris for two years in the mid-fifties with her third husband and thought her time there to also be quite “glorious” but left the judgment at that. These personal aspects were so simple as to be mysterious. I don’t recall a single complaint though she was capable of some rather raw observations about movie studios and California Republicans. She just didn’t take bad business or bad government behavior personally.
I was thinking of her when I went to sleep trying to calm myself for what I thought would be a difficult night. It didn’t happen, other than a striking dream about Sunday school when I was a young girl with rather intense religious convictions, mostly I suppose centering on keeping my dead father safe and secure in heaven. The Korean War was as problematical as Vietnam would later be, but it was too early in my life for that observation or the obvious one that those who declare wars are never endangered by them. At the time I wholeheartedly believed in the Gospels and the saving power of Jesus though I couldn’t make any sense out of the Old Testament. In the dream, in contrast to reality, we were all singing beautifully and somewhat operatically on a Sunday morning in the summer with the western sky yellowish black from an oncoming storm. When the dream was over and I got up to pee Ted barked out the window, perhaps hearing a coyote beyond my ability, and I shushed him. I looked out the window, pleased at the waxing half-moon and that it would become full on our trip. I began to ponder my dream and the existence of Jesus and wondered why I had never gotten around to disbelieving as many do. My efforts simply were never in that direction. Maybe I was so ordinary that I didn’t think any opinion I could summons up on the matter was relevant. I tried to remember the last time I had actually prayed and came up with the day after the night Duane committed suicide and I had prayed that I would not go insane and die. A simple enough request. In this suffering world it was difficult to make a special case for yourself. If anything, prayer should help you accommodate yourself to biological inevitabilities or it should ask for more consciousness since that seems to be all we have anyway.
May 17, 1987. 6:00 A.M.
47 Fahrenheit. 42.5 Lat. 100.5 Long.
We left soon after first light with Lundquist kneeling in the driveway and restraining Ted so he wouldn’t chase after us. Freida had forced upon us a large carton of ham-and-cheese sandwiches insisting that most road food had vermin in it. I often couldn’t help myself in wondering how much time she spent in the toilet what with all she ate. When we drove off I mentioned this to Nelse and he said Freida seemed to be permanently “hyperphagic,” the state bears enter into in the fall when they are crazed to get enough food to gain the fat they need for winter hibernation. He added that men in the north had a tendency to gain a dozen pounds in the late fall, a holdover genetic urge perhaps from the Pleistocene before we squatted in one place and filled the larder. We weren’t even halfway down our gravel road to the county blacktop before Nelse swerved to the shoulder and grabbed his binoculars. “My first May chat,” he half-yelled.
“Your what?” I asked, thinking for a millisecond that we were stopping to talk but knowing otherwise.
“A yellow-breasted chat, the largest of the warblers,” he said, passing the binoculars. “Please write it down.”
I stared through the glasses at the emerging leaves of the windbreak, seeing nothing, but nodded my head and said, “Marvelous.” This satisfied him and we were back on our way. He had an elaborate, to me, theory that even the simplest of us could raise the quality of our lives by vastly increasing our level of attention. Of course he meant toward the natural world, not to each other or people in general. The week before while we were out riding he had noted a slight movement in the grass in a small thicket near the Niobrara. A bull snake was busy swallowing an infant rabbit and Nelse said, “We’re so lucky to see this.” I thought not and wouldn’t get off Rose who also didn’t care for snakes. His request for me to “write it down,” meaning the yellow-breasted chat, came from the idea that it was my duty to keep a logbook of our entire trip similar to his ten years’ worth that had been stolen with his truck. I didn’t mind since he would be doing most of the driving out of nervous habit though I said I would include any number of notations of the phenology of the human heart. He had looked at me askance to make sure I wasn’t joking, then agreed my idea might make for better reading later. He also told me a brief story about how he had let his father read a number of his travel journals and his father had figured out his code entries fo
r sex. This was amusing but then Nelse added that his father had also been critical of Nelse’s supposed distance as a junior anthropologist. His father had an agreeable point here as if you could plastic-coat your life so no living moisture could enter.
This reminded me of a right-wing doctor in Santa Monica I had gone out with a few times. I didn’t say so but I recognized the obvious symptoms of his having read Ayn Rand as a teenager wherein preposterous greed is seen as admirable. On our second dinner date this doctor offered to help me “demythologize” my life to rid it of sentimentality about the poor and the working class, the romantic interest in literature and art that was keeping me from being an effective person. At first I didn’t quite believe he was serious as he seemed otherwise intelligent and attractive, though at a good dinner he insisted we limit ourselves to two small glasses of wine apiece for reasons he wouldn’t specify. I couldn’t clarify any of his aims other than to make a lot of money. I also suspected that when he had picked me up for the second dinner date he had taken a good look at my desk while I was in the bathroom as he seemed to know there was some sort of money in my background. There was also the possibility that he had called a friend in Nebraska. Anyway, by the third date I had a clearer sense of what an asshole he was. It had been a tough late afternoon trying to help a welfare client get a toilet fixed that had been broken three full days. There were several young children and the wife had been terribly embarrassed about the smell in the apartment. I told the doctor this little story while I fixed him a drink with too much vodka in it. The full force of his creepiness came to me when he said in reference to my welfare family that he didn’t want to hear any “bleeding heart” stories. I felt trapped but then also relieved because I was taking him to a large dinner party given by my ex-brother-in-law, Ted, a music producer who lived in a cold modern palace out at the end of Malibu where there were armed guards at the compound’s gate. I was betting that this doctor would fawn all over the featured guests, a dope-spavined rock group that recently had an enormously successful national tour. And I was right. He fixed himself onto these sleepy-eyed musicians as if he were a decal. In the kitchen Ted asked me where I had gotten the “cute jerk” and I said, “He’s yours” and had Ted’s all-around butler, Andrew, give me a ride home. The whole experience was but a week’s duration and I never took a call from him again, though I kept on thinking about what might be left over if you demythologized your life of its dreams and visions, its aesthetic passions, its poignant memories of landscapes and animals, its obsessions with human parity. This doctor could have easily replaced his clumsy philosophical system with heroin and gotten the same results if you left out the money he wanted.
By midmorning we had finished covering my favorite stretch of road in America, Route 12 across the top of central Nebraska, at least until you get past Crofton and head north toward Yankton, or further east toward Sioux City. I had wanted to go the former way in order to visit Pipestone again in southwestern Minnesota, but then we had promised Lundquist we would pass through New Ulm, his place of birth, though it was considerably out of our way. New Ulm was the only thing about which I had ever had a quarrel with Lundquist. President Lincoln had cooperated with the execution of a number of Santee Sioux here for killing settlers and I had viewed it as the same thing as executing enemy soldiers after a battle, though to his credit Lincoln had lessened the number to be hanged. Lundquist claimed that the death of a great-great-aunt gave him bad dreams though he was born sixty-five years after the event. I didn’t doubt Lundquist’s dreams about the event as it was unthinkable for him to fib, though I wondered at the power of family stories that could cause bad dreams throughout a life.
Earlier in the morning we had stopped for a late breakfast sandwich on a high hilltop near the village of Niobrara where both my parents and grandparents had camped, mostly because there was a clear, dramatic view of the confluence of the Niobrara and the Missouri Rivers, the colors of their intermixing waters varying with the seasons and depending on the runoff of rain and snow. Nelse had been there several times before, and I had always stopped there on the way home from the University of Minnesota to sit for a while and cleanse heart and mind of the jingle-jangle, raw nerves and lint of college life.
I could only manage a few bites of Frieda’s gargantuan sandwiches and went partway down the hill into the bushes, ostensibly to pee but really to take a pill in private while Nelse crawled around trying to sneak up on one bird or another. I was counting again and in the first few hours we had slid to a halt to watch eight different birds which I had noted in the margin of our logbook. The one I liked best, partly because it was clearly visible, was the scarlet tanager which Nelse said was rare in the area. I did wonder how he managed to note these birds in the first place while soaring along the road at sixty miles an hour or more, but then he said he had had a decade of practice. This led to the question of how much he missed the road and he said not nearly as much as expected except for the first month or two. He said it was almost Newtonian in regard to an object of motion staying in motion unless met with an unbalanced force and the force had been J.M. It’s easiest to keep doing something because you are already doing it. You’ve patterned yourself, like enduring a bad job because you’ve accustomed yourself to all the little rituals surrounding it which are comfortable compared to searching for a new job.
The trouble down in the bushes was that I tried to swallow the pill without water and began choking when it caught in my throat. It simply stuck there and wouldn’t go down or come up. The world was becoming pink-tinged from lack of oxygen but I managed to crawl partway up the hill on my hands and knees and groan weirdly and Nelse came running and slapped my back. Luckily the pill dropped down into my stomach. I blamed it on Frieda’s sandwich but he didn’t look like he quite believed me. As we walked back to the truck it occurred to me that my time might become foreshortened at a rate that was less than bearable, and that I shouldn’t be counting possible years, but months, and singular days themselves might be a better idea. The fact that this was also applicable to perfectly healthy people did not miss my thoughts. I supposed that most of us drifted, floated, even happily bobbed along and it was not within our capabilities to have a clear view of when and where the river emptied into the ocean. There was not a single metaphor to placate the end of the story except for the utter commonality of the experience, the slow walk through the paradise we are witless to notice sufficiently. I imagined that there were many who wished to stay alive despite great suffering for fear of what, if anything, came after death. When we got back in the truck I had to laugh at the banality of my thinking. I had had a great deal of practice thinking of the deaths of others, my father and then my beloved Duane and then my grandfather, but then his death had been so relatively natural compared to the others in that he had had the time to gracefully prepare himself.
After cresting the hill in the village of Niobrara we “hauled ass,” Nelse’s term for relentless, nonstop driving, more than a bit over the speed limit. He wanted to get out of the cultivated areas and he spoke of “mono-crop mega-agriculture” and its dependence on fertilizers. It might be necessary for a hungry world but he didn’t like to look at it. My own mind was allowed to drift and doze now that the pill had begun to take effect, and I didn’t pay attention to Nelse’s diatribe because I had heard it all before. Thank Jesus or whomever for drugs! Once while living in New York I had a severe sinus infection and I asked the doctor what they did with such an infection before antibiotics. He said that the infection would often enter the brain and people would die “eating the rug.” The homely expression stuck with me and I had resolved at the time to get help when something began to go wrong with my body rather than wait until it was out of control. There was an ounce of comic stupidity here in the way I had ignored my first specific signs of physical unrest early in the winter. It had been too rankly ordinary to be tolerated.
After New Ulm we cut straight north toward St. Cloud, mostly because Nelse figured that
we would otherwise be caught up in the Minneapolis afternoon rush hour. I had been caught up in quite enough of them in the Los Angeles area, and had depended on my tape deck for sanity as many do. When brought to full stops I had read entire books on the Santa Monica Freeway over a period of weeks. As a student I had had so many fine spring dawns and evenings in Minneapolis particularly when I had a small apartment on the hill behind the Walker Art Center and could see the city in the soft diffuse light, the pale greens growing greener in spring after the brutally cold winter. Of course cities are innocent of our moods. On a certain day New York can be as ugly as the word the doctor in Lincoln had used, “metastasis,” but on the next, say after a cooling rain during a summer heat wave, it can be truly wonderful. The same with Los Angeles though the mood has to struggle harder with the sprawl because an outsider is never quite sure of where its citiness resides. But then this is just an initial step and one is ultimately in a state of surprise over how many amenities the citizens offer themselves except, of course, for the very poor on whom all backs are turned.