The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

May 18, 87.

  Duluth. Temp. 43. Longg 92.5 LAT. 46.8

  Time 6:30 A.M.

  I’m going to have to give certain aspects of this job up to Nelse. I feel absurd writing down the latitude and longitude though absurdity is nothing new in my life. Latitude and longitude don’t offer me a frame of reference when I’ve never thought about them except when I learned the terms in grade school geography. There is also the dim memory from college when I found out the term “horse latitudes” came from when sailing ships became becalmed and horses, dying of thirst, were forced overboard in the southern Pacific. True or not, the story outraged me at the time. Jesus Christ, the frantic horses plummeting into the salt water in blasting subtropical heat! The men watching from the rail without comment. Maybe they did it at night so they wouldn’t have to see the horses’ heads trailing off in the ship’s foamy wake.

  Much to Nelse’s irritation we are staying in the same hotel I stayed with Naomi when we were driving eastward toward Marquette late in my fifteenth year and I was plump with Nelse. What accidental symmetry though I don’t think of this as a death trip. He had hoped that we could camp southwest of here in the Fond du Lac State Forest, but when we reached the site he favored it was in waning twilight and rain was falling in sheets, the thunder reverberating through the dense forest greenery. We were looking out over a small lake through the whacking windshield wipers when a splintered lightning bolt seemed to hit the water and the pick-up cab buzzed. I felt much better an hour and a half later when we were having a mediocre room-service dinner in our rooms and Nelse went to the window and watched a freighter dock in the darkness. The rain had let up, the storm passing on to the northeast with lightning still visible far out on Lake Superior which has always struck me as a freshwater ocean. Behind the storm bright stars appeared, clearly visible despite the city’s ambient light. New York had always overpowered the stars and one grew to miss them especially in the summer when in my youth we had lain on blankets struggling to identify the constellations though I mostly counted shooting stars. Now I hear through the wall Nelse receiving his room-service breakfast I had ordered for him in his adjoining room. I don’t want to be caught not eating except for a pill, three saltine crackers I found in my purse and a glass of water. Last evening when we said good night Nelse glanced at the logbook and reminded me that I had forgotten to register two birds, a male grouse strutting behind the highway’s fence and a vireo at a rest stop. I was a bit tired so was stricken by the omission. He patted my shoulder, kissed my forehead and said, “Good night, Mother.” I closed the door after him and listened to him open his own. This was the first time he’d used the word “mother” since our reunion last summer. I don’t think his not using the word is intentional but it was tremendously lovely to hear it. I did make the error of turning around from the door and trying to imagine Duane, a year older than myself, sitting in an easy chair watching the weather forecast on the television. It didn’t work.

  Earlier this morning watching the first light gather above the harbor I remembered the same harbor covered with ice so long ago. Now I feel pretty good and offer the slightest prayer to a god unknown that this infirmity will withhold itself until the end of our camping trip and I reach New York. While we sat in the truck last evening during the lakeside thunderstorm and Nelse was pissed because we weren’t going to hear the tremulous call of the loon he knew lived there I could hear in my mind’s ear my doctor friend droning along as he looked out the window. He seemed to be saying that if I had come to see him in early December at my first signs I would have had a fifty to eighty-five percent chance of living five years. If I had arrived in February it would have been cut to from thirty-seven to seventy-nine percent. Early April might have reduced it to between seven and eighteen percent, and when I appeared in mid-May it was only a two to eight percent chance of living five years, but probably less as I was filtering over the edge of what is called “Stage IV.” These were statistics you couldn’t quarrel with though in the last stage you certainly envision the ninety-two to ninety-eight percent possibility of falling off the edge of the earth. The true cruelty of the disease is that early symptoms are so vague that in seventy-five percent of the cases it has already spread beyond the ovaries at the point of diagnosis. I wished very much over my crackers and water that I hadn’t taken a physiology course at the university that now enabled me to see so clearly inside myself, almost as lucidly as when I had looked at myself in the mirror a few minutes ago. I also questioned what genes had given me such a high, contemptuous pain threshold so that I ignored problems that would send any sane human to the medicine cabinet or the doctor. I was beyond questioning why ovaries, the very core of life itself, could figuratively turn their backs on life and in so doing destroy the entire body. A few minutes ago when I looked in the mirror I didn’t look all that bad, a bit thinner and fatigued, a nearly effective mask for the inside in which the hopeless and tormented drama of lost cells was taking place.

  Over in the corner of my room I saw a steno pad on the desk, used normally for grocery lists and errands, and rather dimly recalled that I had been up at three A.M. for the slightest of hemorrhages, had taken a pain pill and written a note and left fifty dollars for the sheet my blood had destroyed. Now I also remembered starting a list (counting again!) of what I have loved about the earth, perhaps a presumptuous idea but I thought it might help me stay fully conscious rather than falling back into confusion and hysteria. The list certainly wouldn’t be an endless process because I had no intention of letting the disease run the disease’s full course any more than I thought Duane should have stayed alive given his condition. Before I checked the steno pad I searched again for the small leather pouch that contained Duane’s stone, passed down through the generations of his Lakota relatives, and also the tiny velvet bag that contained my grandmother Neena’s engagement ring. I had tried to give it to Nelse to give to J.M. earlier in the winter but the ring had made him highly nervous and he said he would have to think it over because in his opinion “no one wears rings like that anymore.” It was a three-carat blue diamond and I admitted to myself that it came from a time when there weren’t all these MBAs around telling people to spend their money sensibly so they could pass on the uncertain gift of having it to their children. Now I meant to force him to take the ring.

  The penmanship of the list was faulty because of the onset of the drug, the “What I Have Loved About the Earth” trailing off smaller at the end due to the narrowness of the page.

  1. my mother

  2. my father

  3. my sister, Ruth

  4. my grandfather

  5. and now, Nelse

  6. Lundquist

  7. myself?

  The “myself” had evidently been a showstopper. Nelse rapped on my door and I called out that I’d be ready in ten minutes though I was ready at the time. I had the urge to add a few items; I was certainly not thinking in order of preference.

  8. horses

  9. dogs. I count thirteen close dog friends since I was old enough to remember, including when I was just able to walk my father’s cowdog Jack who hated cars so much he fatally collided with one head-on in our driveway. Pure male dog.

  10. Birds and flowers, including also bird and flower shadows, the latter two being something I’ve always noted preferring to walk in early morning and late afternoon when there are flower shadows. Bird shadows are always startling.

  11. The Pacific Ocean. Wherever. From tiny Puerto Escondido down in Oaxaca up to the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia.

  12. My dear friend Charlene

  13. New York City between 3 A.M. and 7 A.M.

  14. The same with Paris.

  Nelse knocked again as I had drifted off into a Paris reverie where once I had been angry with a gentleman whom I couldn’t get out of my room and walked from after midnight to dawn on a cool, blustery early-May night ending up looking through the fence at flowers in the Jardin des Plantes, hailed a cab finally, then asking t
he desk to remove the gentleman but he was already gone whereupon I had the most delicious sleep of my life with rain blowing in the tall French windows.

  15. A rooster named Bob when I was five, named after a kindergarten friend who died of leukemia the next year. None of us in kindergar ten, then ist grade, all three of the remaining students could figure this out. Naomi told us he went to heaven which didn’t help.

  At checkout I was a bit mystified by the large phone charges but recognized a brief one to my doctor friend’s office, probably an answering service, then a long one, perhaps to his home, two medium calls to J.M.’s number in Lincoln and a lengthy call to Naomi’s house. Sweat quickly beaded on my forehead and I stuffed the itemized bill in my purse, not wanting Nelse to know that I knew what he was up to, but when I turned around I could see him loading our luggage out in front. I have an inane ability to remember phone numbers, including from every place I’ve ever lived, or I wouldn’t have recognized the doctor’s number. Oh Jesus I have been found out, I thought, deciding not to let on to Nelse that anything was amiss. Naomi had, of course, told me of Nelse’s own silly faux secrecy when he had appeared on her front porch for the first time, assuming that she couldn’t possibly recognize him.

  When I got in the pick-up I quickly handed him the tiny velvet bag with Neena’s engagement ring and said, “Give this to J.M.,” and he said, “Of course,” and we were off headed east, crossing a magnificent bridge above the harbor and driving straight into the rising sun. Nelse showed all of the transparent signs of insomnia.

  Crystal Falls. 8 P.M. 58 degrees. Lat. 46 degrees,

  6 minutes North. Long. 88 degrees, 58 minutes West.

  (Nelse insists on these “minutes,” whatever they are.)

  There is an odd-looking blackburnian warbler in a bush a dozen feet away. That’s what Nelse told me when he went off to fish for brook trout. He also told me the name of the bush but I’ve already forgotten fifteen minutes later. The warbler has some orange feathers. Today we saw far too many evening grosbeaks dead beside the road. They come out for road salt used for icy conditions and collide with vehicles. It was quite awful to see so many in contrast to the pale green leafing hardwoods mixed with the dark conifers. We did see three loons today on separate lakes near Watersmeet and Trout Creek which are very nice names. Nelse tried too hard to be solicitous every moment of this day just short of being overwhelming. I pretended not to notice.

  We’re actually east of Crystal Falls and camped on the Fence River. On the narrow trail to our campsite I thought I saw cow tracks but Nelse said the tracks belonged to a moose. There are also a few wolves in the area which is a lovely idea in addition to a splendid reality. Before he left for fishing Nelse told me that if a bear happened along I should just sing the national anthem and that would scare the bear shitless. I write on my steno pad to monochromatic mosquito music, vaguely India Indian in sound.

  16. Frogs and toads. The first creatures I knew after birds, dogs and cats. Naomi wouldn’t allow cats because they killed birds but there were plenty in Grandfather’s barn and he allowed me to befriend them.

  17. Men’s bodies. I have no intentions of counting them as the number could possibly be too high and embarrass me.

  18. Women’s bodies? The only woman’s body I ever had the slightest desire for was my dear friend Charlene’s. She made a pass at me when we were teenagers but I declined. She lives alternately in Paris and New York, has been married three times to her financial advantage, and is, I suspect, a genuine bisexual. Also the mysterious roll of the baby in my stomach when I was so young.

  19. Horses, horses, horses. They smell as good as they look. Looking back I see that I’ve already listed them under number eight.

  20. Rivers. Dozens of them but especially the Niobrara.

  21. My uncle Paul. Sometimes he troubles me with his high-mindedness. For a while I thought he might be Duane’s father but he said he was sterile from the mumps, but then I found out he had the mumps two years after he met Rachel. I used to wonder about his improbable austerity but then I finally figured out he was no more austere sexually than I was. He has some of Nelse’s tendencies of an anthropologist studying people moment by moment rather than living with them.

  22. New York Jewish delicatessens. If you grew up in the Midwest or West this is obvious.

  23. Add Italian and Chinese restaurants in NYC. In the Midwest bad food has long been part of our Manifest Destiny. It’s horrid but it’s ours so it’s the best.

  24. Cabeza Prieta. I always detoured here, a long one, on my way home from Santa Monica because it is immense, empty, capable of transfiguring. Cactuses, including cholla, organ-pipe, saguaro, ocotillo, immediately draw off poison. Only once did I see the night-blooming cereus but then it only blooms once and dies.

  25. My grandfather’s barn in winter. My true retreat, hiding place, in childhood, also later, the animal warmth, Duane’s place in the haymow with the revolving buffalo skull.

  26. Pond near the marsh where I made love to Duane just once. And now there is Nelse.

  Who just came back from fishing with four brook trout which he fried and served with lemon, bread and salt, banishing the aftertaste of an earlier roadside meal. In the gathering dark we searched for extra wood as the night would surely come close to freezing. He was able to tear slabs from a white-pine stump which also made a good smudge for mosquitoes and offered up a fine smell to the air. I snuck in an extra pill wondering if I would have enough to get by. Beyond the circular glow of the fire there were pale green sheets of northern lights shimmering, rising and falling, which I had intended to add to my list. Naomi keeps a “life list” of her birds. That’s what they call it. It always reminded me of the winter count Natives used to make to keep track of the events that truly constitute time. We were both in our sleeping bags and Nelse wore a miner’s flashlight on his forehead while he checked out a guidebook on trees. He turned it off before he spoke to me.

  “I know everything. I’ve moved up your appointments. In a few days we can drive from here.”

  “No we won’t. I’m not in that kind of hurry. Charlene’s going to meet me in New York.” The last was a lie of course.

  “Mother, goddammit!” That word again but not so pleasantly this time. I couldn’t help myself and began to cry which I never do. He got out of his sleeping bag and sat on the bare ground beside me in his skivvies, rubbing my neck and shoulders and stroking my hair without saying another word. After a short time I could sense the shivering in his voice. It was the clarity of the stars above and his hands that stopped my weeping. I had him name the constellations above and it became a chant. The sky above and the earth below, the stars so gracefully allowing me to locate myself on earth deep in the forest beside a river, the murmuring of which put me into the deepest of sleeps before Nelse finished the constellations.

  Escariaba. May 5:30 a.m.

  Latitude 45 degrees, 49 minutes North,

  Longitude 87 degrees, 4 minutes West.

  Thermometer (stuck out window of Hotel Ludington)

  says a mere 39 degrees.

  Yesterday afternoon coming toward town it was warm inland but when we drove down to the fine park on the water the weather turned blustery and a big thunderstorm, rare for this time of year, really an immense line squall, was driving up Lake Michigan and far out above the whitecaps we could see its glowering approach. The air couldn’t have smelled better. Nelse, however, was a bit irritated as he wanted to camp well north of here near Trenary where he knows of a spring holding brook trout. He reluctantly checked the weather on the truck radio and the forecast was foreboding indeed. “Shit,” he said, over and over, and then we took rooms at an old restored hotel. His spirits lightened when we walked up the street and had an early dinner of steaks and spaghetti at an Italian restaurant. He had never had this combination before and I told him he should get “out and around,” which made him laugh. It is hard to imagine a young man who knows more about wild areas and less about what
the civilized world has to offer. I am bold enough to suggest that this imbalance should be corrected and he admits he may have to do some “culture travel” to keep J.M. happy.

  On our way here yesterday afternoon we passed the gravel-road turnoff that led a number of miles down toward the shack of the medicine man, my Chippewa friend’s father. I was surprised that I remembered the turnoff so clearly and brought the item to Nelse’s attention. He had me repeat the story of the incident and we minutely examined it, though I couldn’t think of anything truly extraordinary except the turtles flipping and scrambling off the old man’s legs when we walked down the path to where he sat by the miniature lake. Afterward he had made us a light dinner of bowls of wild rice with onions and morel mushrooms. His shack was clean and spare with a large collection of different bird feathers tied in neat bundles and hanging from a rafter. The small dwelling lacked insulation and I had asked him if he wasn’t a little cold during the fierce winters. He thought this over for quite some time then said he had never been cold in his life. His daughter teased him that everyone in the area knew that he was part bear and they both laughed loudly over this. He had asked about my job and I explained rather too elaborately about my welfare work with poor people. He told me that I should probably help rich people too and I didn’t know what to make of this.

  Nelse was a little disturbed over this last item and we pondered what the man might have meant. We were talking so intensely that we pulled off at a rest stop and sat down at a picnic table. Nelse observed that the quantity of misery didn’t necessarily depend on economic position and I had to disagree based on my experience, though the degree of difference wasn’t as great as widely supposed. Everyone knows about the miserable experiences of lottery winners, but then poverty is fairly called “grinding” because it can quite literally grind people down. Nelse, typically, thought that this might be more true of urban areas. I mentioned that I had always felt odd when I passed cemeteries and observed the pathetic vanity in the enormous gravestones to the rich. We paused then as the notion of gravestones was striking a little closer to home. We gradually admitted that the “bottom line” was, simply enough, the fact of the turtles basking on the man’s legs. We were both cynical about the lambent vulgarity of New Age crap or any charlatan’s claim to secret powers. But then this wasn’t New Age but “old age.” I had met Frank Fool’s Crow twice and if pinned in a corner I would have to say he was a man with a superior secret. To say he was just like us would be unpardonable vanity. Nelse took it further and said that in the total scheme of things we don’t have more than a few clues. Maybe this man was some sort of Mozart of the natural world and his relationship with turtles was forever inaccessible to the rest of us. At one point I wished I hadn’t seen the turtles basking in the sunlight on the man’s legs. It certainly threatened my world order which was already crumbling with my illness. Nelse threw up his hands and said that we all were desperately full of shit and that you could spend a lifetime studying birds and ultimately couldn’t come up with the answer of why there were birds.