by Jim Harrison
I got up early because I was in pain. I watched the first light filtering through the white curtains of my eastern-facing window through which I could hear the waves pounding in from Lake Michigan. A gust of wind would lift the curtains and my fevered body would be bathed by the flow of cool, sweet air. There had been a thankfully brief, unpleasant dream of my friend Michael. Before we had left home Naomi said she had gotten a note from Michael’s daughter saying that he was off at some sort of “ashram” getting detoxed again. In my dream his body had become wildly out of proportion which was accurate enough. I hadn’t been up to answering any of his letters which had all coiled down into the same repetitive sequence of knots. For some reason it reminded me of Nelse’s statement that all four thousand mammal species had seven cervical vertebrae. I probably have this wrong. He also said that sixteen billion years ago the entire universe was only a pinhead-sized piece of inconceivable energy. What am I to make of this when I am flummoxed by the existence of monarch butterflies?
When I checked us out I again noticed on the bill a half dozen calls Nelse had made from his room, including J.M. and Naomi, also one to Paris to Charlene which meant my fib about her meeting me in New York had been found out. Oh well, there are vast limitations to honesty. Over my breakfast of tea and saltines I had even questioned the honesty of my list because I had made additions in a drugged-out state in the middle of the night.
27. Gulfstream waves beneath which Duane understandably slipped
28. Lundquist’s voice with animals
29. A mountain ram seen in the Cabeza
30. The first glass of red wine after several days of abstinence
31. The time I saw lightning strike a tree
32. Floating naked in the Niobrara’s current on a hot afternoon in August
33. The strange looks of animals making love
34. The presence of underground rivers
35. Duane riding a horse at a gallop
36. Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky
37. Lorca the poet at Paul’s cottage on Baja
38. Riding at dawn and twilight, getting back to the barn at moonrise
Really quite ordinary and not too goofy. Everyone can’t be exceptional though we are taught that we can. I had the true potential to do what I’ve already done.
* * *
We drove northeast toward Grand Marais on Lake Superior north of Seney, partly because I had been there on a summer job during college working with my mother’s cousin on a lamprey-control project. These marvelously ugly creatures attach themselves and suck the blood out of lake trout. There were all sorts of efforts to trap lampreys and to poison them when they entered creeks and rivers to spawn. Like the noxious alewives the lampreys had entered the Great Lakes due to government ineptitude during the expansion of the St. Lawrence Seaway. I also wanted to go to Grand Marais because quite by accident three in my family had been there: myself, Nelse on the trail of goshawks, and my grandfather way back when he was a student at the Chicago Art Institute. I thought this was odd but Nelse said that if you write down your favorite places the list isn’t very long. This led me to take out my steno pad and add a few items.
39. Spices including ginger, fennel, also the flavor of garlic and cilantro, hot chiles
40. Mexican music of all sorts
41. Erotic dreams of people you don’t know
42. Diving down and touching the bottom of a river
43. The first morning after school was out for the year, sleeping in
44. Working with Naomi in her garden
It occurred to me quite suddenly that I couldn’t say I was unhappy. I was well beyond that sort of consideration. In a specific sense I had never felt more alive and I wondered what else beside the pain had brought me to this place. You could glibly postulate that everyone is on death row but when the date becomes imminent the nature of reality becomes much more vivid.
45. Dreams of Indians and animals that seem to emerge from the land scape where I’ve lived much of my life but that follow me elsewhere.
I could sense that Nelse was feeling awkward so I said that I knew he had been making plans for me. He then almost blurted out that I was flying out of Marquette tomorrow afternoon and Charlene would be meeting me in New York to keep me company during my “appointments.” I readily acceded and he was relieved to the point that the truck swerved when he stretched on his seat. I decided to tease him a bit and asked what he thought of a Rilke line Charlene had pointed out to me in a letter, something on the order of “don’t think that fate is more than the density of childhood.” He said, “Jesus Christ” loudly, then paused a few minutes before adding that the line gave his stomach a thump in the same way that a book of Edward Hopper paintings in my grandfather’s library had done. I didn’t quite see the connection but could feel it. The whole subject became quite anxious in the following silence as if our own humble words couldn’t track Rilke and Hopper into the world in which they created. We were witnesses rather than participants. If I could have remembered a single joke I would have told it at that moment. We were saved by the sight of three sandhill cranes in the ditch of a side road. Nelse slowed down but decided not to disturb them.
I fell asleep then and when I awoke we were taking a back road out of Munising that I remembered traveled fifty of fifty miles through the forest to Grand Marais with some of the road abutting Lake Superior. There had been a brief erotic dream about Charlene but I felt it was a little late to be disturbed about such things. From the time we became close friends in our early teens Charlene had been that very rare female who was steadfastly proud of her body. I knew that in her twenties in New York she had had concurrent affairs with both a reasonably well-known actor and a quite well-known actress and had supposed at the time that they both felt fortunate though a little jealous. We’d have a sleepy Saturday morning breakfast at Ratner’s and I’d ask such silly questions as “Both in the same day?” Once when we were swimming out on Fire Island even gay men seemed to give her a studied but appraising look, maybe because her face was a little androgynous. I laughed awkwardly at the notion that a thousand orgasms do not make you less interested in the next one.
My mind was diverted by thousands of trilliums in a well-shaded forest glade and I wondered how many patches of the wildflower I had missed in the sexual trance. I could say good-bye to that forever. We stopped and I walked among the profusion of flowers which raised my neck hairs with perfumed delight. Meanwhile Nelse was craning his neck to look at the clouds up beyond the pale pastel green of the trees whose leafing had been further slowed by their nearness to the very cold Lake Superior.
Further on we drove off on a side road to a promontory high above Lake Superior in the Grand Sable Dunes. It was a stunning view though I had difficulty getting Nelse out of his sodden-weather mood. He very much wanted to camp in a favorite spot and said a night in a motel would “break his heart.” He then apologized and made us wretched Spam sandwiches on the tailgate of the truck. On impulse I opened the first bottle of wine of the trip and we sat on one of the largest sandpiles in the world staring down at Lake Superior. Lucky for us within a half an hour the wind clocked around to the northwest, lost its mugginess, and we watched as the blue sky approached us across the lake. He ignored it when I took another pill from my jacket and washed it down with delicious gulps of wine. We held hands waiting for the moment which was near when the sun would break through as the clouds passed to the southeast, and then we could see the sunlight racing toward us across the water. We held our breath and then it hit us. I looked down at the sunlight on my hands, and on the hole in the knee of my Levi’s, and through the plastic wine glass half full of red wine, and far below at Lake Superior which now had become azure. I blinked my eyes several times as if taking a photo and wondered how all of this could just go away.
46. Goshawks!
There is a female goshawk near where we are camping. Nelse had watched the nest while camped here ten years before and was delighted that
it was still what he calls “active,” though the female was likely a descendent of the one he watched. I must say its voice and behavior added to my sense of the feminine, the voice almost archetypal as if it slipped into the air from prehistory, and though she didn’t weigh more than a few pounds she looked much larger as she flashed close by, trying to drive us away as if she were the toughest bitch in the world.
It was still a couple of hours before dark this close to the solstice. I felt fine because of the extra pill and the wine, though there was the thought that this might be my last night of actual and total freedom. This was less intuition than a sense of reality. We wandered around the area and Nelse said if we were there in another week or so the dogwoods and sugar-plum trees would be blooming. I broke open a few buds scenting their intensely sweet odor, remembering that my grandfather, quite sick of Chicago, had come north and had been here when the area was white with these blooming trees.
Nelse was looking down a steep, sandy bank into the Sucker River and thinking about trying his luck at fishing when I said I wanted a fried beefsteak so we drove a half dozen miles to the grocery store in the village of Grand Marais. The beef wasn’t attractive by Nebraska terms so I bought a bottle of steak sauce to help it out. When Ruth was seven or eight Grandfather had told her that she could make her fingers strong for playing the piano by squeezing a rubber ball a thousand times a day and also eating a steak every day. This advice drove Naomi quite batty as Ruth took it religiously and it was nearly sickening to watch this little girl devour her daily beef, though soon enough the sound of the piano grew louder, and the little boys in the country school yard avoided her strong grip.
When I came out of the grocery store Nelse had the truck started, anxious to get back to camp. I waved and headed for a bar just down the street called the Dunes Saloon for a martini, a questionable move but then I felt entitled. There was a very large bartender, even by Nebraska terms, with a scant amount of red hair though I guessed him to be in his thirties. When I ordered a martini he stared at me as if I were a zoo animal and announced that this would be the first martini made this year which meant the tourist season might be starting. He also asked what I figured I should pay for it since it had been so long he had forgotten what to charge, and then Nelse came in and they talked about brook trout fishing. The man drew a hasty map, saying it was his “fifty-seventh best place” to fish. Nelse took a sip of my drink and squinched up his face as if it were gasoline. I impulsively hugged him and the bartender warned us that if a man forces his wife to go camping during mosquito and blackfly season it can endanger the marriage. “He’s my son,” I said, and the man laughed and said, “You don’t say.”
47. The night itself, or perhaps herself
48. The sound of the whippoorwill
It was nearly dark before the fire was ready and I set my grandfather’s old Wagner skillet directly on the coals, putting what looked like too much salt in the skillet, and letting it heat until it was nearly red-hot. Nelse watched this somewhat cynically and I said his own camp cookery was doubtless mostly opening cans. I had rubbed the meat with raw garlic and covered it with black pepper, and when I dropped it in the pan the meat smoked and hissed and took only a few minutes on each side. I ate perhaps a half pound and Nelse easily finished the other two. We drank a full bottle of Gigondas and I slipped in an extra pill when he walked beyond the circle of fire to pee.
What a night we had, with a quarter moon not really disturbing the clarity of the stars. Nelse had set up the tent in case the weather changed its mind but we laid out our pads and sleeping bags in the open. I requested another constellation chant, the music I wished to hear. We talked about love which is easier in the dark before a small fire. I told him about my absurd summer before I went off to college when I worked as a waitress at Lena’s Cafe on the breakfast and lunch shift so I’d have to leave the ranch by 5:00 A.M. for the long drive. I’d take a nap on the hot afternoons and read about love since his father had only been gone for a little more than two years and I was still mortally possessed. Of all the books I read that summer only Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights seemed close. After reading as long as I could bear I’d go out riding with the dogs in tow and if it was still very warm I’d swim in the Niobrara with my animals watching and sometimes joining in for reasons of their own. Nelse nervously changed the mood by admitting he hadn’t read either of the love texts and I laughed and made him promise, which he did. I then reconsidered and had him take back his promise as what was the point in urging him to become more like me?
He admitted to worrying about J.M.’s volatility but suspected they would have, all in all, a fine time with their life together. He wished his adopted father had lived longer, and he wished from all he had heard about Duane that he had gotten to know him but he wasn’t disposed to question what he called their “disappearances from earth.” This was an odd enough expression to give me a chill and I reached for my wine glass wishing it were full of brandy. He wished his adoptive mother didn’t drink so much but then she had done so since he could remember. He thought his lesbian sister in Kansas was probably better off than the sister in Washington, D.C., who had recently told him in a letter that her marriage was so “nothing” she frequently wept with boredom. I told him he should write back and tell her to fly the coop. He liked this old-time farm expression. We decided that the very idea of “wishing” was deeply suspect.
49. The smell of the ground in the woods
I woke up well before dawn having slipped off my pad so that my face was pushed against the ground. Nelse was kneeling next to the fire adding wood and he looked like some old photo of a Lakota in the dim light. I brazenly took another pill as there was another fire smoldering within me. We began talking again and by coincidence with his image beside the fire he told me about his embarrassment over driving up to Pine Ridge when he had worked on an archeological site near Valentine. He had felt so much like a spoiled white boy that there were tears of shame and anger at himself for harboring the illusion. There was certainly a point, he thought, at which the idea of blood relatives meant nothing. I agreed to a point but said that his shame, anger and embarrassment probably meant that he wasn’t just a spoiled white boy. I said I remembered when my grandfather who was half Lakota told me that his own father had decided what world he would live in. I also told Nelse that I had known a half black in New York quite well (we were lovers for a month) and the fact that he could easily pass for white caused him a great deal of torment. I sensed this was confusing for Nelse and he joked that when a Navajo rose at dawn and bowed to the six directions that was really what one needed to know about latitude and longitude. You knew where you were when you bowed to the six directions.
After that he began to snore and it was a comforting sound intermixed with another call from the whippoorwill. I wondered what kind of noise the stars made up close and this childish question led me to believe that we retain intact within ourselves each of our ages. This is probably obvious and no big deal but right now I am eleven with the ghastly feeling that I have just been thrown by a horse that Grandfather had forbidden me to ride. I am also eighteen and feel like the dying Catherine in Wuthering Heights. I am also forty-six, and moment by moment trembling on the lip of a very short future. The grotesque expression “bottom line” raised itself like a printed blip in a cartoon, but why ask about the rock bottom or the bottom line when the rock bottom was the earth I lay upon, with eyes that watched the stars above and a mind that thought it actually could see the quarter moon move across the sky. I felt too much the mammal but that surely was what I was. Nelse has an affection for the word “primate” and it seemed quite accurate here on the ground. I blocked out the moon with my left hand the better to see the stars. If I crooned some sort of prayer there was the doubt the prayer would rise higher than the ground mist that was coiling around the greenery in the first light. First one birdcall, then three, then a chorus from down by the river. This would be a good time to die with the bottl
e of pills and a water jug handy, all to the gathering density of birdsong, but then I couldn’t very well leave my body up to Nelse. I had thought of a better plan but also wished to say good-bye to my family.
May ?, Marquette, High Noon.
I’m going to miss latitude and longitude a little but I sense that words are beginning to fail me, or better yet, I am beginning to fail words.
50. My first airplane ride
51. My first car, the aqua convertible
At the Marquette airport I was absurdly pleased that I got a window-seat assignment. I had felt like a cow plot when Nelse awoke me finally at nine this morning with the sun warm on my face and a mosquito bite on my lower lip. I also said, “I don’t have any clothes for New York” and Nelse looked at me as if I were daft. The tent was down and everything was packed except for the angular lump I made in the sleeping bag. He brought me my tea and crackers with which I took two pills. I was running low but then Charlene had always been a pill expert and I couldn’t think of anything she couldn’t get ahold of—men, women, money. After the ticket desk we went back outside and I wondered if there was an inside space big enough in the whole world to defeat his claustrophobia. I bummed a cigarette off a very old Finn in a bright blue suit with a vest. When I had quit smoking ten years before and while still in the throes of the mean-minded detoxification I swore if I ever received a death sentence of any sort I’d begin smoking again. Unfortunately the cigarette tasted terrible so I pitched it after a few tentative puffs. The old Finn glared at me for wasting a cigarette and Nelse laughed. We walked back inside and to the boarding area and when we hugged good-bye Nelse looked as though he were being strangled. I couldn’t think of anything to say to lift his mood.