The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  He began to accept tardily the notion of limits. He had spent his life eating the world and had been slack in learning how to spit more of it out which is to accept the limits of your intelligence and talent so that you might have a life to go along with your writing. Sometimes his sense of his own limits became so glaring, so obvious that the concomitant humility made him mute and the idea of operating a small-town gas station seemed attractive. Of course he realized when he reached sixty that it was far too late not to run out your string. Thinking you could become something else was another case of hubris. He had known dozens of Indians (some prefer to say Native Americans) and didn’t see anything enviable in their marginal condition except their extreme tolerance for letting their older men and women go their own way without judgment and bullying. A number of old ones he had met lived a bit apart back in the woods and seemed content to chop wood, carry water, and make their meals. The contrast of this life with a nursing home was extraordinary. His Swedish grandmother had essentially taken care of herself until her death at ninety-seven but then this presumes the gift of health. He had the idea that when he finally stopped he would be content to wander around in the mountains with a dog and then sit under a tree beside the river, maybe helping out in his wife’s garden more than he usually had. He sensed this time coming one morning in his studio when their very old cat Warren was sleeping on his pile of papers and there was no way to work without disturbing the cat. He sat there watching the cat sleep, fiddling with the course of his mind without making notes, and then nearly three hours later it was time for lunch at which point the cat awoke of its own accord.

  Writing novels is a prolonged aggressive act and when he “woke up” after finishing there was also the prolonged process of recovering a semblance of health, a period that naturally increased as he got older. This was a time when he became more female in defense against the craziness of clock addiction, of going forward as if searching for a firing squad, the inevitability of a bowling ball rolling down Pike’s Peak, men holding their cell phones like pistols as the airliner lands. Waking up after a novel was to see that the world had changed again and the operable metaphor was Yeats’s dance, the Tao of a river. In this postpartum semi-trance the Romantic fallacy became even more absurd. Why would anyone wish to be unique unless it was ultimately for the common good? Who wished to be the five-legged or two-headed calves he had seen in his childhood while visiting farms with his father, the small worn photo of Ava Gardner tucked in his pocket? But then both his revered Gnostic Gospels and his somewhat diffident Zen practice called us to offer ourselves by becoming what we truly are.

  With age impending moment by moment he decided to further limit himself by traveling only to France and Mexico at which point he immediately began studying maps for a return to Italy and Spain. He had a secret plan to somehow find the briefcase of poems that Antonio Machado had lost when fleeing Barcelona and Franco’s armies to Collioure, France, in the late 1930s. This was as cockeyed as he actually was with his blind left eye always looking elsewhere, perhaps in harmony with his mind. The literary world, which appeared small as a dog pound to astronauts, would lionize him for finding these lost manuscripts. There would, however, be no parade because Machado, one of the very best poets of the century, was scarcely known in the United States.

  In the aftermath of a novel the imagination becomes soft, playful, utterly antic. Waking at dawn he scribbled this in a journal: “It’s quite easy to imagine eating fish with Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. They used a round piece of pounded metal set on the coals, really a mixed method of frying and roasting, and ate their fish with unleavened flatbread and millet to which they added garlic, onions, and hot peppers. They didn’t drink wine until the evening. Since I don’t speak Aramaic it was impossible to get more than a gist of what he was talking about. When he pointed at the sea with a morsel of fish stuck in his beard he seemed to say that the universe was a vast ocean in which we keep drowning only to resurface in a different form. But maybe he was saying, ‘Don’t go fishing when the wind begins to blow from the north in the twilight,’ or perhaps he said, ‘It’s hard being the son of a virgin even if you know who your real father is.’ He’s everywhere but nowhere in particular. I have to quit this carpentry and fishing and go into the wilderness by myself for forty days.”

  Since he had many notebooks at hand he only discovered this passage days later. What could it mean, if anything, other than that he had looked through an illustrated Bible nearly sixty years before, with the engraving showing women in gowns with appealing full breasts, and walking men in the desert with vipers coiled near the feet, and Mary Magdalene near the well on an obviously hot day, her face haunted and shy. Imagine throwing stones at a woman until she died. He could rescue her by taking her to his hideout in the woods.

  He was doing well enough in America to cobble together a decent living and for his waning ego France had come forward to offer solid affection. There were no complaints because it is improbable to make a living as a literary novelist without teaching and his last classroom experience had been at Stony Brook in the mid-sixties. Frankly, though, the experience of twenty or so trips to France in a decade did not depend on the French appreciation of his work. That was the lagniappe, of course, but the main pleasure was wandering the country and simply living day to day in different places from St.-Malo to unfashionable western Burgundy where a friend, Gérard Oberlé, had a house, down to Aries, Marseilles, and Bandol where he had become friends with Lulu Peyraud who owned the Domaine Tempier vineyard. Naturally everyone he met, both American and French, told him that France was better in the old days but that was beyond his concern and interest. You heard the same thing throughout America and Mexico. By accident he had had a Francophile high school teacher so that beginning in ninth grade he had come to prefer French literature to English. In France unlike the northern Midwest his interest in food and wine was not considered eccentric. Modest pleasures were France’s specialty. He was well prepared for the fine food because his wife had cooked him ten thousand good meals. During abrasive and nearly hopeless times in their marriage their shared passion for the kitchen had gotten them through, albeit narrowly. In all of his relentless road trips in the U.S. he had never found the equal of a Brittany truck stop where a woman who had bigger arms than Arnold Schwarzenegger beat an enormous bowl of fresh mayonnaise for the crudités and his plate of duck thighs and potatoes were better food than he had found in many of the pavilions of gastronomy in Paris, but then he had slowly become a bistro person. It was difficult to comprehend money in a global sense when a fresh fish stew for breakfast in the Yucatán cost one-tenth the price of oatmeal in his New York hotel.

  How could harmony be so strongly felt in two such disparate places as France and Mexico? It wasn’t the cuisine but dozens of small things each day that added up to a whole life. It was doing nothing much at all at the Villa Louise in Alexe-Corton except staring at vineyards after a snack of cheeses and a baked apple in his lovely room, or the way in Zihuatanejo a maid put flower petals on his pillow and folded a bath towel into a swan. But mostly it was an escape from our overconstructed world so busy teaching one not to know things of value in favor of what the culture’s economy values and demands. As an Omaha Indian said, “It’s not that you white people can’t know certain things, it’s that you’re taught not to know.” He wondered why we want to do everything big before we were capable of doing small things well.

  When not driving unknown roads in his leisure time, including log roads that must be followed to their ends, he was walking the dogs, or rowing a boat on the Yellowstone River in Montana or on lakes in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The driving in distant areas became slower with many stops to try to determine the spirit of place, or at least sense a bit of its nature because locations don’t often give up their true natures easily. When they moved to Montana he finally sold the cabin after visiting it three times one summer which required ten thousand miles of driving. It was also a v
alid excuse to drive around Montana looking for another retreat and reminding himself not to pick a place solely on the aesthetics of the name, that despite the sonority of “Grassrange” maybe it was too far from home base.

  There’s a sappy lassitude that comes after a long work is finished that made him vulnerable to fake equilibrium similar to the warm feeling of driving down a road at fifty-five miles per hour and noting on the thermometer and clock that it’s fifty-five degrees at five fifty-five P.M. He felt that his susceptibility to stupidity was comic and that maybe the kind of balance sought by some in our culture was implausible, a nongift from the Greeks and Buddhists, and various contemporary wisdom cults that reminded him of movies wherein it’s a big wide wonderful world where nobody seems to have a job or the orgasmic heroine in a romantic novel—“She fell back onto great waves of nothingness.” The balance of the day is not the balance of the night where he would occasionally be revisited by a whirling infirmity where the interior night vision probed for wounds and found their visual equivalents. This condition could not be resisted or expunged but could be somewhat directed by the Third World practice of “traveling,” where the demons were at least set in motion against the startling landscape of the Arctic, or the ocean’s floor looking through a whale’s eyes, visiting the world of Lucrezia Borgia, a horse running through eighteenth-century Wyoming. A mood-soothing measure was to enter the being of an animal which brought one’s own imagination into check. He sensed that throughout his lifetime he had housed and fed this consciousness and its unconscious source which did not mean it would always be under his control; in fact, it rarely was, so that the whirling disease was a matter of falling into the lap of imagination’s mother, chaos.

  At such times when he knew he was a fairly well-behaved madman it was elementary science that saved him. Science was the subject furthest from his abilities but days spent studying and thinking about flora and fauna, biology and geology, the morphology of rivers, the ninety billion galaxies could be a splendid relief if you avoided falling back into the trap of the self. He would never transcend the level of Tuesday’s science section in the New York Times but that was enough to keep him anchored to earth. Dozens of natural history guidebooks filled him with a proper humility and there was frequent despair over learning things he should have learned fifty years before. His habitual pride made him sweat through books on DNA and the genome or, even harder, Gerald Edelman’s Neural Darwinism, but his retention was minimal compared to his wonder. It was startling to learn that they had monitored the dream life of an Australian finch and in the dreams of this bird it sang variations of its daytime songs but never actually used them during its conscious life. This fragile knowledge and thousands of other ill-digested facts about birds, including their intelligence, changed the nature of the winter residence he and his wife kept near Patagonia, Arizona, on the migratory path of a profligate number of birds. He would sit on the patio in late March trying to read a newspaper for unclear reasons and glance up to look at the surrounding thickets and feeder and see as many as two dozen species of birds, all virtually seething with their genetic peculiarities, not to speak of the local coatimundis, javelinas, Coues deer, who passed along the creek bed, the ring-tailed cats and rattlesnakes in the jumble of boulders near the house, the mountain lion tracks that were frequently indented in the creek mud, or even the jaguar caught by a trip-wire camera a thirty-minute walk away up a canyon, another questionable migrant from Mexico along with woebegone wetbacks and the drug smugglers who had abandoned a half ton of marijuana a scant two hundred yards from their casita.

  Their place in Montana was even less Words-worthian. Binoculars were needed to see the closest neighbors except for a ranch to the north hidden by thick willow groves. Their beloved English setter Rose had begun a swift decline after being bitten twice in the face by a rattlesnake, a fang dislodged in her eye. Their rancher neighbor had lost thirty-three sheep to wolves in the previous year. His wife, Linda, had called him in Paris one November to say the wolves had killed three more sheep and she had heard them eating from the bedroom window. Over eight hundred rattlesnakes had been killed in recent years near a den halfway up the hill behind the house. He didn’t believe in killing rattlesnakes unless they were in the yard where they were a danger to their dogs and grandchildren. He remembered the critic Kenneth Burke talking about this peculiar beauty of threat. The local grizzly bears and rattlesnakes were beautiful but it was best to be even more attentive in their vicinity than you were on the turbulent Yellowstone River during spring flood.

  After the cabin in the Upper Peninsula was sold the degree of homesickness for it dumbfounded him. He listened to the great Cesaria Evora sing her “Sodade” in Portuguese. Saudade was the improbably powerful longing for a place or person, neither of which could be recaptured in one’s life. He wept in secret as he had in hearing the news of his brother John’s death at age sixty-seven. He used a rehearsed mental trick when visiting any new country or city: “What is here that’s not in other places? Also, what’s not here that I cherished in some other places?” Montana had passed the test of having enough otherness to keep the mind alive.

  The cabin could be dismal in the north’s perennially cloudy weather where there was often no sunlight for a week at a time in May and once on May 11 it had snowed a foot deep. The cabin had been built by a Swede crew in the early thirties and there weren’t enough windows but a small well-lit corner room at entrance was fine for writing and eating meals. The windows were paned and he had spent twenty-three summers jogging his head left and right, up and down to make mental paintings out of the separate panes. Sometimes there would be a visiting bear, deer, or coyotes in the painting but mostly just birds.

  It seemed impossible to figure out what the spirit of place added in its particularities to any location, and it was so numinous that his perception of it occasionally seemed a tad daffy, though harmless. Why did a particular hotel room in Mérida in the Yucatán or Arles in France give him an uncommon sense of well-being? The same with a grove of birch trees near St. Petersburg in Russia, particular thickets in Hampstead Heath in London, a grove of trees on a friend’s property in western Burgundy, and a half dozen thickets in the Upper Peninsula? Why was he so fond of Irving Place in New York City and Rue Vaneau in Paris? Neither was very distinguished; in fact, they were less distinguished than nearby streets. It could be a bend in a river, an abandoned house full of crickets, or a pasture with few specific characteristics or, rarely, a restaurant or a café like the Select on Montparnasse, a simpleminded small-town tavern, the interior pond at the Frick Museum, the view of the East River from the end of Seventy-second Street, a gulley near the Niobrara River in Nebraska.

  He went out on the slenderest limb, and for his use only, deciding these places were simply the soul’s best habitat, whatever the soul might be beyond a neural concentration of all the vaguely spiritual events of a life. Sitting on a comfortable boulder at the high end of a canyon that seemed a farther walk than it once was the mind emptied out as the dog’s nap deepened. A wild odor penetrates the dog’s sleep and she wakes up, looks around, goes back to sleep having decided the odor is harmless. Her master’s mind is uncommonly trouble-free because it has been absorbed by the landscape. What is different in this favorite canyon from the adjoining canyons? Nothing perceptible that would determine the affection. In fact the one to the west is more dramatically beautiful. It’s likely everyone has their spots though they aren’t often talked about any more than the secret religions we have that dominate our public ones. Or the animals we favored in childhood that will likely approach us again on our deathbeds.

  Meanwhile in their casita down on the Mexican border there was a drawer full of unused maps to relatively unknown places. These maps were similar in emotional content to the books he might write in the future. To an exhausted brain the colors of black and gray predominated but when the energies begin to regather the full spectrum of color seeps in. Of course he was getting old but the
occasional autumnal or early-winter feeling was absurd in his calling. The feeling was similar to the overused contemporary word “closure” which to an artist was a doorbell to the death ward. Circles contract and expand. Moving to Montana they were near their daughters, Jamie and Anna, after a long family dispersal, and also their grandsons Will and John in whom he could see certain childhood obsessions developing that would be part of the fuel for the rest of their lives.

  Jamie had given him for Christmas the 1937 edition of My Book House, all twelve volumes, the most overwhelming literature of his childhood, and one winter night while quite ill he had sat down and turned every page. The experience was as far as one could get from the unpleasant science fiction of that morning’s CAT scan. He entered a beautifully haunted country where any sense of threat had been adumbrated by time. There was danger in the “American Miner’s Song,” and fearful delight in “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” and Kingsley’s mysterious Water-Babies, Goldsmith’s “Death of a Mad Dog.” Back then children’s literature was far less protected from mortality. He knew that “Ring Around the Rosie” with the chorus “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down” came from the years of the bubonic plague. He slowly turned the pages for hours, seeing how many of the stories had stayed with him however small the traces. Scholars can talk of “belief systems” but the brain is welter, not a linear construct. When we learn that something is not literally true it doesn’t mean that it disappears. A boy used a wolf as a horse, an Indian girl a polar bear, frogs and mice dressed as soldiers, Casey Jones died, and Daniel was brave in a den of overmuscled lions. He remembered wanting to live east of the sun, and west of the moon, that’s where he was headed for sure. Bears love music and the world was full of secret gardens, entrances and doors. There were dozens of tales of American Indians, doubtless a source of his lifelong obsession, many fables from Aesop and Greek myths. Thor and Odin were there along with Jesus, and Robin Hood stood fast in his young leftist temperament. He hadn’t wanted to be a knight in shining armor, or a cowboy. Wearing all that metal was confining and how could you swim? He wanted to be a nearly naked Indian running through the forest with his bow and arrows, or Joaquin Miller in the western wilderness. As the volumes progressed with more mature stories, one of America as a “melting pot” had seemed vaguely sexual. And for planting the seed as a writer there were stories from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Faust, Cervantes, Dante, and Villon, and little biographies of Tolstoy, Keats, and Byron who had seemed so admirable.