Off to the Side

by Jim Harrison

  Meanwhile the poet who has written very few poems and a five-page short story but has stuffed his brain to the cracking point with the best of American, English, French, Russian, and Spanish literature is going home to load their possessions into a U-Haul trailer, gather up his wife and daughter who are thrilled to be fearful, and move east to Boston. They are a few steps up from the Joads but certainly not out of danger. They are most of all deeply involved in the facts of survival. More than with poetry the mind spins with the question of whether the car will make it pulling the heavy trailer. They are any young couple on the move, and even the peculiar ambition to write poems and novels is scarcely extraordinary, and the driver knows and repeats over and over that only the made thing, the work done, finally matters, that intentions in themselves can be a crippling disease, and that ambition bears no more weight than wishing yourself well when you get up in the morning and check in the mirror to see who you might be.

  At this point, I want to stop and describe an experience I had recently that offered up a punishing metaphor. It had snowed down here in Patagonia, Arizona, the day before. The area is in the middle of various mountain ranges near the Mexican border, and it was coolish when I set out quail hunting with my friend the novelist Phil Caputo, who wrote, among other things, Rumor of War about his wretched experiences as a marine officer in Vietnam. Over the years hunting, quail hunting in particular, has become more for me on the order of an older urban man going to a gym in the mostly vain effort to keep the body limber and operable. There is also the pleasure in watching a bird dog work the cover where you witness a skill and intensity rarely seen in the human species. A good dog doesn’t have concentration, it is concentration as it fairly floats along with a physical stamina known only to the best of our athletes.

  I knew soon after four-thirty it was time to turn back but then Rose found a covey that wild-flushed and we stupidly pursued them rather than turning back to the car, an hour’s walk in the opposite direction. Quite suddenly everything was against us, most dominantly the improbably rumbled topography. The drainages, the washes or arroyos that fan off Mount Wrightson in the Santa Ritas, have dug themselves deeply over the centuries, some of them virtual canyons. We didn’t have time to backtrack before dark and not being goats we couldn’t move laterally across the arroyos to the car. I chose to head southwest along an arroyo called Temporal, but I was one canyon too far to the west, a smaller one that narrowed and was still full of snow in some places, which radiated cold. Just before dark through the narrowing open sky of the arroyo I caught a glimpse of the distant mountains that are south of our casita on the creek where my wife no doubt sat with Phil’s wife in growing alarm, in no little way because their husbands are far from youthful and to say the local terrain is treacherous is an understatement.

  It became too dark to gamble on walking any farther though I knew we were an hour or less from my kitchen with our usual lavish supplies, including a fresh shipment of French red wine I especially pined for in the now freezing canyon. For the first time in decades I was pleased that I still smoked in that there were two lighters in my pocket. In the pitch dark we were able to gather a bunchgrass called saceton and plenty of kindling from the dead branches of hackberry and mesquite trees. We started a modest fire and in the light it cast we were able to gather more and larger pieces of wood including an enormous log Phil dragged from the wash. Now we had a true bonfire that heated our clearing in at least a twenty-five-foot radius. Rose, who is a bit petulant when not hunting, became overwarm and moved off into the grass for a nap. Before we had started the fire she and Phil’s setter, Sage, were still looking for quail in the dark.

  The fire meant safety in the same manner it did to Pleistocene man. My geezer body, exhausted by over five hours of rough walking, drew in the heat with the intensest of pleasure, my butt quite cold but my chest, face, and legs gloriously hot with dense sweat of exhaustion drying into the air. I can’t say that we were truly comfortable but our bonfire was so reassuring that notions of true comfort were irrelevant. I curled up with Rose who was willing but irritable, the latter possibly because she had been lost three nights in December in a large area empty of people but thriving with the creature world. Rose is what dog trainers call a “competitive bitch.” If she is let loose in the field with four male relatives she wants to beat them to the cover. It is a similar impulse to when you’re hunting morel mushrooms or wild berries with friends and you very much want to find the mother lode before they do.

  Suddenly the dogs perked up their ears at a sound, a resonant coughing, well up in the canyon to the north. It was a mountain lion coughing up a hairball gotten from grooming like a house cat, and abetted by eating furry creatures and swallowing stray hairs. It brought one to attention but not to any fear what with shotguns leaning against a log. There was also the total unlikelihood of the lion’s interest in us. In their increasing contiguity to us through no fault of their own they have been known to pick off house pets, a few children, and the occasional jogger behaving like prey. Our alertness was simply a possible genetic reaction similar to hearing rattlesnakes rattling, a grizzly grunting, the twilight howl of a wolf.

  Snuggling there with Rose, a very poor substitute for my wife, I attempted to locate myself in the general picture, something I do before sleeping and when I wake up. Members of a number of Native American tribes do this, and the innocent procedure was also advised by Dogen, the fabled Japanese philosopher of Zen. In short, you must find yourself where you already are, obvious but not so easy. I have long been a preposterously inept Zen student, somewhat in the manner of my failed graduate studies. I suspect this Zen oaf thing comes partly from Charles Olson’s notion that as artists we should only “traffick” in our own sign, or Robert Graves’s dictum that our poet fidelities must not be spread beyond the poem. In my prolonged debut as a geezer I have apparently not settled into wisdom. Every single answer seems umbilically connected to a multitude of questions. When younger I seemed to need a whole fresh metaphysic to get up in the morning. Now a bastard mixture of a few old ones will do.

  Where am I? In a cold canyon near the border with the grass in the firelight marbled by snow patches, my left hand on the heartbeat of Rose. I’m looking at the best shadows in years flickering with the strength of the fire off the mesquite and hackberry. At the top of the canyon the strong light of the moon spills over the rocks like milk. I am a lost man of sixty-four curled on the ground with his dog staring up at Orion whose stars in the clear air are sparking, vivid, incomprehensible.

  Well, we were back in my kitchen at midnight drinking Bandol, a Provencal red wine I strongly favor, and cooking up some quick knockwurst and sauerkraut. A helicopter found us, manned by two men from the Arizona Department of Public Service who were also paramedics. We gave thumbs-up and tried to wave them away with their powerful searchlight for fear they’d crash. Caputo, who has had a great deal of experience, said our LZ (landing zone) was too small. They finally landed on a nearby ridge and made their way down a steep slope to us, having directed by GPS a game warden in a pickup to a nearby trail. So we were “rescued,” though I was slightly mournful as our grand fire was put out with shovels and water.

  Years ago I wrote, “How can I be lost when I’ve never been found?” A poignant question, but this was a case of cold, clear, lucid lost. Usually most of us are lost in the often suffocating effluvia of our lives, or in the zoolike constructs built around our lives as protective measures, made by ourselves with ample help from the culture. It’s so hard to know when to jump ship, bail out, cut and run, slide through the bars. Few things are painfully simple though much is made of simplicity. Getting truly lost only offers up the metaphor with the clarity of a rising moon, a lion’s cough, the heartbeat and snore of a dog, the stars that drew much closer than was their habit. I am haunted by a story told by a rancher I know of how someone cut his fence and thirty cows got loose. A kindly neighbor found the cows and drove them back into another pasture, only this on
e was without access to water. Eight of the thirty cattle died of thirst while gazing at a mountain lake a few hundred yards in the distance. Over the years troublesome stock tends to get culled out for practical reasons. A smart and pissed-off cow can cause problems, a bull even more so. In earlier times the Mexican long-horns in this area of the Southwest charged contingents of the United States Cavalry. We love to look for wild animals that our ancestors so resolutely exterminated with their habitat in a lust for profit. We can easily love the idea of freedom and wildness but few of us have the power of our children who might occasionally skip school for a movie, a ball game, or to go swimming. It is strange indeed how the most wild-eyed artists I have known can trip themselves and be lost within themselves. The basic romantic notion that we can always “liberate” ourselves is corruptly optimistic.

  After my experience, which in the manner of a true senior I suffered without embarrassment, I said to my wife, “Isn’t it wonderful to live in an area where you can get lost.” There was no comment. After all she was the one who truly suffered with the idea that her husband might have pitched off one of a thousand available cliffs in the darkness. It’s never the conclusions, it’s the story, the experience.

  Back to Boston and finally not lost like the perpetually unemployed, mildly exultant with a job and a paycheck, not much of one at first but I got a fifty percent raise after three months for accidental reasons. On my book route I visited a partially completed new school but the librarian wasn’t there. In a long empty hall a well-dressed man was practicing with a fly rod and we began talking about trout fishing. I politely observed that he was turning over his wrist at the end of each cast, which had the effect of throwing a loop in his monofilament leader. He turned out to be the superintendent for three new schools in the area and the upshot of our fly-casting chat was an order for three complete school libraries partially funded by a government program. This accident overly impressed the manager and owners of Campbell and Hall and I had the fresh experience after a black-sheep existence of being admirable and, along with it, a new Ford station wagon to drive plus the hefty raise.

  We had stayed in Cambridge with John and Rebecca a few days and then found an apartment over in Allston on a cusp between Jewish and Catholic neighborhoods near the Brookline town line. We were in a fourth-floor walk-up in a group of buildings called the Longfellow Apartments, a name that gave me some pause after being forced to try to memorize parts of his silly “Hiawatha” in grade school. Even after my solo shot of lugging up our meager belongings and twenty cartons of heavy books I loved our vantage point, from which so much of Boston was strikingly visible. No one thinks, “Boston: Land of Enchantment” in the manner of the National Geographic, but in the early sixties it seemed a lively place with a great deal of what is called “intellectual foment” arising from the many colleges and universities in the area, so that after the senescence of the fifties you could almost imagine from the rooftop the clouds above Boston to be clouds of ideas.

  My book routes on varying days took me from Newburyport to Fitchburg to Providence in Rhode Island and to New Bedford, which as a Melville addict I loved. The area was storied in the oldest sense and while I was driving place-names would find their coordinates in my reading, and not always pleasantly. Driving across a bridge in Waltham I became certain that it was the bridge poor Quentin Compson had flung himself from in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. With Hawthorne north on the coast I couldn’t help but wish that he had had the sense to escape to the early prostitutes around Scollay Square given that his wife was a cold-hearted virago.

  Frequently I completed my rounds by midafternoon which allowed me to write, nap from a long writing night, or take my daughter Jamie for a ride or walk. We would stop at an old-style delicatessen on Brookline Avenue and share a platter of herring to the admiration of ancient Jewish men who would pat little goy Jamie on the head for eating her herring and onions.

  As a midwesterner I have always been quite the fool for self-improvement schemes, an impulse that becomes nearly liturgical in more isolated areas. In Horatio Alger young men were bent on “improving their lot.” You are either exercising yourself to a frazzle using the “dynamic tension” of Charles Atlas, improving your word power, saving your pennies in a big jar, making use of every minute, studying treasure maps, or reading biographies of men who made it “up from the depths.” This kind of inane bullshit later exfoliated into Vince Lombardi’s notion of toughness and the kind of rabid Americanism that was bent on punishing any form of dissent. On my sales route in the Boston area this penchant took the form of selecting a novelist or poet to meditate upon each day during the humdrum struggle with traffic and unknown roads. There were separate days of William Carlos Williams, Melville (especially Billy Budd, which confused me), Kierkegaard, Turgenev, Dos Passos, Rilke, Lorca, Céline (who didn’t produce a good sales attitude), the journalist Dwight Macdonald, Steinbeck, and many others. I had been rereading the unfashionable Steinbeck in honor of my dead sister since he was her favorite author. My father had given me Grapes of Wrath when I was about twelve and it had produced so much sorrow in me in the manner of an American Dickens. In Boston I thought that Steinbeck like Mark Twain might have been generally denied a higher place because he was insufficiently puzzling to produce a goodly number of professional jobs like Eliot and Joyce. I was meditating on Steinbeck the day I walked into the Hathaway Bookshop in Wellesley and the stock clerk told me John Kennedy had been shot. This produced mutual tears as we sat there in the basement among the book cartons drinking coffee and listening to the radio.

  I have long supposed that the central value of this very ordinary job was its settling effect on the enervation of unemployment and death. Driving solo can be soothing like gardening, fishing, or hunting. Where can we run from the knowledge and wisdom that we think we have but which is actually crippling our imaginations? The sedentary life often leaves us with no room for surprises while the movement of walking alone or driving can stir our neurons to unexpected life.

  We had bought a couch at Filene’s on layaway, the first big purchase of our marriage, and when it was finally delivered we had a party and the couch received its first red-wine stains. I continued to go to Grolier Book Shop on Saturday mornings and there is the question of how young, unfinished poets can talk at such endless length about poetry. The immense pink-faced bartender at Jake Wirths where we’d take the subway for lunch would shake his head, being more accustomed to sports fans. My old college friend and poet J. D. Reed had moved to Concord with his wife, Carol, so we saw them and the poet Bill Corbett and his wife, Beverly, plus my brother John and his wife, Rebecca. We all drank too much except my brother and his wife, but then for an all too brief period in anyone’s life alcohol can be quite forgiving. Since my job included lugging cartons of books I stayed in fine shape but my morning head was often fuzzy. On the way home I’d grocery-shop, particularly at a budget supermarket in Waltham where fresh scrod came as cheap as nineteen cents a pound. Only someone from the waspish Protestant Midwest can appreciate with enthusiasm what was available in Boston, from cheap ethnic restaurants, to delicatessens, to a grand fish store on Brookline Avenue, to the delicacies at Sage’s in Cambridge.

  I continued to write slowly under the cautionary onus of having read fine poetry in great quantity. In the spring of our first year I had ten completed poems and wanted to get back in touch with Galway Kinnell, who had been quite encouraging in a conversation we had had when he appeared at Michigan State. He had been subletting Denise Levertov’s New York City apartment and that was the only number I had. I spoke with Denise whose work I knew quite well and she suggested I send some of my poems to her. I did so with a great deal of nervousness because no one but my wife, Linda, still my first and most valued reader, had seen my poems, certainly not my fellow unpublished poets. By common unworded consent we took the private high road, mostly out of the fear of judgment. As any scam artist knows you maintain your credibility by keeping others in
the dark, and there had always been a tiny nodule back in my brain telling me I was a fake. For survival a young artist boundlessly inflates his ego hoping very much that the evidence will naturally follow. This was frankly a period in my life when I spent as little time as possible in front of a mirror.

  It was in a little more than a week that I got a fat letter back from Denise, which I assumed contained my poems. Instead it was a ten-page scrawled letter saying that she had recently been appointed the consultant for poetry at W.W. Norton and if I had a manuscript of the same quality as the ten poems I had sent her she could certainly get me a contract for publication. Naturally I was dumbfounded and fearful. This was absolutely my first approbation from the world outside and it unnerved me. I had inherited a deep and unpleasant maudlin streak from my father that told me nothing ultimately good comes from anything. Wine might be good but the only thing you could rely on was God’s water. That sort of thing. I shared Levertov’s letter only with my wife for fear it would be bad luck to tell my fellow scruffy poets. I then set about mining my notebooks for unfinished work, false starts, bits and pieces, unruly longer poems that had left me wondering what I had been attempting. A month later I sent off the completed manuscript and settled in for what I assumed, having heard the war stories of poets at Grolier, could be a long wait.