The River Swimmer

by Jim Harrison

  The cast had begun to disintegrate in the water and the freedom of movement was wonderful though it came with extra pain. He was surrounded by them as he eased out the channel, thinking that he had missed grasshopper season and the chance to drown Friendly Frank. He would have to leave it up to Tooth during deer season when she said she would “pop his skull” with her 30.06 rifle.

  He knew that the women would be in a state of shock when they returned to find him not there. Now he was fairly gliding down the river with his friends around him flittering this way and that as if in play.

  By the time he passed through town the women had returned to the pond site and within an hour the State Police dive team were there, of course finding nothing in the pond and there was no place else it was sensible to look once the local contact, the sheriff, told them that earlier in the summer Thad had swum to Chicago.

  By nightfall Thad had reached the mouth of the river where the winds were coming in very strong, over fifty knots, off Lake Michigan. The waves were growing moment by moment. They were already a dozen feet high and the river’s strong current barely got him through. The troughs of waves in Lake Michigan are without tidal influence and so are much narrower than in the ocean thus the swimming or boaters tend to get relentlessly slammed. You move upward with the water, then are tossed or flipped. His little friends clung to him as if they were all glue. After midnight on his westward course he was exhausted and cold to the point that they had to buoy him up in unison. Throughout the night he was mercilessly tossed and trashed and by dawn when the storm began to subside he was more dead than alive. By midmorning the Coast Guard found him forty miles out. And when they dropped the harness and stretcher the volunteer going down the rope was sure he saw that the victim seemed to be surrounded by thickish fish of about a dozen pounds apiece. This mystified him but he pushed it aside in favor of the duties of the moment. After they raised him to the chopper the medic determined that Thad was nearly dead from hypothermia but recoverable.

  At a private sanitarium outside Chicago John Scott was speaking with the psychiatrist.

  “We don’t seem to have many options for keeping him alive,” John Scott said quizzically.

  “Lock and key. Extreme supervision. Very expensive. This is indefinite. It’s ultimately up to him.”

  “Only the light touch will work in the long run,” John Scott said.

  In three weeks Thad was home again and recovering. His father and Dove kept an eye on him full-time, backed up by Tooth. It was hard but by the end of October the four of them were at the pond with a length of binder twine tied between Thad and Dove. He saw no signs of life and wondered what his miniature friends thought when the helicopter picked him up out in Lake Michigan. It was one of those spectral, glistening, sunny, early fall days after a light rain, warmish with all of the collective fall odors flooding the nose. They hadn’t sat there for more than fifteen minutes before Dove shrieked, “Look.” The thirteen water babies came surging in the channel, made one circle of the pond on the surface then went back out the channel into the river. Apparently, he thought, they had come to say good-bye. He heard his father breathe deeply and mutter “What?” Tooth began singing. They belonged where they were.

  That evening he was back at his desk staring out at the twilight, wondering how far they swam to find the warmer winter water they needed. He was rereading The Rivers of Earth deciding that he must stay alive to greet them next spring. He turned out the light and lay down after rereading the Amazon and Nile chapters for the umpteenth time. You could not swim the lower Nile or a hippo might very well bite you in half like they did crocodiles. Hippos had a pride of ownership over their rivers. Stay out, mine, they said. He dreaded the upcoming winter. Emily was trying to persuade him to come to Costa Rica with her but she was being pushy. He had called Laurie that morning but she didn’t want to see him anymore. She felt betrayed. He couldn’t blame her. Emily had a college project of a botanical nature in Costa Rica and said he would love the water there especially around Flamingo Bay where there were conical volcanic rocks upthrusting from the ocean. It all made him feel the injustice of money in the world. The message was, if you’re poor stay home, the only real temptation was that he had never swum in the tropics so perhaps his pride was misplaced. Why freeze his ass off as usual on the farm cross-country skiing every day. He felt mentally victimized by the miraculous. Life would have been easier without the water babies. The world lost its top with their appearance. He felt the lumpishness of a coming depression. He turned the light back on and read about Costa Rica in his old shabby Britannica he had bought at a Grand Rapids yard sale. He recalled what his father, who was susceptible, had said about depression. Early in the process you always had to have your antennae out. You had to cook or boil yourself down late in the evening when you’re too desperate to lie still and see what’s there deep in your soul. That was easy for Thad.

  The young scholar from Michigan State said that poets and novelists were whores for language, that they would give anything for something good. Thad easily accepted the idea that he was a whore for swimming, the only activity that gave him total pleasure and a sense of absolutely belonging on Earth, especially swimming in rivers with the current carrying your water-enveloped body along at its own speed. It was bliss to him so why shouldn’t he be obsessed? And if Emily wanted to take him swimming in Costa Rica it was only another kind of whoredom. What was at issue except pride? The classic “I can’t be bought” but then I can. He would anyway end up selling his life for a job like anyone else, including his dad putting out oil well fires or his mother donating her life to the farm. It’s just what people did. He could even imagine doing so at the age Grandpa had been when he died, eighty-one, an old man heading downriver. A teacher had told him that for most of his life the great James Joyce had to be supported by a woman named Sylvia Beach. But he didn’t say where she had gotten the money to begin with. Was there truly dirty money? Or was it purified by rotation and use.

  Frankly he didn’t mind being a whore. In the past decades the word had lost its power. He slipped off his nightclothes after looking at the reflection of a big moon in the river. Leaving the room he heard a suspicious click in the door and he accurately guessed it was a device Dove had devised to let her know if he left the room. He quickly passed through the dining room and out the front door. From the front door he could see Dove standing by the kitchen table talking to his parents then moving hurriedly off. Maybe he was just going to the bathroom down the hall? But Dove had to check. By then Thad had trotted down the yard and had dove in the river. He was merciful to those he loved and just swam down the length of the river, pulled himself out by grabbing a branch, then trotted back to the house by a well-worn path, memorized to avoid stubbing toes on roots. They met him at the front door with his mother weeping and Dove yelling, “God damn you Thad.” His dad poured him a shot of whiskey and his mother dried him off with a handful of kitchen towels from a drawer. It had been an utterly delicious swim, moving downstream toward the moon that glistened both in the sky and on the water.

  Back in bed he felt comfortable and totally hopeless. If there was a body of swimmable water nearby he would enter it. It was his nature.