by Jim Harrison
I'm not at all proud of those years, say between the ages of fourteen and twenty; most of them seem characterized by selfishness and insensitivity. Work was the excuse, an urge to prove myself at the expense of Emmeline. We got married when we were sixteen, not unusual at the time for people who came from families identified as lower class. By then I was working on the bridge with Ted, who bought us a small house in Epoufette, a lovely little town on Lake Michigan, not far from St. Ignace. It was partly greed over getting a grown man's wages. It was work anyone could have done—road construction, driving dump trucks, building storage sheds. It was only later that I developed some unique abilities that made my labor meaningful. It's said that bridge workers, the bridgemen, are so mean you can never tell if they're sick or drunk or both. I aped these men, including the Mohawks, who are well known for their abilities at working at great heights. And the steelworkers who did the marine work off the barges, the caissons, pilings and the cofferdams, seemed wilder yet. It seems it took until Africa before I got over the coarsening effect of those years. I was sick of the cement block tabernacles I had preached in, and the bridge itself represented the slowly building path to the outside world. I would watch the cable-spinners through Ted's binoculars and long to do something high-minded and dangerous so far up there hundreds of feet in the air. At the time, the middle section was the longest suspension bridge ever built in the world, over 3800 feet. All of us on shore were a little tentative, but a lot of the excitement rubbed off. Odd, but I can remember the names of those who died: Frank Pepper, Albert Abbott, James La Sarge, Jack Baker, Robert Koppen. We younger workers wanted to be out there where we might have a chance to die heroically!
Perhaps many of the mutual disappointments between Emmeline and me were inevitable for those who married so young. Most often I was working six days a week, twelve hours a day. My exhaustion was so great that often I'd fall asleep at the dinner table. Bobby and Aurora came along pretty fast, and our main entertainment was playing with the babies. Only the midwinter break, when the bridge work closed down, did we do anything to save us. Emmeline had gotten involved with the young wives of other workers, who viewed us as laughably old-fashioned. I remember one evening when I came home and Emmeline was crying. It was in November in 1955 when the south backstay span nearly toppled in a seventy-five mile per hour gale.
“What's wrong, pumpkin?” I asked. In fact, she had gained a lot of weight with the births of the children. This was also my fault, as my complaints about her cooking, so awful compared to Mother's, had gotten her overly interested in food.
“I drank a glass of beer over at Wanda's today,” she gasped. “I'll go to hell for sure. Save me, Corve.”
“A loving Cod is not going to send you to hell for a glass of beer.”
“Yes, He is,” she shrieked.
“A little wine for thy stomach's infirmities,” Saint Paul told us. I was pretty resourceful what with all the Scriptures at my fingertips. When I didn't feel like going to church, I'd remind myself that Jesus said, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”
Rachel, Ted's wife, figured we were having problems, so she took care of the kids and made us go off for a weekend at the Soo. I hope to tell you we let her rip. We bought a radio and a phonograph and played records in our room at the Ojibway. We went to the Antlers twice for dinner. We did it in the fashion the workers called “dog-style” for the first time. We bought some beer and peppermint schnapps and sat there in the room drinking and listening to music and waiting to go crazy. We saw my very first movie, starring Esther Williams, the renowned actress and swimmer back then. We watched it twice, in fact. I would get a whomping hard-on watching all of those ladies swimming, and Emmeline would play with me right there in the dark theatre. We even danced in the hotel room to a record that was a big hit at the time, called “Sh-Boom,” of all things.
That trip helped somewhat, though Emmeline played “Unchained Melody” so much that winter that I finally limited her to once a day. We stopped short of a television, partly because all of our God-fearing acquaintances of the past might see the aerial. We went to the Soo one other time that winter and saw Rock Around the Clock, which we thought, despite the wonderful music, was a frightening picture of life in the big cities. We were very moderate in our drinking because my sister Lily had moved to St. Ignace and had developed quite a drinking problem. She showed up at Ted's one night all beaten up by her husband. When I saw her, I just broke down and cried. Ted called the police, but they weren't interested in the problem, so Ted and me went looking for him. We split up and walked the streets of St. Ignace. Until then I had never committed any violence against another man and still think of it as evil unless it is unavoidable, say, if some lunatic jumps you. Well, I found him in a bar and did quite a job, despite my youth, before I was pulled off. Later on they got back together. In fact, they're still married. I asked his forgiveness, but he said I was right to stand up for my sister.
The real problem then was that I had met my first male friend. He was a college kid of Italian descent who had a summer job because his dad was a superintendent for Merritt, Chapman and Scott, the marine contractor. Val, his name was, and we had a great time together. He was from Chicago and treated me at first as if I was a hick, but he was crazy about fishing and hunting, so I was quite a bit of help to him. We'd bring his father a lot of fish on Sundays, and on one occasion we jacklighted a deer. His father was from northern Italy, and I've never seen a man quite so excited about having a deer to eat.
Val's father offered me a job: After Mackinac they were going to do a smaller bridge over the Suwannee in Florida, then on to a larger one in Mexico. I was full of myself for several days until he found out I was married and said a young husband should stay with his wife. Val saw my grief and tried to talk his father out of it, with no success. To tell the truth, I was heartbroken. When Val left, I didn't say good-bye, and when the bridge was done enough to let all the workers make the first trip on foot from St. Ignace to Mackinac City, I played sick and wouldn't go. I lapsed into a long silence and went back to religion. Even Ted couldn't get a thing out of me, and Emmeline took to going out with her friends, leaving me with the babies, whom I catered to in the fashion of a martyr.
This proud murk, or I should say mud, went on for several months until I drove Emmeline, Ted and Rachel witless. Then one day Ted ran into Val's father, who had returned for the bridge-opening ceremonies, and got the whole story. This only served to make my brother angry.
“Corve, there's no real money in being some construction vagabond.”
“Not interested in the money. I want to see the world.”
“Oh, bullshit. You saved every cent you could since you were fourteen. I'm counting on you for a partner someday.”
“Looks to me like I'm going to live and die right up here.”
“That's what I'm saying. You got plenty of dough. Why don't you take Emmeline over to Niagara Falls or down to Detroit for a ball game?”
I had something far grander in mind, having called Laurel in Detroit and laid out fifty bucks for a magnificent world atlas. I had outlined a trip that would have required the most manic traveler a number of years. I also bought those books many dreamers buy—Work Your Way Around the World, Around the World on a Tramp Steamer—and my secret itinerary included the Gobi Desert, the Transvaal, Tierra del Fuego, Kashmir, the Himalayas, the walled kingdom of Tibet, Macchu Picchu, Kenya, the Sahara, Fiji, and so on. I felt I had two things in my favor. First, I had saved nearly fifteen thousand dollars in six years, an awesome amount for a young man in those days, or so it seemed to me; I would leave thirteen for Emmeline and take the other two to augment what I could earn. And the other point in my favor was that I knew a lot of skills: construction, including plumbing and wiring, heavy equipment repair, regular auto repair, and I could read and follow blueprints, drive shallow wells, drive a bulldozer or a backhoe, finish cement, plus I had modest talents as a machinist. I felt all this should ge
t me around, and I was right for a change, but by accident.
What happened was that Ted had been contracted by an old friend of the family who Dad had helped out. This man had become the director of foreign missions for a large fundamentalist denomination—I won't mention what group because, as you'll see later, these people were truly a bunch of fuck-ups. There's a stubborn irony in the idea that so many of the most compassionate people don't know how to do anything. Anyway, this man sent Ted the plans for a small mission school and suggested if Ted still “loved the Lord” he would be willing to go to Kenya for a few months and supervise construction. The people of the “dark continent” were full of a “longing for Jesus.”
“These folks must be real dumb, Corve. We could whip this sucker together in a month.”
“With no help at all,” I agreed. It was a simple three-room construction—a smallish hall with two rooms in back, one for a clinic and one for storage.
The upshot was that Ted convinced this director of missions that I could do the job, helped a bit by an ample contribution. Ted was a strict tither; that is, ten percent of his income went to the church or to church charities. At the time—it is still true now—fundamentalist groups were insistent that the entire world hear the gospel. The main theological impulse here is that the world couldn't come to an end until everyone had had a chance to know Jesus and, if nothing else, these folks wanted the world to end. You simply can't go anywhere in the Third World without running into these missions. These people go through indescribable discomforts and suffering to spread the gospel. They are scorned by the intelligentsia of every country, but then they could care less about the intelligentsia. Both revolutionaries and right-wingers murder them, but what better thing than a martyr's death? Frankly, these mission schools are traditionally a wonderful breeding ground for revolutionaries because, properly understood, the gospel teaches us to hate injustice and to love one another.
Emmeline cried a lot but had undergone the total indoctrination of the Scriptures. It is said: “Many are called but few are chosen.”
“I always knew you were chosen to be something special, Corve. Me, I'm just ordinary. I never give a thought to anything except what I'm doing. Ever since we walked around the lake that day at Bible camp you were my hero.”
Late on the eve of my departure I was trembling a lot and staring at my suitcase and a new brown suit all laid out. At dawn Ted would take me to the bus station in St. Ignace, from which I would travel south to Grand Rapids, where I would be prepped by the mission director. For over a week I had been filled with fear and trembling, mixed with a wild, soaring expectancy. Emmeline and me had simply screwed ourselves silly. She said she would be true to me, which struck me as odd because it never occurred to me otherwise. I kept assuring her that the longest I would be gone would be six months. Later I realized that my departure must have reminded her of her father's fatal trip to war. Late that last night I kissed Bobby and Aurora, and the tears came so strongly I couldn't catch my breath.
So I crossed the bridge going south, and I never really came back until now, over twenty-five years later. A number of things disturb me as I'm saying this, maybe not so much disturb as nag at me. You could almost envision your life as a crèchelike tableau, a series of three-dimensional photographs of the dominant scenes, the bitterest griefs and the accomplishments. I see myself on a rainy summer dawn, embracing Ted and getting on the bus. I can't really breathe or swallow, and my stomach is cramped. Somehow in the diesel hiss and whine of the bus I look east toward the glow of the rising sun. I am murmuring prayers, because I am frightened as if I had somehow allowed myself, a child of God, to be sent back to Egypt. It was as if my yearning had got me out of an imagined bondage for the real one of the unknown. Probably everyone feels this on their first true flight from whatever nest, but it is no less real for being so universally shared! We all have mothers and fathers, and what sweet anguish, sometimes terror, there is in those names. If you give it much thought, the skeleton of life is stupendously ordinary. So much of the emotional content of our lives seems to occur before we are nineteen or twenty, doesn't it? After that, especially by our age, we seem like stone walls, mortared together by scar tissue. The whole point is not to be. From all my reading done in construction camps throughout the world, the main point or challenge is to stay as conscious as possible, absurd as that seems.
Talking to you now I'm getting back some of that vividness. My god, man, look at a map. Maps are comic. Locate Marquette or Trout Lake or Moran or Epoufette in the upper peninsula of Michigan, then look at Kajiado, south of Nairobi, in Kenya. I am barely twenty years old, and the buttons of my new, bargain brown suit are already unraveling. My passport is getting worn from constant rechecking. I am off for a lifetime of work. I say “lifetime” as it is now a question that it might be pretty much over, however abbreviated. South of here, on the Kingston Plains, sometimes on a camping trip if it was raining, Karl and I would burn one of those century-old white pine stumps. I've pretty much burned myself up, and if you looked at a succession of photos of the work I had a part in, it wouldn't mean much to anyone else. Is your true life in those books of yours? It better be. I can flip this photo over in my mind now, the bridges, irrigation projects, dams. We no longer have much faith in that sort of thing in our country, but they do elsewhere. Those triumphs of technology and engineering are easily forgotten when the lights never go out. They are questioned the most by the people who have the most, which is not even a paradox for human beings. It was far simpler for me back in Africa where the drilling of one first-rate well with pure water could save hundreds of lives from fatal cholera, not to speak of any number of slower deaths from other diseases.
Africa was by far the most beautiful nightmare of my life. If it had lasted more than the half-year I was there I might have died, both emotionally and physically. There's simply no preparation for the impact of Kenya, not certainly in the fifty years’ worth of National Geographics I studied in the Chippewa County library. You said you'd been there yourself, so you know what I'm talking about. But you're a sophisticated traveler, and I was a twenty-year-old stripling who had only been out of the U.P. en route. Manhattan alone seemed a mirage from the airplane, and I swore to spend some time there someday. The church made my travel arrangements with typical Protestant sadomasochism; it was two and a half days of airplanes and airports, with no chance to see any of New York, London, Rome, Addis Ababa. And when I reached Nairobi, my suitcase was at the luggage dock but not my tool chest, which Ted had so carefully selected and purchased. This put a lump in my throat that stayed there until the tool chest mysteriously arrived at the mission three weeks later. Reverend Blank—I must conceal this fool's name—insisted that the power of prayer brought the tool chest to us. The mission wasn't really in Kajiado but well outside a town very similar to it. This is to conceal Sharon's identity—she might have a husband now, or even children.
So there I sat on my suitcase outside the Nairobi airport for more than an hour, waiting for whoever was sent to pick me up. I hadn't had anything but catnaps for more than two days, and my senses were raw and vivid. Twenty-five years later I can still remember many of the faces. There was a group of obviously very rich men from Texas and Colorado being picked up by a white hunter for a safari. One of these men looked at me sitting there in my brown suit with transparent, mean-eyed scorn. Back home you wouldn't look at anyone that way without being in danger of getting your ass kicked. More poignant were two English girls who had been on my flight and were being met by their parents. I had become infatuated with them on the plane, not that they were beautiful, but they were so lively and had extraordinary laughs. They were the sort of upper-crust girls I had never seen before. The true money from mining in the U.P. was limited to a few families on the Keewanaw Peninsula and in Marquette. Most of the mining concerns were Boston-owned, and that's where all the money went. The girls’ clothes were strange-looking but lovely. The younger one waved good-bye to me, though we
had only looked at each other on the plane. There was a fine flash of leg as she got into the car, the first Jaguar I had ever seen other than in photos. I entered a reverie about taking off her expensive underpants and hoped desperately to see her again. When you come from terribly confined circumstances, the main thing you cannot comprehend is the sheer dimension of human activity on earth.
Then there was a large black man in soiled khakis standing before me and a severe-looking woman in her early thirties in a sun hat and cotton dress.
“Brother Strang? This is Peter, and I'm Sharon, the mission nurse. You look tired. It must have been an awful trip.”
“It was a great trip.” I bowed to her and shook hands with Peter. There was a thrill here; though I had seen some blacks in Grand Rapids during my indoctrination, I was twenty years old and had never met one. Some fundamentalists think of them as the accursed children of Ham, but Dad had said that was nonsense. After Christ died, all curses were lifted from earth if you wanted them to be.
“I'm glad you're optimistic. You'll need it here.” Sharon was giving me that direct once-over that I've come to think of as a mark of an intelligent woman. “I'm sorry we're late. I waited forever at the pharmacy.”
Peter went off to check on my missing tool chest, and I had a chance to look Sharon over. She verged on being attractive and would have been so with a minimum of effort. Her surface severity contrasted to full breasts, narrow waist, and fairly full hips. She was a farm girl from outside Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and we loosened up when we began babbling about being from the northern Midwest, not more than a few hundred miles from each other.
Well, the mission was a lot less than I expected. Circled around a huge baobab tree and encircled itself by a kraal-type fence were a small house with a screen porch, a small open-air school, a stucco dispensary, and a miniature motel-like building with three doors. My living quarters were at one end and Sharon's at the other, with an empty nonconnecting room between us. There also was a shed that held a welter of junk and useless equipment. Peter said that no one had been in there for years because it was full of snakes. I immediately shied back, which brought a smile to his face. He was getting the idea I wasn't a total lamebrain, and this was a relief to him.