by Jim Harrison
Of course this is a cursory view looking back at my raw youth from the vantage of thirty-two years. In your early teens your perceptions are incapable of providing any reassuring conclusion. That’s why I used the word “raw” to mean abraded, sore, the metaphoric tongue always probing life’s sore truth. I remember kneeling in the water tank and nuzzling Emelia’s tailbone. Why should a pretty girl have a tailbone? I was disturbed daily because I had overheard in Houston a doctor saying to Laurel, “This boy has enough testosterone to fuel a football team.” I wished not to be the stranger I was. Why did I love a rich girl who totally ignored me? My relative salvation in Cincinnati was hard study and exercise to improve myself and making friends with a mulatto boy who lived two blocks away in the Tenderloin. His name was Cedric and he was being raised by his grandfather who was a retired railroad employee who spent his days playing the piano and reading history books from Cincinnati’s splendid library. Their little house was immaculate except for the kitchen which was a jumble. The grandfather was a tad obese and obsessed by the idea that man had eaten wild meat for a couple million years and should continue doing so. Cedric taught me to hunt and snare along the Ohio River and in whatever farm woodlots we could manage to poach. We’d ride our bikes east, west, south at least twenty miles from the city once or twice a week and come back with squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, muskrats, opossum, and occasionally ducks which were a prize. We ignored hunting seasons and no one cared or noticed. Cedric had a Stevens single-shot .22 which I carried strapped across my bike’s handlebars because it was a time of racial unrest and it looked better for a white boy to have a rifle than a black. Early on a cop stopped us but when we explained what we were doing he gave us his phone number in case we got an extra muskrat which he favored fried up in pork fat. Over the next few years we brought him a lot of game and sometimes he’d come over and eat at Cedric’s house. He was a great big man and would always bring a poorly made cake and a pint of whiskey. Cedric’s grandfather was the finest rudimentary cook in my life and far later in the bistros of Lyon I recognized him in the divinity of the ordinary food that springs unbidden from the earth. Most would make light of a possum pie but they are fools indeed. When you’re roasting, a young female raccoon is best and I preferred muskrat and cottontail simply fried after marinating it in buttermilk and Tabasco.
Meanwhile my parents were appalled that I had become a hunter. My father was speechless with disgust while my mother’s dismay turned into curiosity but then she let it drop. My answer to them was the anthropological fact that people have always hunted. They would have been more upset if they had known that by age fourteen I was visiting this big black single mother named Charlene once a month, always near the big moon when despite the antiviral pills I was highly agitated. Charlene was amused by my energies. Cedric caught on to my strangeness one afternoon while we were hunting and were too far from our bikes to reach them by dark unless we cut across a marsh which he dreaded. I weighed only one hundred sixty at the time and he one hundred eighty but I carried him over my shoulder across the wide bog and still visited Charlene that evening with my ten-dollar bill.
Of course at odd moments we wonder who we truly are beneath the layers of paint the culture has applied to us. I was struggling to do no harm within the human construct of a permanent stranger. I read widely in all of the historical nonsense considering lycanthropy arriving at the conclusion that all of the cases, including those from thirteenth-century France, might resemble my own a bit but I was ultimately a child and I didn’t resemble those subjects. The only magic was in the infinite varieties of blood chemistry and the viral interlopers that could not totally be extinguished any more than they later could with HIV. By my late teens I had been so winnowed and withered by the medical profession that I shuddered when passing by any medical facility. My father was without much curiosity about my condition and my classicist mother only thought I had a blood condition and valued the palliative of pills. It was Laurel who kept me before the Stone Age fire, Stone Age because for all the vast knowledge in medical research there were equally vast lacunae in blood diseases. This fact came into play because of Laurel with whom I had an intermittent correspondence that made no mention of our two sexual nights. She had left George and her letters were either from Seville or Granada in Spain. Through her Cornell University contacts she had been in touch with a young hematologist in Chicago. When I wrote that I was off to Northwestern University the die was cast. I arrived in Evanston near Chicago quite happy because my mother had fled my irascible nitwit father. I was starting a new life in which the only people I’d miss were Mother, Cedric, and big Charlene for whom I felt a great deal of affection.
I met with Laurel at a medical center in Chicago early one morning after taking a bus in from Evanston and my instantly dreary dormitory room. Laurel was worn from jet lag but still lovely and I was palpably excited when we embraced. The young doctor was at the same time cold and goofy, a pure scientist of the body who didn’t want to recognize the human within it. I immediately had blood drawn into the different vials and then a disgustingly unpleasant spinal tap. This was on a Thursday and I spent a long weekend with Laurel at the Drake. I was curiously intimidated by the immense vase of flowers in the lobby. Back to the rawness of an eighteen-year-old’s perceptions, and a relatively poor young man at that. Chicago seemed so grand compared to Cincinnati mostly because Chicago is a grand city. I was near my monthly frenzy and had cut back on my antivirals to have the energies that I could sense Laurel was expecting. It was all reminiscent of Padre Island because during our spells of rest we could look out at the moon glistening on Lake Michigan’s wave caps.
On Saturday Laurel bought me some clothes because that evening we were to have dinner with her father. He was an arch and cynical New Englander who split his time between Beverly, Massachusetts, and New York City. He had a peculiar accent and teased his daughter about “robbing the cradle” with me. She blushed and denied that we were lovers and he said, “Oh, nonsense,” and laughed. He gave me some investment advice which in itself was laughable because though I was on a full scholarship my main problem would be affording enough to eat, especially in the time surrounding the efflorescence of my infirmity. That evening I ate five dozen oysters and a very large porterhouse which amused him. They were the first oysters of my life and I was ever after an addict.
On Monday morning we returned to the hospital and Laurel’s hotshot young doctor said I had both avian and canine viruses that were apparently incurable and had become neural. He referred to the diseases as “zoonotic.” He knew about the wolf pup and I explained about the hummingbird wound adding that on the way down the mountain several hummingbirds had been attached to my bloody throat. I told him that my father and his ornithologist friends were forever looking for a rare semicarnivorous hummingbird that lived in southern Chihuahua. He was clearly fascinated and said he would do further pro bono research on my problem and see me again. I joked that it was unlikely because dogs hate to go to the vet’s.
That early afternoon I rode out to the airport with Laurel who was on her way back to Spain to study art. She had her driver drop me off in Evanston in a wonderful thunderstorm. Our leave-taking had been melancholy and I refused to accept any money from her. At the time money was quite confusing to me and I felt better living on the edge on the minimal budget I would be earning as a busboy in an Italian restaurant. I had resolved that because of my physical problems I had to run what people call a “tight ship.” Ultimately the nature of viruses is far more interesting, complicated, and mysterious than the nature of superstition which is only an amalgam of ignorance and the predictable consequences of fear. My problem demanded that I become an ardent student of natural causes. The direct meaning of “zoonotic” is that I have been invaded by invisible creatures. There was simply not a moment available for the very human emotion of fear or the disastrous effects of self-pity.
Here’s what I mean: after returning to Evanston from saying good-bye
to Laurel I took a long walk in hopes of burning off my excess energies. By nightfall I was twenty miles north up near Lake Forest with my feet hurting from my cheap shoes. It was then I remembered the lesson of the stray dogs I used to walk with on the outskirts of Alpine. Such dogs have a level of attention unknown to us. They are worthy of imitation. They know they are strays so they don’t go “astray” as it were. Sitting on a park bench near Lake Michigan far from my pathetically ugly dorm room I resolved that I must always be able to locate myself geographically down to a millimeter, also historically, botanically, and sociologically if I were to survive with my problem. To maintain a level of attention I also had to ignore my moods which were only the content of billions of neurons at play.
There is a great deal that is wretchedly tentative about living within the confines of an institution. A university is a process that is always trying to interfere with its contents. Despite the institutional interruptions I was an obsessive student though I would have been well ahead if I had devoted my time to libraries and the splendid museums of the arts and sciences in Chicago. I was a speed reader like my mother who could finish an English mystery in an hour. There is a grueling punishment to nearly all academic prose which encourages speed reading. Naturally one slowed down in literature and the humanities where the aesthetic component offers reason to pause. When I became bleary from reading in my major, economics (again, I didn’t want to be poor like my parents), I would return for a half hour to Ovid or Virgil, Walt Whitman or Chaucer. Also to beginning Spanish, French, and Italian because foreign languages are playful. I took botany and zoology for the same reason. Simply enough, I could see the spirit of random play in all living creatures.
Looking back I see that at the time I felt envious of those who could afford to follow their curiosity outside an institution. Of course part of my modest repulsion came from the struggles of my father which had set me to brooding early on with my childish antennae wavering to pick up life’s perverse signals that find expression in parents.
Part of my entertainment came from my half-English, half-Chinese physics-major roommate. He was brilliant in his subject and had an enormous sense of humor, and could answer any question I had in the sciences. He left at the end of his freshman year for Caltech but his gift to me was eventually enormous. What happened was that my mother’s maiden sister, a librarian in Boston who had visited us only once because she loathed my father, had set up an education fund for me of a thousand dollars. In the spring of my freshman year I had bought a junky old Chevrolet and a good bicycle. I loaned my roommate five hundred dollars to move to California which in his mind constituted an investment in the inventions he was always diddling with on paper. One of them dealt with measuring solar winds (steady at a million miles per hour, but gusting to two million). This small investment eventually supported me for my entire life as my roommate was to become a pioneer in the computer field.
I had to have a car because I was exhausted with taking the Greyhound bus north to upper Wisconsin or Minnesota during my monthly difficulties. I couldn’t very well endanger my university career with my inevitable energetic behavior. During December’s big moon before Christmas I had fucked my Spanish instructor nearly to death and I was fearful for both of us. She was in her early fifties and had carelessly seduced me after cooking dinner for us. Luckily it was during the mutual loneliness of Christmas vacation so she didn’t miss any of her teaching duties. The staff at Emergency at the hospital were sure she had been gang-raped. I brought flowers and read to her during her three days in the hospital. She had taken her PhD at Columbia writing her dissertation on Antonio Machado. After our unforgettable experience she quoted a Machado passage to me from her hospital bed:
Look in your mirror for the other one,
the one who accompanies you.
We remained friends but naturally not lovers and this fearsome experience taught me to seek out the big tavern tarts of the North in Duluth, Minnesota, or Superior, Wisconsin, and occasionally vigorous black women in Chicago, one of whose pimps I had to throttle perhaps fatally though I found nothing in the Tribune about it.
The Great North brought me back to hunting with open arms but more so as a retreat from areas where I might do damage. My life began to take firm shape around the principle of finding a relatively safe place for my seizures, and then I would have to move on for the next month’s two-day period because my memory of what I’d done during the seizures was somewhat short-circuited so that I only remembered in visual jolts. For instance I was camped near Cayuga in northern Wisconsin in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest and on a late-afternoon hike on a bitterly cold and snowy late November day I came upon a vacant deer-hunting camp of three floor tents. There was a hindquarter of venison hanging from a cache pole. I maneuvered the meat to the ground and was making off with it when a burly man emerged from one of the tents and began shouting at me. I ran with the hindquarter under an arm and he gave chase on a snowmobile. Rather than backtracking toward my own camp I entered a swampy delta near a small river thinking that the thick brush would prevent him from following. Unfortunately he knew the landscape better than I did and was waiting on a tract downstream. When he rushed at me I swung the frozen venison quarter which likely weighed thirty pounds striking him on the head. I lifted his body onto his snowmobile and ran it into the river hoping to make it look like an accident.
Frankly I doubted if he survived. The hunter was hunted. The next morning I remembered this in the briefest visual images and recalled the feelings especially in my hands when the meat slammed into his head. I moved camp a half dozen miles and spent the night thawing, cooking, and eating the meat, a grand feast indeed. I heard wolves howl in the distance and responded.
And so life went. I graduated from Northwestern on an accelerated program in a little more than two years and moved to Minneapolis where I took courses on property management. I was able to set myself up overseeing remote properties for wealthy men in Minneapolis and Chicago. I rarely ever met the men themselves but dealt with their money managers who at first were suspicious of my peerless academic credentials. I explained that I was the son of a naturalist and had always suffered from acute claustrophobia. I further offered that man had spent a couple of million years out of doors and had only recently moved indoors. I was likely less evolved except intellectually and preferred the outside. A couple of them said, “Oh, the lone wolf type” and I jokingly responded, “More like a lone dog.”
In successive years I took care of properties in the western Dakotas, Wyoming, northern Minnesota, and several places in Montana. I thrived especially in winter when for weeks, sometimes a month, I’d never see another soul except when traveling out for supplies. It’s a comfort for wealthy men to own such properties even though they rarely visit them except for a short time in the summer. I stayed away from keeping an eye on working ranches for the obvious reason of my monthly infirmity. To counter the emotional starvation of keeping my personal lid on so tight I read poetry, the best of world fiction, and listened to classical music and also rhythm and blues the passion of which intrigued me. I also began a lifelong project of studying the languages of the nonhuman creatures, quite amazed to find myself fallen into my father’s obsession with birds. With most mammalian species the language is in the nose which was equally fascinating. I did a great deal of hunting for meat, and to avoid the curiosity of game wardens I rarely used a rifle. I followed the path of the great anthropologist Louis Leakey by hunting in trees. Elk were too large but deer were manageable. You baited an area beneath a tree with fruit or grain and waited up there on a branch, falling on the creature with a knife in hand. Your weight usually broke the animal’s back, especially the young females who were the tastiest eating.
Sadly I spent a great deal of time in a state of sexual deprivation in these years. My best outlet was in the company of large Indian women who abound in the many reservation areas of the American West. I was making decent money and could afford to be genero
us in terms of food, alcohol, and outright cash. In our long occasionally grotesque history we have treated these people with a hygienic savagery they could never imagine. It seems that the most civilized and mechanized countries are the best at meting out slow torture and prolonged and sophisticated punishment. In the wake of World War II we treated the Japanese and Germans far better than our resident natives.
My body had begun to bring me down to my very sore knees after a half dozen years in the West. I had continued eating mountainous amounts of meat and because of that along with the extreme physical exertion my joints had become occasionally cripplingly painful. At the time I was looking after a large property near the Washakie Wilderness Area in Wyoming and one spring morning no longer able to bear the pain I drove fifty miles over to Meeteetse to visit a very old doctor who, after elementary lab work, determined that I had enough purines in my blood to kill any human who wasn’t part dog. I liked his humor. He said ranch hands who lived in remote line shacks and ate only meat and beans had modest versions of my blood problem. While looking at my body he said it resembled that of a bulldogger (a rodeo cowboy who leaps on a steer from a horse and wrestles it to the ground). I joked that I only wrestled deer for dinner. He advised that I go the tropics and eat fruit, rice, and fish for a decade or my goutish blood would permanently cripple me.
A few days later by sheer luck I was liberated. I occasionally corresponded with my Chinese-English roommate from Northwestern and I heard from him that he had sold his small company in Palo Alto and wanted to know what to do with my share. I called and was somewhat stunned at the amount. I asked him to wire it to the bank in Chicago that had held my original college fund and my small savings over the years. Since it was necessary for me to be mobile I had to live simply which anyway was my preference. Any money more than the minimum for my needs would blind me to the actual world I had come to love. My continuing motto was that nothing is what it appears to be. I had the advantage of being a permanent stranger on earth which gave me quite a different point of view. True, my character was occasionally violent but it seemed to me that most men have an itchy trigger finger in the womb. My own life would always be a barely containable arc but it now needed an adjustment in direction.