True North

by Jim Harrison

  There was an image of my father being strangled in jail by poor white trash or an angry black. Once in a sober moment Fred had told me that I was unable to have compassion for my father to the degree that I was unable to have compassion for myself. Of course this made me angry. What did it mean that he would get drunk and fuck girls that were too young among various other crimes and misdemeanors? In a dreary introductory psychology course that masqueraded as science it occurred to me that you could explain everything away but the behavior remained. He may have regretted raping Vera but what could this regret possibly mean to Vera? What did he feel when he stole my cabin, or bilked the trust money due to Cynthia and myself? He didn’t hit my mother but his language to her was often icily violent so that Cynthia would hold her hands to her ears and scream until she was about ten, and then she simply stayed out of his presence as much as possible. This taunted him because everyone in Marquette who didn’t know him well thought of him as gracious, charming, generous. After the Duluth incident I was outside the screen door of the work shed and heard Clarence say to Jesse that my father would fuck a rock pile if there was a snake in it.

  How well had I treated Polly? The sound of our marriage had been my subdued whine. I had driven her away as surely as if I had wielded a club. Even on our marriage day I was vaguely aware that I was doing the wrong thing. I think both Cynthia and my mother were also aware but remained hopeful. There was the definite possibility that after the separation when Polly and my mother had continued seeing each other my mother had said, “You must forgive my son.” For what? For trying so hard to be unlike his father that he had no idea who he was.

  Riva had disturbed me because though she was clinically hardheaded and knowledgeable she had said that there were invisible fibers between certain people and they couldn’t do much about it but try to control them. She had said that after I had told her about Laurie from start to finish. This was during our breaks between lovemaking when she asked me about my sexual experience. I wrote it down when Jesse had referred to Laurie as a “plumita” and years later I had asked a Mexican girl who was a graduate student what it meant. She was embarrassed but laughed saying it meant that whomever was a “fast little feather,” a girl who could be from a good family but liked “intimacy,” not necessarily whorish but “available.” I told Riva all of this and she said people didn’t have to be in love to want each other badly. “Look at us,” she added.

  I was shivering on the porch listening to the implacable roar of the waves so impersonally hostile that I hugged Carla to my chest. After all, I was her parent. I was straining for the first sign of light in the eastern sky so that I could go out to my tar-paper cabin, clean it up, and make a list of needed supplies. I could feel the thump of Carla’s heart against my own. I was her parent and the night before I had forgotten her and was repaid with torn upholstery. On a certain level, perhaps the same as my own, she was trying to explain the world to herself. Luckily she lacked the crippling ideals that suffocated my marriage to Polly. Certain of these ideals blinded me to the fact that I was as self-referential as my father who as a tertiary alcoholic saw all existence only in terms that related to him right down to the weather forecast.

  On the way out to the cabin I stopped the truck abruptly and said, “When I’m preaching to myself who am I preaching to?” Carla looked around alarmed to see if I was talking to someone else. I continued on distracted, taking a few wrong trails until I found the cabin. I pumped a few pails of water and heated them on a propane stove to mop out the place. I stopped Carla from eating porcupine shit several times. It startled me when a large garter snake near the woodpile struck at Carla who was barking and grabbing at it. I caught the snake and pitched it in the river. I washed some of the dusty dishes suddenly glad to be there. The cabin lacked the pure grace of the one Sprague had given me but it was more than serviceable for my minimalist intentions. There were three kerosene lamps to light my journal writing and a Coleman lantern to walk with to the outside toilet with the usual quarter moon cut in the privy door. I would buy a couple of extra flashlights as I had a habit of misplacing them. There was a tattered cookbook called Camp Grub that included hearty dishes for hunters, the kind where you mix a can of beans with a can of corn with a can of tomatoes with a chopped onion with a pound of ground beef and add Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, and a teaspoon of garlic salt. I’d call Jesse to have him send over some of my mother’s cookbooks and an Italian one Mrs. Plunkett had given me when I went away to college. Under a coffee table next to a bunk bed there was a large stack of “girlie” magazines of the most basic sort with a couple of them outright pornography. One of the latter was packed with photos of men ejaculating on the upturned, eager faces of women. This seemed to be a male delusion. I saw only one woman truly attractive to me in half a dozen of the magazines and wondered about the specialization of sexual taste. Looking around the cabin there were places for eight to sleep including a small rickety loft. My father used to go to a fancier camp over south of Munising. He didn’t really deer hunt but he had all the equipment. I know my mother had a strong suspicion that their hunting trips were up to no good, especially when he met his old Yale pal Seward from Duluth, a saturnine man who oozed privilege and bad behavior. I suppose that some men needed these camps to return to what they thought of as their birthright.

  I heard a shrill barking in the distance and rushed to the cabin. I had neglected Carla and now she was yelping back in the woods to the east. I found her in a grove of popples with two quills in her nose and a young porcupine halfway up a tree in front of her. I snipped off the base of the quills having read somewhere that the process lets air out and they are easier to pull. The quills weren’t deep in her nose but when I jerked them Carla howled and snapped at me. I lay down with her and comforted her then dozed off for a little while thinking I should go to bed at a set time if I intended to do a full day’s work.

  I had been inattentive and when I awoke I wasn’t sure in what direction the cabin lay. I had always been careful about directions when trout fishing in near wilderness because there was always the possibility of becoming fatally lost in the Upper Peninsula though this mostly happened during an especially cold deer season in November, or to snowmobilers who ran out of gas.

  I wasn’t fearful when I struck out in what turned out to be the wrong direction but I knew there could be the possibility of discomfort. My jacket with a compass was back at the cabin and I had only a jackknife and no matches. Even my pocket watch was in the jacket pocket. You can keep a fairly steady heading with a watch if the sun is visible. It was a coolish June midmorning but I had a good twelve hours of daylight in front of me at this latitude. I looked in vain in the immediate area for any ferns I may have broken when I came to retrieve Carla but found none. The biggest problem for those lost in the U.P. is the density of the foliage in some areas. You are literally without a point of view except that offered by the sun which you must remember is moving.

  After an hour it had become unpleasant. My bug dope was also back at the cabin in my jacket pocket. Carla was tired so I had to carry her. She couldn’t have weighed more than twenty pounds but she was ungainly. She may also have sensed my worry and wiggled a lot. I couldn’t seem to get out of a low boggy area which made the mosquitoes and blackflies worse. I put Carla down and climbed a pine tree for a vantage point and she wept thinking I abandoned her. I couldn’t get high enough to see above the tops of neighboring trees. I tried to maintain a straight line north knowing that there was a county road within five miles. At the beginning I had tried to move too swiftly and that made me thirsty and my ankle sore.

  I finally broke through to a clearing of about twenty acres. I was so relieved to escape the claustrophobic density of the woods that my eyes teared and I flopped down against a stump. Carla was also relieved and fell fast asleep. After a few minutes my worried mind and eyes cleared to the degree that I could see that I was sitting on the edge of the grandest collection of white pine stumps I
had ever seen. They were simply immense with several so large that three men with hands joined couldn’t have encircled them. I had inadvertently discovered a stump shrine. I counted thirty. The soil must have been perfect for white pine and one could only imagine them rising a couple of hundred feet toward the sky. My skin tingled though my heart and mind felt sore.

  After a half hour’s rest I picked up Carla who consented after walking a mere fifty yards or so. On the far side of the clearing there was a gully that seemed to lead in a more westerly direction. I knew that the sun was farthest north this close to the solstice and the gully pointed to a downward drainage so that it had to finally lead toward a creek or the river from which I had departed. I turned around and stood there a full ten minutes, my enervation and fatigue now gone, until I could again imagine what this patch of forest had looked like. I can’t say how but the massive stumps now seemed alive and reassured me that my work had a great deal of meaning. My ankle still hurt but the ache seemed as insignificant as a mosquito bite.

  Scarcely a hundred yards down the slow pitch of the gully I came upon a stunning surprise. There before me was the largest of all white pine stumps, the great mother of stumps, straddling the gully like a ten-ton spider supported by roots so massive I couldn’t get my arms around them. I had put Carla down and she had scurried around to the other side sniffing the ground. Suddenly she was inside the stump and I was looking down at her through an opening between two contorted roots. There was a slice of sunlight shining down on her face and she regarded me gravely. I scrambled around to the other side and there was an opening large enough to crawl in and I joined Carla. It was sufficiently high enough for me to sit up straight and there was light to see the ground which was a mixture of cool sand and gravel. Carla was shivering in fear but I knew it was the scats on the ground left probably by bobcat and coyotes and a larger piece of dried fecal matter that was likely from a bear. I was enthralled, and there was a distinct feeling similar to when I had been baptized. I thought that this was as close as I could come to finding a church for myself in our time.

  The gully did lead to the river though I guessed it was a mile or so, and I had to half-crawl through a dense alder thicket with mud up to my elbows and knees. The important thing was that I could hear the river and it was a joy to slide over the bank into the moving current as if I were a dead man. I released Carla and we floated at the same speed with Carla gulping the water. I was painfully thirsty myself but waited a hundred yards or so to make sure that there wasn’t a dead animal in the river that might cause me to get giardia, an intestinal disease that lasted for months.

  23

  I spent ten days surrounding the Fourth of July weekend laying low while the village was crowded, continuing to work out my grid in the areas where white pine had been present. I could now walk up to four hours a day on my bad ankle, and Carla quickly got stronger too. I rigged a sling and pouch out of a day pack to carry her on my back in the manner of a papoose when she became tired. I had certainly had my doubts at first but Cynthia was right about Carla being a companion. Every midafternoon when it became too warm for comfortable walking we would drive over to Au Sable Lake to bathe and row a couple of hours before making dinner. Jesse had sent along my mother’s Joy of Cooking but I soon found out that it would take a while for cooking to become a joy. I was distressed by my ineptitude and my first so-called triumph was an elementary dish of scalloped potatoes. The bottom of my meat loaf was burned and the top crumbly. My spaghetti sauce was acrid. Mick helped when he brought out roofing supplies and suggested that my oven temperature was off. I bought a baking thermometer and found that the propane was over fifty degrees higher than the dial read. I had also discovered on the day we were lost and so happily waded and swam downstream that Carla couldn’t handle a whole large tin of sardines. We were on our way to town for a drink when she gave me a curious look and her bowels loosened on the front seat. I reminded myself to buy paper towels.

  I checked the post office every day and had received a letter each from my mother and Cynthia. In my mother’s there was a hundred-dollar bill and a P.S. saying “have a nice dinner.” For that amount I could eat at the tavern twenty times. I kept away from the tavern in the evening to avoid getting involved with a local girl despite my imponderable horniness. I wanted to put in a solid month’s work before I frantically sought diversion. I still had hopes for Vernice but my thoughts kept returning to Laurie whom I knew was married, and Riva who had left Fred. I got a letter from Fred in his Columbus, Ohio, clinic that said, “Riva has left me in the hour of my need. I can’t say I blame her.”

  Then on the Friday after the Fourth I got a postcard from Vernice that said, “Maybe. Love, Vernice.” I smelled the card in the post office lobby and an old crone laughed at me. Incidentally, there was no odor. The card was postmarked five days before and I idly thought that maybe she was on her way north. My heart sped up and my dick twitched in my trousers. My willpower slackened and I went to the crowded tavern for a drink. There were at least a dozen acceptable women in there drinking beer and saying such inimitable things as, “I gotta take a piss.” One next to me on the bar stool said to me, “Buy me a beer, cutie.” She was from Germfask and her large tits swung in her halter top. My ears burned. I was a leg and butt man but for a change the sight of these big stretch-marked breasts enlivened me. Luckily her pulp-cutting boyfriend showed up and my thoughts turned to Shirley who was playing pool with a burly older man who Mick had told me was a downstate writer. A commercial fisherman I met earlier had given me five undersized lake trout about a foot long apiece and I left after my two-beer limit despite saying to myself “who gives a fuck?”

  Outside near the tavern entrance two girls were doing a dance step. They were clearly underage, I guessed them at thirteen or so, but physically attractive. One of them was beautiful in fact. They wore only shorts and halters in the late-afternoon warmth and moved gracefully to the music that came out the tavern’s screened door. Both of them grinned at me and I felt blood rising to my face as it occurred to me that this was the kind of desire that had caused my father so many problems, but then he didn’t accept the social contract to the degree that he denied himself anything. The other question that came to mind was why didn’t I ever dance?

  I made the mistake of leaving each day at dawn and spending three days to the west over near the Big Two-Hearted River area hauling the boat and fishing several lakes in the afternoon. I didn’t care much for Hemingway who was a twentieth-century icon to my father. Some of the early stories were fine but as a nonveteran I had no fascination with war. I preferred Willa Cather and Faulkner both of whom my father considered “soft in the head.” He had made several fishing trips to Cuba with Seward in the late forties and early fifties and had met Hemingway several times, doubtless at a bar. I suspected later that the main purpose of these trips was the sexual tourism so popular under Batista.

  My mistake was not checking the post office because I got back in Grand Marais after the lobby door was locked. On the third night after two A.M. Carla was barking, not unusual because she always barked when she heard coyotes or smelled a bear, but then there were lights sweeping through the cabin windows and I thought of the revolver that I had abandoned to make sure I didn’t use it on myself.

  It was Vernice. To put it in mild terms she was furious. I stood there at the door in my skivvies and she asked why I hadn’t met her “fucking plane” in Marquette as promised. In the background Mick waved, outlined by his pickup lights. I was shining a flashlight and there was a cloud of mosquitoes around her head. I tried to brush one off a cheekbone but she hissed, “Don’t touch me.” She stood at the half-opened screen door as I quickly lit two lamps. More mosquitoes were coming in so I retrieved her blue suitcase and she stepped inside far enough for me to close the door. She flinched when Carla started licking her ankle but then stooped and petted Carla who rolled over on her back. She spoke in a low tight voice saying that she wanted to fly back to Chicago in
the morning and had made a reservation when I hadn’t met her plane. She had taken a bus from Marquette to Seney, then paid two teenagers at the Seney Tavern twenty bucks to drive her to Grand Marais where she arrived at midnight at the tavern. She had to wait two hours for Mick to close up because other men in the bar were ugly drunks. She had assumed that my cabin was on a beach not “a shack in the fucking woods.” I apologized and said I hadn’t been able to check my mail for several days. I heated her some water to wash up. She said her plane back to Chicago left at six-thirty A.M. and I said that meant she’d have an hour to rest then we would have to leave for Marquette. She yelled “fuck” so loud that Carla scooted under the bed. She got down on her hands and knees and coaxed Carla out from under the bed and I thought how unlikely it was that I’d ever get to touch that butt sticking up in the air in a soft denim skirt. I asked if she was hungry and she nodded while calming down Carla. I heated her a bowl of my chili which I thought was pretty good but when she sat down she stared at her bowl and said, “Chili is not made with kidney beans, tomato, and hamburger.” She looked at me so closely as she ate several saltine crackers that I wished I had put a shirt on. Her hair was swept back in a single braid which was curled into a bun. She said she was too tired to leave on a morning plane and when she had a night’s sleep she would make up her mind. She carried my sleeping bag to a far corner single bed, took off all of her clothes except her panties, smiled and gave me the finger, and was fast asleep in a minute. Carla stood on her hind legs scratching at the sleeping bag trying to get in bed with Vernice. This made me feel childishly jealous but I helped her up.