True North

by Jim Harrison

  I finally said, “Everybody needs enough but nobody needs too much.” I had never been confident of my social theories which Fred described as being unrealistically left wing. I finally couldn’t understand how the government historically could justify the destruction of many people for the gain of the few but then I was too emotionally preoccupied to be lucid on economic subjects.

  We went upstairs so I could show her my room. She looked around in a state of amusement at my library while I made a stack of nature guidebooks to take back to the shack. I was about to ask her to send me a conclusive book on the nature of nature but what came out rather timidly was to make love one last time. She laughed and came into my arms saying she didn’t want to mess up her clothes and we didn’t have much time. She lifted her skirt and leaned far over my desk. I had the distinct, joyous feeling that my desk was being consecrated though I comically fell backward when I came, looking up from floor level at what I thought was the loveliest bottom in the cosmos.

  At the airport she looked off at the lovely green hills north of the runway and said, “You live in a beautiful place and you don’t act like you know it. “This was the rawest of points because when I looked at U.P. landscapes I often tried to imagine them through the eyes of Schoolcraft or Agassiz before the landscape was fatally violated.

  At the gate I saw several businessmen trying to conceal their stares at Vernice. I suppose that technically she wasn’t beautiful in the manner of magazine models or actresses but she drew the immediate attention of both males and females. She was full of “élan vital,” a life force as described by the French philosopher Bergson. When she kissed me good-bye before boarding she said, “Well, Quixote, I hope your god is with you. Write when you wish and remember I hate the phone.” That was that. I went out in the truck and wept. I had my project and my dog with her unstable allegiances.

  On the way back I stopped and got a turkey sandwich to go, glancing over at a corner table where I used to sit with my father and Cynthia. I suddenly recalled how in the third grade a little red-haired girl named Martha, the daughter of a visiting professor at the college, controlled my life. They were from Boston and she sounded strange to me but I was smitten and she authoritatively guided me through every aspect of the third grade. When I went to her house to play her mother who “loved the dance” wore leotards, smoked cigarettes, and played classical music very loud. I stole a diamond ring for Martha from my mother’s jewelry box but her parents returned it that evening when they saw her wearing it at dinner.

  I stopped and hiked the beach near Au Train not wanting to rush home to the company of Fred. I wondered at the attraction of one human for another that could start so early in life. An eight-year-old boy is overwhelmed by a red-haired girl so that when she leaves in June he stands in tears in their driveway while her parents pack their car. In the days after they leave he continues to walk past their rented house in the mornings as if her departure was a horrible mistake that might have been corrected in the night.

  Clearly love was as inscrutable as prayer. Naturally I didn’t expect this gut feeling of abandonment. Vernice had half turned her head and fluttered a hand and then was in the plane. Why was I rehearsing this over and over if not for love? And all of those roots of desire beyond meaning. There certainly was no evident thread to connect the few women that overwhelmed me — Laurie, Riva, Polly, Vernice. With the exception of Polly who made the attempt the others certainly didn’t want to live with me. The idea of finding out why hadn’t yet occurred to me to any meaningful degree.

  When I got back to the shack in the late afternoon Fred surprised me by saying that he intended only to stay the night, then head for Marquette and up to the Club to see his relatives for a single night. He needed to get to his Zendo destination before he “delaminated,” a favorite word. It distressed him that he had to take tranquilizers for the time being. Meanwhile he admitted that he had thoroughly snooped in all of my journals. He enjoyed the detailed maps because they gave a patina of rationality to what I was doing which then became thoroughly distorted in reading the journals. I wasn’t upset because I had already gone through a period of painfully explicit criticism of my life, character, and work and Fred didn’t offer anything new. Far more meaningful was the wretched casserole he had made out of a can of beans, a can of corn, a can of tomatoes, and all of the leftover splendid pot roast that Vernice had cooked the night before. He proudly said he had added a full tablespoon of rosemary, an herb that became dreadful in that quantity. I mourned my lost pot roast but kept my mouth shut. He had already said, “I got to get out of here because the woods make me want to drink,” so I figured he was too tenuous for my food carping.

  Fred rambled on throughout the short evening in a manner that reminded me of my mother’s Judy Garland stage in the months immediately preceding the disintegration of the marriage following my father’s rape of Vera. I supposed that the tranquilizers were better for him than being drunk but the results were charmless, slurred, disconnected, and totally self-referential. He was oddly conscious of this and said he looked forward to nothing but water. The evening was utterly bleak until he began to speculate on my uncle Richard’s drowning and the fact that my mother and father were the only witnesses. Fred was sure that it was an accident but was equally sure that everything hadn’t been admitted by my mother and father. I lamely responded that I imagined it was disastrous when two brothers loved the same girl, adding the stew would have been overthickened if there had been two Adams and one Eve in the Garden. This delighted Fred who said it certainly would have changed the history of theology. He continued to mull this over with pleasure, then asked if I had noted the profound religiosity of my great-grandfather and grandfather, a penchant that had lost its strength with my father. I said I had but couldn’t draw any conclusions other than the usual hypocrisy. He then made an observation that despite his muddled mind would both haunt and aid my project. He told me that I should note in my reading of journals, monographs, and texts how all the great predators were theocratic, that if you were going to rape the land and people, whether it was the original Indians or the working class that followed, it was important to think that God was thoroughly on your side. “John Calvin is always under the floorboards during America’s board meetings,” he added.

  A loon flew up the river in the moonlight uttering its querulous cry. I’d learned that after the male loon sits on the nest for a month and a half to give the female a break he goes crazy. I didn’t intend any conclusions when I described this but Fred warmed up.

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter if you’re nuts, you’re keeping yourself busy. Fuck everyone including me. Continue full bore. Kick ass and take names.” He then got up and took the whiskey from his bag, unscrewed it, and poured it out in the sink. “Nature, improperly understood, makes me want to drink. It’s incomprehensible. When I was in the booze ward there was a flowering crabtree outside my window and I lay there sedated watching it bloom with the full knowledge that I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what was going on beyond badly remembered details from high school biology. There was a rummy landscape architect in our ward and he was quite helpful on the nominal level of how trees functioned but not beyond that simple level. I had spent years studying the religious nature of man but hadn’t got very far in figuring out the origins of the religion, say, looking at a tree and stating, ‘What the fuck do we have here?’ Now I have to start all over with nothing.”

  I learned later from my mother that it took Fred over a month to reach Hawaii what with a relapse after a delayed flight in San Francisco and a taxi into the city. Meanwhile, the morning he left he was up at dawn looking at birds with my binoculars. When I called him in for breakfast he said he had been in the Audubon Club in grade school and should have stayed there. “Seventy-seven roads diverged in the woods and I took half a dozen.” At this point Carla woke up from her nap on the rug and jumped in his lap. He was pleased and spooned scrambled eggs into her mouth. “You must learn to eat like a p
roper young lady.”

  27

  Beginning with Fred’s departure I buried myself in my work, a habit that over the years I grew to think less than admirable. In down periods I reminded myself of those ragged, geek street-corner philosophers I had seen in Chicago mouthing their contorted perceptions with a sense of confidence that no one would possibly understand them. I became friends, sometimes sexual, with Shirley from the tavern. Like millions of other jerk males I hoped she was uncomplicated but it turned out not to be so. She was on the run from a questionable situation in Ann Arbor and merely acted the tavern tart as a satisfactory role that nobody questioned except herself in private hours. We filled some sort of modest lacunae for each other though I often doubted that she would have maintained her interest in me without her affection for Carla.

  I completed my reconnaissance of my mid-Upper Peninsula grid by mid-October with no thought of what I would do in the winter. I had to move out of the shack because the owners were coming up to try to spot a big buck well before deer season, deer being creatures of territory and habit. When the male is in rut he loses his ordinary sense of caution. Carla and I were sitting on the front steps when a male passed, nose to the ground, not ten feet away and in such a state of sexual charge that he merely glanced at us. Due to his size Carla only growled her lowest growl.

  I wanted to see Laurie whose condition distressed me but Cynthia had written that Laurie and her child and mother were staying in Minneapolis with an aunt where they had access to oncologists who specialized in Laurie’s peculiar form of breast cancer. She had also developed a melanoma on her lower back and Cynthia admitted the long-range prospects weren’t promising. I allowed myself to pray for her. People in their twenties are mentally inexperienced with the prospect of the death of a young friend or lover.

  My guidebooks and Vernice’s reading list saved my emotional neck that summer and fall along with rowing and fishing. Guidebooks on trees, wildflowers, and birds preoccupy you to the degree that you become more vulnerable to the landscape than yourself. You see a flower and say “daisy” to yourself only to discover that there are more than a hundred types of daisies. White birches were common but where did the yellow birch come from? What did this area look like before the time of the glaciers twelve thousand years before? The larger issues of human history that had always absorbed me didn’t so much become smaller but faded into the landscape on many days. At the same time my statistical approach to my white pine grids had become less interesting than the human stories accumulated from the various historical societies in different villages. Each village was obsessed with the history of its own immediate area and infinitely less so than in the history of the village a mere thirty miles away. Later in life I learned that human geographers called this “geo-piety,” which also applies to larger units and fidelities like the Michigan State-University of Michigan football games. On the local level, however, very few of the codgers I spoke to seemed particularly interested in the larger picture. “My grandfather lost a leg below the knee at the log slide and carved himself a new one. He was back at work in the camp horse barn in six weeks. He had kids to raise.” That sort of thing mostly without questioning any company obligation.

  Vernice’s letters were without emotional content unlike my own. I wrote her absurd little book reports that I slaved over. Yeats and Paddy Kavanaugh and William Carlos Williams were engrossing but I had problems comprehending Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan. Vernice assured me that it took time to absorb the language of poetry. By mid-September I hadn’t heard from her for several weeks and her forbidden phone was disconnected. Finally I got a postcard from London where she admitted she was on her way to France with a “prominent poet” who was on a Guggenheim Fellowship. That was that for the time being. Birds of a feather, I thought, sitting in the pickup next to the post office in a blustery rain.

  I moved temporarily back to a tourist cabin in Grand Marais when I had to leave the shack. I was short on money and substitute-taught for three days but found the job grueling and not suited to my temperament. I called my mother and asked if it would be okay if I moved back to Marquette for the winter and she said, “Of course, it’s your house. I don’t want the goddamned place,” and she laughed. This was curiously pleasant as I didn’t recall my mother swearing. Over my objections she said she would have Mrs. Plunkett move in to take care of me. When I said I could take care of myself she said that Cynthia had told her that I was thin and ragged and I could consider Mrs. Plunkett my Christmas present. Cynthia had stopped by a few weeks before on her way to see Laurie in Minneapolis. She said I could pass for a pulp cutter. I said the closest clothing store was sixty miles away and that’s why I had learned to sew up tears in my clothes. She stayed for only a couple of hours. She cried about Laurie and after she heard the story said that Vernice was the best thing that could have happened to me. She asked to what degree I’d ever join the human community.

  Back in Marquette Jesse and Clarence were glad to see me though both asked about my health. I had barely reached the alley before a late October snowstorm hit and we sat in the work shed before the woodstove sipping glasses of whiskey. I told them I had lost weight from cooking for myself and walking several hundred miles or so. It was then that Jesse said that my mother had given me the house though she continued to take care of the bills. She had paid off my father in a deal that involved her taking care of his legal bills. They both liked Carla. Jesse followed me into the house to help me with my duffel and cartons of journals and books. I idly said that I hoped one day to visit Vera in Mexico and apologize for my father and he simply said, “Nothing is your fault. You can’t apologize for your father.” I didn’t know how to pursue the subject so let it drop, though I wondered how he had continued to work for him. Fred had told me rather ominously that Latinos have long memories.

  I managed to spring some additional education funds by driving to East Lansing and agreeing to do some work for a history professor in researching logging folktale sources and for an anthropologist named Cleland on early Native settlements in the western U.P. This would enable me to buy snowshoes and the short, wide cross-country skis I would need in winter, also to stay in motels when I wandered because I scarcely wanted to camp in winter when forty below zero wasn’t unheard of.

  My father showed up just before Thanksgiving. I had been at the Marquette Historical Society and Peter White Library and come home in the near dark at five to find Jesse and Clarence helping a man load the contents of the wine cellar in a large truck. Jesse rolled his eyes and when I walked into the house my father was just finishing packing up what he wanted from his den. My mother had told me on the phone that this was going to happen but not when and I had hoped to be away. He was in his “northern gentleman” mode and shook my hand with a smile. He had gained a good deal of weight but carried it fairly well. He refilled his whiskey glass and asked if I’d have a drink with him. After ten years without seeing him I didn’t have the heart to refuse. I was overwhelmed by the nothingness I felt. It suddenly occurred to me that I was taller than he was. He told me he admired Carla and that it was sad that we hadn’t had a bunch of dogs and that he would never see his grandchildren because Cynthia was so unforgiving. Mother had told him that I was writing a history of logging and mining in the Upper Peninsula and he hoped I wouldn’t be “too hard on the family.” He added that I looked like an out-of-work logger and he was sure I owned more decent clothing. I found myself unable to say anything until he said he was sorry to hear about my divorce and I said that I was sorry about his own. “My brother Richard was a good person. I’m not. Nearly everything I’ve touched in my life has turned to shit except your mother, Cynthia, and you. I congratulate you on your survival.” And that was that. I knew he wanted to hug goodbye but that was out of the question. I watched him walk down our front sidewalk and slip but Jesse caught him by the elbow.

  By luck I went down to Chicago for Christmas with my mother. I say “luck” because I didn’
t want to. I was loving the bleak clarity of winter and the only acceptable reason to go would have been to see Vernice whom I hadn’t heard from in three months. The whole trip turned out wonderfully with only one bad event. Cynthia and Donald came down with my nephew and niece and I had forgotten what this holiday meant for children. The bad event was early one morning when I was having coffee with my mother and said that I was thinking of going to Mexico to see Vera and she began to sob. It took a while for her to calm down and then only when Cynthia came into the kitchen with her children. A little later when we were alone Cynthia told me that Vera’s son, our half-brother, had been hit by a car while riding his bicycle and had been operated on. Mother had paid for the operation through Jesse. Cynthia showed me a photo of Vera and her son and the beauty of Vera was overwhelming. Her son had my father’s jaw and had a rather fearsome look about him for so young a boy.

  The luck of the trip came about when I met the boyfriend of my mother’s housemate. His name was Gerald Coughlin. He was in his mid-forties and from Ireland though he had been in Chicago since right after the war. He was introduced to me before dinner by my mother as a “mind scientist” because she had a complete aversion to terms like psychiatrist, psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalyst. Fred had told me that in the milieu in which they were raised everyone was expected to be of sound mind even though they were slowly eating their fingers. After a cousin had committed suicide he was described as having suffered a recent case of the flu. Coughlin put me off at first by saying, “So you’re the young man who is bent on saving the past. Quite a job.”

  After we got over this awkward statement we discovered we shared an obsession for fishing. As a bachelor he had been able to rig his practice in such a way that he trout-fished the entirety of August and September every year. Years before he had fished many of the rivers in northern Michigan but now his passion was brown trout in Wyoming and Montana. He was very impressed when I told him I had caught a three-pound brook trout while fishing with my friend Mick on a beaver pond the summer before. Our conversation got around to fathers teaching their sons to fish and I said in my case it was my father telling our yardman Clarence to take me fishing. He said, “That’s better than most,” and told me how his father was a music hall pianist out of Sligo but when he played up in Belfast in the 1930s some “Orangemen” had smashed his hands with a mallet for playing the wrong song so that when they fished together he had to heavily tape his father’s hand to the rod handle and tie on his flies. This peek into another world made me nauseous and I pushed away my food plate. Coughlin was startled at my reaction and skillfully turned the talk in another direction after saying that hatred eats the soul with the energy of a dog at dinner. I was delighted when it came about that I could name a Yeats poem and he would quote the whole thing. We were at the far end of the noisy table but Donald overheard and said, “Ben Bulben” was the best collection of words that had ever entered his ears.