True North

by Jim Harrison

  When I finally hit Route 61 traveling south along Lake Superior toward Duluth my father began sighing and groaning in his sleep, his face a livid contrast to the glories of mid-October in the landscape around me, the yellow aspen and red-leaved hardwoods and the blue sea stretching infinitely to the east. Carla who had died at age twelve had always been such a grand traveling companion and she belonged in the seat beside me, not this ancient deviant. I was then reminded unpleasantly of the backwoods lawyer chiding me about Christian compassion. Coughlin had told me that my father was a nympholeptic which at least seemed a step up from a pedophile. His brain was obsessively fixed on young women around the ages of thirteen to fifteen which is proper only if you’re also that age. The etiology of this disease is less than certain and the best revelation of its nature is in Nabokov’s Lolita, which I don’t know if my father ever read. It might emerge from a missing period in a young man’s development, or some professionals have suggested that it is partly the mammalian urge to “cover” young women before other males reach them. A percentage of men, small fortunately, cannot accept the culture’s “no” when it concerns young women any more than others can stop committing murder, robbery, or simply beating up their fellow men. Coughlin even suggested a genetic possibility, though it seemed remote. Of course the fact that you had begun to understand it had nothing to do with the behavior itself. Out of curiosity I had fished for answers to Richard Nixon’s behavior and despite a hundred explanations there was still this peculiar and isolated monster on the hook.

  I’ve put this nasty little incident on paper only because I learned something solid about my father’s nature when we reached his place which was the ample-sized carriage house next to Seward’s Victorian mansion on a stunning hillside. I helped him in with his gear but before we left the pickup he handed me his 20-gauge Parker shotgun having decided he wouldn’t hunt again. Coughlin had come north twice to grouse hunt and I had only a battered old Fox Sterlingworth I had bought at a Seney gas station. Grouse were delicious eating and Coughlin thought it might do me some good to walk without looking at the landscape critically. My father was happy at my evident pleasure at having been given the gun.

  The inside of the carriage house was uncomfortably immaculate with a two-story living room looking out over Duluth harbor far below. The kitchen and his bedroom were toward the rear, with a dining area to the left and a den area partly enveloped by Chinese screens on the right. Above his desk there was a portrait of Cynthia and me standing forlorn in front of our house that mother hadn’t liked and had stored. There were at least a dozen photos of us as children, his wedding photos with Mother, a photo of Mother in her dreaded moon costume at the Club, and a recent photo of Cynthia and her children where it was easy to see that Donald had been cropped out of the frame. There was also a photo of Richard on his graduation day at Groton.

  What I learned in a few minutes of forced pleasantness was that my father saw himself as the aggrieved one, the insulted and the injured, as if the family were a collective pope that had excommunicated him without good cause. He referred to his shortcomings as “foibles.” My sense of my own mental balance felt a tremor. It was easy to see that to him his victims weren’t quite people or human any more than the loggers or miners that had worked for his father and grandfather were human, or if they were vaguely people it was altogether sensible to ignore them. It was appropriate to ignore them. It was just to ignore them. When I got back in my pickup after relenting and giving him a good-bye hug it occurred to me that as surely as Europe we Americans had developed an aristocracy whose merit depended on how long their money had allowed them to largely ignore the rest of the human race.

  29

  Now, standing in the den at midday, I’m eating my favorite Plunkett sandwich, aged provolone and mortadella on a hard roll. In a day and a half I’ll go to Chicago for my mother’s memorial service, returning with her ashes to distribute these bits of bone and vertebrae near the Huron River Point, her semicoma dreamscape. I have always wished that Laurie had been cremated. I’ve read that the cement vaults that enclose coffins, built somewhat like septic tanks, often leak so that the caskets float in the darkness. I’ve never researched why so many people resist the idea of cremation. Anyone who has come upon a dead animal in the woods on successive days has noted the alarming rate that we deliquesce. Fred had written in one of his not very interesting Zen Buddhist notes that “ashes don’t return to wood.”

  With mother cremated I would remember how she truly was but my occasionally berserk imagination will still see Laurie’s remains in the vault after a decade. Cremation liberates those left behind, but at the point I made up my mind on the subject I admitted it seemed natural that Clarence had been buried in a plain pine coffin without benefit of a vault in a Chippewa graveyard. In the following November I had attended a Ghost Supper for Clarence with Donald and Cynthia and perhaps a hundred relatives and friends. There were several roasted turkeys and a big kettle of corn and venison stew that was delicious on a cold clear afternoon. In front of Clarence’s old shack there was a big bonfire and you dropped tobacco into the fire in order to release the souls of your loved ones who had died. Without the desire of your grief holding on to them they were able then to travel to another world. It was easy to release dear Clarence by crumbling the tobacco into the flames but when I did so with the multifoliate images of Laurie I began to weep. Of course many wept, and when I went out a hundred yards or so to my truck and leaned against the hood I heard a group of old ladies wailing and chanting an Anishinabe death song. Within a few minutes of standing there I had an image of Laurie out on Presque Isle when I had helped her up on a boulder and she was standing there in a yellow summer skirt and brown legs in the warm twilight looking toward the west. This is how I now see her most of the time and this is why the Ghost Supper is a unique experience in my life in how religion can work. However, if I’m enervated, exhausted, petulant, or angry she returns to the vault and its dank water.

  I sense that my mother will remain whole in my imagination. I will not see her drunk and crying where she had fallen in the backyard after a quarrel with my father. I was hiding with Cynthia in the grove of lilacs along the alley and peeking out while Cynthia was arranging her collection of keys from her red purse. Probably every child in the world has hidden from their parents. Once she had left her “mad dog” husband my mother said she only gradually could focus on her children and felt panic that it was too late to be of any use to them. I said it hadn’t been too late but it was, though there is a question of how much parents can do to change the behavior of their children once the teens have been reached. Once Coughlin got to know Cynthia he remarked that she had been able to use the improbable willfulness of her family all to her own good purposes. Her doubts in this direction about me gathered around the iron hand in which I had established my life’s work at age sixteen because most of what had forced my decision was against something, a reaction to the incomprehensible rather than for some possible life force. My father had closed the windows to the world and I was spending my life struggling to open them. The question was whether I should have taken a club to the glass, jumped out, and burned the house down which is what Cynthia had metaphorically been able to do. And that’s what my mother had been able to do, albeit late, so that one evening in Chicago when she seemed unable to overcome her sense of having failed me I answered that with a question, “How much could you do when you were trying to save your own life, and the prospects didn’t look good?”

  This was about a year after Laurie died and I had become a full-time hermit. Mother wanted me to start a “professional” relationship with Coughlin which was difficult because we were gradually becoming friends having fished together for three weeks in Wyoming and Montana the September before. Coughlin thought it would be awkward and unorthodox but was willing to give it a try. I resisted because I valued the idea of a friend more than a human confessional. That winter I suspected that my mother was using Mrs. Plunke
tt as a virtual spy but when I finally found out it was true while we were drinking too much wine and playing double solitaire I thought “Who gives a shit?” My mother’s worries were well founded and well intentioned so why should I care if Mrs. Plunkett made daily reports? The compromise by spring was that I agreed to write a letter a week to Coughlin about my mental state but by that time the storm was nearly over. The idea of the term “depression” had always seemed an inept psychologism to me and that by the time you recognized this state in which all oxygen had left your life the oxygen begins to reenter.

  My downfall began in November when I received a manila envelope with Vernice’s first book of poems without a return address, a letter, or even an inscription, just the book published by a university press with a sepia photo of a stump on the cover, not a grand stump but an ordinary stump. I eagerly read the book looking for a sign of myself which I didn’t find. On the back of the book there was a blurb by a man I took to be her prominent poet lover saying that this volume would establish Vernice as one of the “leading young poets of her time.” Her stump poem led the volume and I readily admitted that it was fascinating and elegant. An obviously lonely girl wanders in the forest of the north and finds an immense stump straddling a gully under which she crawls, sits up, and redreams the world.

  I had been banished from her work though once my anger subsided I assumed it was an aesthetic decision she was privileged to take. She couldn’t very well say that there was a lover under the stump trying to go down on her. What goaded me was that another man had brought her life into bloom. It was sheer raw jealousy. There was no way for me to viably respond though I did write a letter in care of the university press to which there was no response that entire winter. Was she with this man because he was a better lover, a better companion, or, in short, a better man? Did she send the book as a knife, or an offhand announcement to me along with copies to dozens of other friends?

  I tried to console myself with the obvious idea that she had taken up with this man merely because he could facilitate her ambition but I knew perfectly well it wasn’t that simple. People rarely do things for singular reasons. Our motives are clumsily multiple. With Vernice she had pursued and seduced a man who could directly help her and this man wasn’t me.

  It wasn’t an appropriate conclusion but it was at this point I began to doubt if I could do my project by myself with only my mountains of books and monographs and a few chats with a waning supply of old loggers for company. My fishing friend and tavern owner in Grand Marais, Michigan, had helped me outside of the books, and so had Vernice’s abusive clarity, not to speak of Cynthia’s sisterly prodding and the gift of Carla. The trouble was that it took so long for me to take advantage of what they had freely given. And now I had Coughlin to help steer me if I had the sense to listen. The September before when we were camped on the Yellowstone River near Big Timber, Montana, Coughlin had said that it was altogether sensible to separate oneself from the human community in order to get my particular kind of work done, but that was assuming you knew the human community in the first place. You couldn’t simply be an inexperienced dog (he was kind enough not to say “pup”) in the manger peeking out between the barn slats at the world.

  That winter words failed me. I should say scholarly words failed me. I came upon a sentence in a treatise that reported, “In 1923 Michigan realized it had to deal with ten million acres of stumps.” I threw the book against the far wall of the den and the sleeping Carla barked wildly. What the fuck could this sentence possibly mean? “The west had to deal with the absence of seventy-five million buffalo,” would be another version. For months after this incident all scholarship seemed a moronically skewed version of the reality of history. The words dropped like turds in an outhouse. I could read early environmentalists like Ernest Thompson Seton, James Oliver Curwood, Thoreau, Sigurd Olson, or Aldo Leopold, but any material that wore the veil of scholarship became egregious plodding. It had no nurture. It was dead as a canned sardine.

  I was completely numb for a few weeks in January where all I did was snowshoe out portions of Dickinson and Baraga counties with the firm sense that I was full to the gills with bullshit. I wrote Coughlin about my dismay and continued snowshoeing in the daylight hours until the winter landscape drew off my poison. By early February my world had considerably lightened because I spent all day “seeing” rather than reading or thinking, the latter of which comprised mostly of shortsighted rehearsals of questionable conclusions. This all could easily be allowed to dissipate into the landscape because I was exhausted by the fraudulence of my hard work.

  In early February there was the delight of a three-day thaw and when it turned cold again I was able to take Carla along. She loved running on the snow’s thick hard crust rather than floundering in softer snow which made me leave her behind with Clarence. For a break from physical exertion I’d stop in villages and small towns and it was easy to find someone who had a collection of what they would call “old-timey” photographs of the early days of logging and mining. Since I was so vastly overloaded with background information it was wonderful simply to look at the photographs and people my abstractions with human faces. A camera held while men are at work draws forth the tender absurdities of pride. When Cynthia was about ten she used to wander around Marquette on summer evenings with a Brownie camera taking pictures of people walking their dogs. Dog owners were happy to pose with their mutts. Even my father was fascinated with Cynthia’s scrapbook of these photos.

  On a Friday in mid-February I had a stroke of luck which carried on for twenty-four hours and which helped me to radically change directions. I got home by dark after a bright glistening day with Carla snowshoeing the McCormack tract, a large area of old-growth timber over west of Champion. While taking a rest I had lain with Carla in a thicket of firs and watched a redstart coming in and out of its nest. Other than ravens and chickadees the redstart is the only bird that could survive winter up here. It lines the interior of its nest with a cushion of animal hair and grouse feathers, the warmest cocoon possible. I was only a few feet from the bird which had decided not to be troubled by our presence. Carla watched it for a few minutes then napped curled up in the snow. I was curious about how many thousands of years it had taken the bird to evolve this survival behavior, then I idly wondered what kind of survival behavior I had evolved in my own short life. I let this preposterous question go with a smile at its insufficient interest.

  When I came down a long hill toward the truck Carla growled and barked because there was a small group of men standing near their vehicles. I loped down the hill on my snowshoes and they turned to watch. I found out they were setting up a course for a race the next day, Saturday morning. One of them was a young lawyer for the firm that took care of my family’s business. He said he was surprised they hadn’t heard from me and I admitted that I opened business mail that came my way only on Sundays. My father was finally selling some land and the court-ordered lien would return to me the amount for which he had sold my cabin. It was a little over a hundred thousand dollars and I stooped and petted Carla not knowing how to respond. Another man came over and said he watched the speed at which I came down the hill and he thought I might want to enter their ten-mile showshoe race the next morning. The idea normally would have been alien to me but I agreed.

  When I got home Mrs. Plunkett was sitting in the kitchen drinking red wine and not cooking and I remembered that I was taking her out for her birthday dinner. There were two letters for me, one from Coughlin and one from Fred in Hawaii. Fred had taken to sending me cryptic notes once a week, most of them irritating. This one was no exception with a quote from a Chinese poet saying that we must find ourselves in the shallows. I saved Coughlin’s for after a shower and a glass of wine but it was disturbing. He said that I sounded as stale as hundred-day-old bread and that I likely should do something dramatic to get out of my current “septic tank” which of course reminded me of my poor dead Laurie. Perhaps he intended to. He suggested
that I track down Vera in Mexico and present my apology, the idea of which had become a kind of cyst in my mind and it was time to relieve myself of it. Another option was to find Vernice in Europe, or wherever, and see if she wanted anything more to do with me because even a definite “no” was better than brooding about her. Ideally, I should do both because I was clearly suffocating myself. He added that he normally didn’t give direct advice to patients but then our contact wasn’t in that category. This was a sore point because Mother had tried to make a gift to him of a “fishing vehicle,” a 4WD, and he had turned down the gift, chiding her not for her generosity but for trying to interfere with a matter from which she should keep her distance.

  The only good outfit I had were the clothes I had worn to Laurie’s funeral, unworn since then, and I found I had further shrunk. It’s hard to keep up when you’re spending six hours a day on showshoes. While I dressed I pushed away, for a change, an unpleasant thought, this time how much I’d rather have my cabin and property than a hundred thousand dollars. I didn’t know at the time what a good step this was. A mood can be a mud puddle to be jumped over.

  We had a fine time at the supper club, what the better restaurants are often called in the great north. Mrs. Plunkett ate a large very rare T-bone which seemed odd for a lady in her seventies and then criticized me for eating broiled whitefish. She was absorbed in the problem of putting more “meat” on me. I told her that maniacs often became quite thin which she didn’t think was funny.

  At first the dinner was awkward because our waitress was a high school classmate of mine named Susie. I didn’t recognize her immediately because when I used to try to help her out on her atrocious grammar in the ninth grade she was very large but now only mildly so. When she asked what I was doing I said that I was writing a history of the Upper Peninsula and she said “the whole thing throughout time?” She laughed at herself and we chatted for a few minutes and she said she was the “usual” for our class, divorced with two children and working two jobs. I couldn’t help but look at her fine fanny in the starched pale green waitress uniform. Mrs. Plunkett watched it all carefully and when Susie walked off to service another table she said, “That young woman is fresh for you.”