True North

by Jim Harrison

“I suppose that’s the money,” I offered.

  “It’s everything that comes with it more than the money. None of his friends accomplished anything in particular but that didn’t stop them from feeling superior. They sputtered about the nasty world and went on their way. Maybe I’m not a big exception.” She stopped on the verge of tears and paused to regather herself.

  “I don’t think of you that way,” I said.

  “I was only prepared for a certain kind of life and I never had the ability to really step outside it like you and Cynthia. When I visited Donald and Cynthia last fall I couldn’t see a single trace of her parents. There was simply nothing of me or your father in her life. I was pleased. As you know I’m the eternal docent but when I tried to help out in a children’s oncology clinic I only lasted a week. I’m not tough enough. I’m irrelevant except among the type of people I grew up with. My only outside friends are Polly and her two children who call me ‘Granny.’ Don’t you ever miss her?”

  “Of course.” I found myself pleased to see she thought of my father as a dead duck. There was a specific anemia to the so-called upper class that boggled the mind. All of the paths were proscribed with centuries-old cobblestones. She had told me that early in their marriage Chicago had been their headquarters with Marquette and the Club reserved for the pleasant months from May until mid-October, then they decided that Marquette was a better place to raise children.

  “It was so sad when you broke up.” She wasn’t going to leave the subject of Polly. “I don’t really understand why you refused to have children.”

  I got up and stirred her gelatinous chicken. There was a question of how to withdraw from the immediate situation which seemed to resemble the beige mud puddle in the frying pan.

  “I think Dr. Coughlin feels that you want more from life than it can offer. Jesse told me you went to Mexico. That’s a good example.”

  She had me there. I had read about the point at which parents could become querulous children and it was a mistake to think of them as more than older versions of our own questionable selves. It had to be enough that I, along with Cynthia, had successfully escaped living their lives which despite the secure place in the culture seemed utterly deranged. As an escape route I fed Carla. Looking around I was struck by the idea that that sort of life was an expensive kitchen in which nothing could be cooked because you had everything but the proper ingredients. I remembered how sloppily Fred made bologna sandwiches for the poor kids but he was trying.

  “You’re avoiding me,” she said.

  “I haven’t seen what life has to offer. I’ve been too busy thinking. I’ve been trying to get through the used part.” This was lame but all I could offer. I couldn’t humanely pursue certain things with her as I had my father. Part of me might wish to be a spotlight but a penlight would have to do. The point was not to feel lighter by sinking someone else. For instance, there was no reason to ask her why she hadn’t grabbed us and run for it far before our lives had declined to the point that Vera could be raped. A point had been reached where further examination of wounds would be fruitless.

  I looked down amused at the chicken glop I had been stirring. This was clearly a case where a pig’s ear couldn’t be made into a silk purse. Carla sat beside my mother’s chair looking at me as if the delicious fumes rising from the stove were unendurable. Mother was entranced with petting her. It was almost a still life. I loved my mother and I felt as if I were taking off my imaginary judge’s cloak and tossing it in a Dumpster. I walked over and embraced her. I followed an absurd impulse and asked her if it was okay if I called out for a pizza. I hadn’t had a good Chicago pizza since I had left theological school. She was pleased with the idea.

  36

  I fell into a state of serene collapse. After dinner Mother went to bed and Coughlin came over so that we could begin mapping out our trout expedition later in the summer. He had previously teased me about eating too much of the world without spitting anything out so when he arrived and asked me how I was doing I said I was busy spitting out my excess world of which there was a lot.

  I had intended to leave the next morning but my sense of urgency had fled and I spent it with my mother and a neighbor lady digging holes and planting shrubs. At one point I found my mother beginning to call me Clarence but then she caught herself stopping at “Clare.”

  In the afternoon I went down to the Newberry Library and stared a long time at ethnological maps of the northern Midwest but I couldn’t concentrate because I was still full of the pleasure of digging holes and the notion of following in Clarence’s footsteps. When I left the library I stood for a moment in the place where I had met Vernice. There was a cold wind off Lake Michigan whipping through the streets so I couldn’t quite re-create her summer dress.

  When I left at dawn the next day Mother got up to fry me eggs solid as a tennis ball and see me off in her old blue robe which she used to wear wandering around our early morning yard talking to Clarence about what to plant where.

  I drove hundreds of miles out of my way in order to look at the Mississippi over near La Crosse, Wisconsin, my progress slowed by Carla’s toilet stops though it was still better that she ate Mother’s chicken than if I had. I thought of stopping in Madison to check out a program in the new academic discipline of human geography but reminded myself again that I had to pull back and gather some oxygen around myself. When we were talking about our fishing trip and looking at maps Coughlin had mentioned my natural cognitive disarray in trying to figure out why people were where they were in the United States. It was far simpler in Europe, in southern France for instance, where a locale was virtually the birthplace of the Occident.

  I found a good place on a pasture hillside north of La Crosse and sat there on a big rock looking at the ice-laden Mississippi while Carla roamed a pasture. It was warm enough, close to fifty degrees, to sit there comfortably and I recalled how a wonderfully cynical history professor had pointed out that when we came to America we were always discovering something like the source of the Mississippi that the Natives were already well aware of, but then our attitude to the Natives was not unlike Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews. And the history of my family was not unlike the history of the United States. We were among the leading conquerors of a region and when we had thoroughly depleted its main resources we mythologized our destruction.

  But then the river drifted me away from the obvious presumptions I had gathered around myself like a child’s favorite blanket. Almost too perfectly there was a group of crows hitching a ride south on a large fragment of drift ice with a single crow at the far end hopping and squawking at the others. I had to smile when I thought how my father hadn’t denied anything but thought his crimes of insufficient interest to talk about. This was a welcome mat to his reality. I had read that even crows have specific ethical concerns and, sweeping my eyes over human history, sociopathology was as rife as the common cold.

  I sat there for nearly two hours with Carla close beside me having been frightened by a feral barn cat in a nearby thicket.

  It was the strangest feeling possible when the primary obsession of my life began to abandon me. Every filament of my musculature began to loosen and it was as though my brain had liquefied and might begin to leak. I was struck by the irritability of my hate for my father and now that it had begun to recede I realized how strongly we wish to love our parents beyond childhood.

  The vast river before me became incomprehensible with this perception and I wanted very much to give up trying to understand the world, at least for the time being.

  I scratched Carla’s ears. She was enervated by the feral cat who had now emerged from the thicket and was glaring at her from fifty yards away. In respect to Carla it was comic to think again of Cynthia’s gift for intimidation while I walked through life leading with my chin. On occasion I had unwittingly tripped over life herself on my myopic, solo descent into hell. It now struck me as so simple in that looking backward I saw how fueled by a singular obsessio
n I couldn’t see clearly where I was walking.

  Meanwhile Carla was stiffening and there was a rumbling in her chest, and then she burst toward the cat who shot up a slender tree at the edge of the thicket. On the way back to the truck Carla was full of herself, prancing absurdly, and she seemed to grow larger. As for myself I was the same size but not quite the same man.

  Dinner in the hotel dining room was discouraging but I met and talked at length to a red-haired busgirl who wanted to be a writer. She had pale skin, the grace of a ballerina, a high clear voice, and the vivid speech of a precocious or junior Vernice. She asked if I wanted to get together after she finished work and I became excited at my good luck, but then she said she would call her father and tell him not to pick her up if I would give her a ride home. I asked, “You don’t drive?” and she admitted she wasn’t old enough to get a license which meant she was under sixteen. My scalp prickled and I said I couldn’t see her later. I took Carla for a walk and when we returned I could see in the window from the motel lawn. The girl was finishing up her work and looked a little downcast. I put Carla in the room and then went into the back door of the bar adjoining the dining room and had a double whiskey. The night was cool but my hair was damp and I had difficulty swallowing the whiskey. She appeared at the door between the dining room and bar and waved at me. I swiveled the bar stool and turned my back.

  37

  I began to flow then, not like a river but at least in a fashion similar to a feeder creek coming out of a forest in twists and turns. It was a few days before I recognized it as a state of serene collapse.

  On reaching Marquette there was a morose and discordant note from Vernice admitting she had loaned half the money I had given her to her poet lover. He was expecting a check from the States but when it came they had separated without him returning the loan. She had moved in with the “slightly Sapphic” woman near Arles for the time being who was willing to support her until she finished her novel. She didn’t want anything more from me except that when I went to Grand Marais I must greet our stump for her. She was using our affair in her novel but, of course, was changing the names to protect the innocent. Perhaps we would see each other in October.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if her melancholy state would be permanent. Her profession was pretty much her “self” and that could be a fragile path. My own long-lost impulse to avoid thinking about myself had been a failed effort though I could now see that it was not so much a matter of stopping but letting it drift away. My father had been a perverse anchor and I had cut the rope.

  Within a few hours of reaching Marquette I was deep into the pleasure of digging holes. Clarence had bursitis in a shoulder and a snowplow had destroyed much of our back hedge bordering the alley which meant it had to be replanted. His nephews were supposed to do the digging but they were busy on another landscaping job. I was surprised when I found remnants of winter ice a foot down and had to use a pickax. It was a warm late April afternoon and I was soon soaked with sweat and had to put on a pair of Clarence’s work gloves to avoid blisters. Clarence and Jesse sat on lawn chairs, drank beer, and watched critically. After a few hours Clarence’s nephews arrived and helped me finish the job, and then Susie came by, obviously tracking the nephew, Sam, who had moved up from Detroit. We had an al fresco picnic in the backyard over Mrs. Plunkett’s lasagna and questionable red wine. I made a small business decision and decided to help the nephews with their landscaping service which was undercapitalized. Ownership would be split into thirds and I would buy them a used pickup, shovels, rakes, a rototiller, and a couple of lawn mowers. Clarence would advise on the trees, shrubs, and flowers to be planted. A couple of days later when I packed up to go to Grand Marais I saw that Susie had painted on the door panels of my pickup “David Burkett Landscaping Service.” I can’t say I felt a warm glow but it was pleasant. I intended to alternate weeks at the cabin with weeks of hard manual work. This program would keep me on earth rather than floating above it. I liked the idea of mowing the lawns of my parents’ friends.

  In the morning on the way out of town I stopped at a job site and ended up helping Sam and his brother Teddy align a group of boulders along a driveway which were designed to prevent snowplow services, which work with haste, from ripping up the yard. I was a bit dreamy thinking about the opening of trout season and my inattention caused me to get the tip of a finger squashed. I hopped around howling and then Teddy drilled a small hole in my fingernail with the tip of a jackknife blade to release the impacted pressure of the blood which then spurted up through the hole. Because of the nerve ending in the fingers the pain was more intense than fracturing an ankle. I felt it more strongly with each heartbeat.

  Teddy and Sam sat there drinking coffee from a worn thermos and looking at me with empathy. I rose above my absurd pain far enough to reflect on how battered they appeared though they were only about my age. It wasn’t just the accelerated aging I had noted in Clarence and Jesse the day before but the hardness of life within the lower regions of the economic scale. Teddy had had considerable experience as a Golden Gloves lightweight and after that as a medium obnoxious street fighter with cauliflower ears and eyebrows lumpy with scar tissue. Sam was less scarred but with the gristly appearance of one who had worked in a Detroit drop forge, also auto plants. He had lost some of his hearing and came close when you spoke.

  I as a well-heeled ideologue and history zealot was relatively smooth and unmarked having recovered from my ceaseless winter walks but then my hardships were those of choice.

  On the drive to Grand Marais it occurred to me that you were not likely to feel compassion when you had become totally self-sunken. I was obsessed with my family’s crimes against nature, less so with the human victims of logging and mining. Maybe the survivors had to mythologize their work to make the past bearable. The implicit ideal of my great-grandfather and grandfather would be to get people to work for nothing as in the practice of slavery in the south. The rich invariably knew how the poor should live. Just show up for work, humbly.

  Off the main road and into the cabin on a two-track I had to break through a few crusty remnants of snowdrifts though it was two days before the beginning of May. The woods were still gray but the trees were beginning to bud and the dead grass in the openings showed a little pale green working through the beige. My finger still throbbed but I felt an almost unnerving lightness which I compared to Carla’s fidgety eagerness on the seat beside me. This was clearly her favorite place. Early in the morning I had thought of calling Coughlin about this sensation because waking in the night I thought I might levitate. Walking down by the river in front of the cabin I wept freely. One can scarcely question tears.

  38

  I was swept along with time in a new manner. It was a pleasant form of crazy as if the vacuum left by my father as a primary concern was filled by a repressed goofiness. The river was too turbulent from the spring runoff to fish so I walked with Carla and rowed in the bay or on Au Sable Lake though the cold air rising from the water meant you had to dress warmly. I caught some whitefish from the pier with a group of geezers who shared their bottles of schnapps with the flavor of the snuff tobacco from under their lips. I wrote letters to Vernice, Fred, Coughlin, and Cynthia. I wanted to write Elaine Pagels, the mage of church history, but I was too shy. I pondered the gnostics’ insistence on relying on your own immediate experience. It sounded more than a little like Fred’s Zen discipline. One day I skipped like a child until I was exhausted and soaked with sweat. I even tried crawling though it disturbed Carla in the same way a parent’s errant behavior bothers a child. I made love to a middle-aged woman I had met a number of times at the grocery store. She had asked me to look at her roses many of which had died during the winter. We made love on her living room floor next to a grandfather clock. I turned her around as the metronomic swing had begun to irritate me. I had rug burns on my knees. Her cat hissed at me. We made love with less energy a second day and on the third I was relieved that her husband w
as returning from Minneapolis. I think that she was also relieved. She claimed it was her first act of adultery in thirty-five years of marriage. I thought irrelevantly “that’s how old I’ll be next year” but said nothing.

  One day while rowing I fell into a fresh kind of trance while following a loon down toward the west end of Au Sable Lake. It was warmish with enough breeze to keep the bugs away so I took off my shoes and socks in order to feel the water passing under the thin floor of the boat. When I started rowing from the launch site I had been idly preoccupied over the old idea whether there can be individual salvation without collective salvation. This thought arose when I had awakened at dawn thinking about Sprague’s journals from his trip to France soon after World War I. After visiting Verdun where eight hundred thousand men had died in ten days he speculated that the battle site raised the largest question mark in the history of mankind, followed by “no answers can be fairly raised.” Thus I began rowing in a rather lighthearted state because all of existence seemed clearly beyond my comprehension. With each stroke I’d think of something, say how all religions seemed to imitate and sacrifice themselves to temporal political powers thus allowing greed to wrap itself in a semi-holy mantle, then after each strong stroke there was a long glide when I’d become utterly submerged in the sheer “thingness” of life around me and be incapable of thought let alone comprehension: lake, water, sky, bird, my feet, my breathing. Something similar had happened when I went west to fish with Coughlin and in Nebraska had seen my first buffalo closeup. We had been talking about my project that morning before we stopped at Fort Niobrara near Valentine and I was still distracted when I got out of the pickup and was face to face with a buffalo behind a sturdy fence. A ranger told us that this buffalo was one of the largest in existence. My skin prickled and the rest of the world including myself faded away with the perception of its immensity, its odor and the sound of its breathing, its baleful pinkish eyes. I came back to “reality” when it let out a hollow, thunderous grunt and I jumped straight up in the air in an act Coughlin described as “athletic.” From that point onward my brain would imagistically confuse buffalo with logging and the immense stumps we had been discussing before we stopped at Fort Niobrara. As a boy in Ireland Coughlin had been obsessed reading about cowboys, Indians, and popular-culture renditions of the American West and knew that perhaps seventy-five million buffalo had been killed with a remnant of a couple of hundred left to maintain the species’ existence. It seemed metaphorically logical that my brain would connect buffalo and the huge white pine stumps I had found.