True North

by Jim Harrison

  The loon had circled back east from the Rhodey Creek inlet and with a few hard strokes I was approaching Laurie’s beach. This time my mind drifted to my childhood collection of bird feathers, thence to Laurie’s vulva. Maybe no one is prepared for how warm it is inside. Glenn and I were about twelve when we snuck up on a couple making love one spring in a college woodlot. We recognized the girl as one we had seen frequently on Third Street when we would ride our bikes past groups of college girls who all looked mysteriously attractive to us unlike our shrieking classmates. In the woods with Glenn in the courageous lead we were appalled at the clear view of merging parts and the groaning sound the girl made. The man huffed and one of the girl’s legs flopped. There seemed to be much more to her than when she had clothes on. It reminded me of a dowdy and rather homely seventh-grade teacher who after I saw her on the beach in a scanty bathing suit achieved an altogether new reality in my mind. She called me over to ask how my summer was going and I could barely speak. She was clearly amused by the effect she was having on me, but nothing in my life had equaled the presence of Vera dancing on the beach, or in the upper hallway when she had exposed her bottom. The unrealized desire was on a different level, closer to physical illness, than I had reached with Laurie, Polly, Riva, or Vernice. While saying my abject prayers against lust I had the notion that if I made love to Vera I would die on the spot. When I reached the launch site I laughed when I discovered I had spent four hours rowing. Carla had slept in boredom on the back seat with one eye open in a squint at the possibility of anything happening. On shore she ran off in the woods for a half hour, clearly pissed at the uneventful afternoon. I made it up to her by taking her back to my great mother of stumps early in the evening. When we crawled under the stump she growled at a small pile of bear feces. I felt the general urge to pray but it seemed too aggressive in that holy place.

  39

  I alternated a week of work with a week at the cabin until I left with Coughlin on our fishing trip to Montana in early August. At the cabin I fished every evening and continued my somewhat autistic practice of rowing for a few hours every day. When I worked with Sam and Teddy in Marquette I’d fished in the evening on my old haunts on the Middle Branch of the Escanaba near Gwinn or on the Chocolay. One day in Marquette when we had to retreat from our landscaping due to a hard, driving rain I spent the day going through my research papers for my project which were stored, ironically, in my father’s study. Who gives a shit, I thought. It was obvious to me that nearly everything I had written save the stories from old miners and loggers was stilted, junky, falsely academic, and fueled by anger. Unlike the stories the writing was purely awful. It seemed that when I tried to be informative I had two choices: write it from a clearly remote angle or as a personal memoir using the tactics Vernice had suggested but informed by my father’s disappearance as a motive. After all, what he had mainly accomplished in family history was smugly spending the money.

  One afternoon there was an embarrassing moment when we were working in a yard of what Teddy called “rich folks.” A brittle-voiced old woman came out of the house chiding us for this and that, then stopped cold and looked at me as if she was dislocated. “David?” she said, and then I recognized her as one of Mother’s bridge partners from long ago. “Are you okay?” She regarded me and then Sam and Teddy with puzzlement. I was getting used to this look around town though she was the first to say anything. I clearly wasn’t supposed to be working for a living.

  I wondered why no one had answered my letters and then it occurred to me to check my Grand Marais box, my original error with Vernice. There were letters from Cynthia, Fred, my mother, and a recently arrived note from Vernice who said that she might come back to the States early if I’d loan her a grand for a ticket. She had finished her “sex” novel and was trying to determine whether she should publish it under her own name but then scarcely anyone knew her own name so why should it matter? She was delighted at the idea of her mother reading the book. She had moved from the house of her “overly affectionate patroness” and was cooking for an elderly couple from Chicago who had a house near St. Remy and entertained a lot.

  Cynthia wrote that Donald had finally succeeded at his three days and nights without food, shelter, or water and had returned swollen with mosquito and blackfly bites, cooked his favorite barbecued ribs, became ill, and went to bed. She had heard from Vera in Oaxaca that her marriage wasn’t doing well and that she was homesick for Veracruz partly because Oaxaca was full of tourists. Cynthia added that we were due another check because “Dad” had to sell more land in order to resolve a legal problem with a black girl he had met at a quail plantation in south Georgia several years ago. (This explained a letter from the young lawyer I hadn’t wanted to open.) Dad probably would have been home free but the girl’s parents were involved in civil rights activities.

  Fred said that he was still trying to save his “sorry ass” at the Zendo but had lost the spiritual excitement of the first few months. He was working in the vegetable garden which he liked and also studying Hawaiian birds and botany for no particular reason. He was sad because Riva never answered his letters. Had I heard from her? The mention of Riva made me lonely. I wondered if I would become like Sprague who after the death of his young wife never again found a companion.

  Mother was at the same time apologetic and vaguely obnoxious. She enclosed a check and said she was appalled to hear that I had been seen mowing lawns in ragged clothes. My upbringing and education had prepared me for something better. She had directed her accountant to send me a monthly check. She felt that she had failed me. Had I given up on my history of the Upper Peninsula? She had finally called Clarence and found out about the landscaping company which was still the equivalent to her of mowing lawns. Would I please come see her so we could fully discuss my future? She had some sort of kidney disease which, though not normally fatal, accentuated her worries about me since Cynthia was doing fine. She actually said that my current manual labor might reflect badly on the family name. She concluded by saying she loved me so very much and would pray that I have a noble future.

  The night before I left for Montana I asked Clarence and Jesse for dinner and Mrs. Plunkett made us veal parmesan. Clarence had become slow on his feet in addition to his bursitis. I noted he placed his feet carefully. Jesse had developed an almost imperceptible slur. I asked him about the most recent land sale and he said the lawyer was handling it. I also asked him about Vera and he seemed pleased to say that her marriage had become difficult.

  That night after eating and drinking a little too much for the planned early departure I had a nightmare based on reality that showed me that though I had neutralized my father I hadn’t gotten rid of him. We were out on a raft on a lake at the Club—four fathers and four sons—having a supposed fishing, swimming, and picnic party. I must have been eight at the time. The raft was large and solid with a ladder to the water and was supported by oil barrels. We kids were fishing and swimming while the men were drinking. We ignored them until it was time to eat. My father by then was lying on a mat at the edge of the raft telling stories and then he suddenly groaned and rolled off the raft into the water. Everyone reacted in panic. Two of the men who swam well jumped in to look for him. I was a good swimmer and dove in but when I came up for air I was yelled at and told to get back on the raft. My drowning father might pull me under. After five minutes the two men got back on the raft with one of them crying and saying it was a lost cause. It was then that my father called out in a basso voice saying he was in the land of the dead. He had lodged himself up into a space between the barrels where he could breathe. The men were furious and I couldn’t stop crying.

  In my nightmare my father never came back up on the raft. I dove down to the bottom where he was holding on to a sunken log and wouldn’t let go. Air bubbles came out of his mouth and then there were none. I was hysterical because I couldn’t save him. I was too young and weak. I awoke sweating and thrashing. Carla was alarmed and jumped
off the foot of the bed. It was four A.M. and I tried to sleep with the lights on but it didn’t work. I read some late poetry of Yeats but the elegant cynicism drove me further from sleep. I kept thinking that throughout the world there are sons and daughters with distorted wishes for what their parents should be, or hopeless wishes for what their parents should have been. Some of the most critical of us are afflicted with a paralysis over this, our brains too active with resentment to solidly function. At least I had created my garbled history. The fact that I could be so thrashed in the hands of a nightmare about my father startled me. My reaction had nothing to do with anger or curiosity but a mute acceptance of the human condition, the brain spinning tales before which we are quite helpless.

  40

  We took a tortuous route west to satisfy Coughlin’s curiosity to see certain places he had read about as a boy in Ireland. This included Teddy Roosevelt’s ranch in North Dakota, then south to Belle Fourche where we cut northwest on 212 to pass through the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation and arriving one early evening at the Custer Battlefield near Crow Agency. I was boggled by Coughlin’s knowledge of Native history, trying to imagine an Irish boy in Sligo making his own personal map of history. Coughlin said that whether you are brave or foolhardy depends on whether you win and Custer had lost disastrously so that he stood there not alone in military history as one who had followed his daffy ego rather than sensible strategy.

  I brought up the idea that you can seem normal to yourself because you are who you are and have become accustomed to your oddities. You hope to be rewarded for what you are whether you deserve it or not. Even where you live takes on the warmth of a personal nest. Coughlin tended to think of the Upper Peninsula as a “mini-Siberia” pointing out that the forest that begins in northern Michigan continues on through the U.P., Wisconsin, and Minnesota, becoming open prairie only a thousand miles later just short of Grand Forks, North Dakota. He suspected that many people who moved West were claustrophobes. I added that within the dimensions he had described fifty-three million acres of virgin timber had been cut.

  “You sound lonely when you say that,” he said.

  I was embarrassed with this plaintive sensation and asked how I could hope to get rid of it. He suggested that I likely should finish my project but not to dawdle, then figure out what I might want to do with the rest of my life. He sensed that I wasn’t really a “natural bachelor” and someone might come along whom I couldn’t drive away once I had lost my obsessiveness. Naturally I had told him about my marriage to Polly and had been surprised how completely he had sympathized with her.

  We picked up our river boat in Livingston, Montana, and spent a day with a guide named Danny who attempted to teach us to handle the boat in such a way that we wouldn’t imperil ourselves on the Yellowstone River. He suggested that we keep to the stretches downstream near Big Timber where the currents of the huge river were less tricky. Unless you’re in a dead, relatively fishless stretch you row backward in order to avoid turbulence and protruding boulders. It wasn’t easy but then how could you expect to learn a portion of someone’s difficult livelihood in a day. Danny was a caustic ex-logger who turned to guiding after a shoulder injury from a falling tree in the woods. Later in the evening Coughlin described him as an “autonomous man,” a specialty of America that you see less in Europe. In the boat Coughlin had suggested that we stop talking about logging and just fish and learn to row. I had been appalled to learn that a clear-cut area up in the Absaroka Mountains Danny had pointed out would take three hundred years to fully regenerate due to the lack of moisture relative to Michigan.

  We fished for five days solid including through a violent thunderstorm where we beached the boat and lay flat in a pasture avoiding the cottonwoods along the river that would attract lightning. I covered myself with a poncho and it was oddly pleasant to lie there in a warm grassy puddle. As the storm passed a group of Angus calves inspected us closely to the point that I was able to scratch the nose of a bolder female. The male weanlings stayed farther back with little snorts as if we posed a threat.

  On the evening of the fifth day Coughlin received and made a number of calls over the illness of his younger sister in London and that was that. It was likely that she had pancreatic cancer and I drove him to the Bozeman airport at dawn after we had talked most of the night. There is a curious attribute to days of solid fishing in that you wipe your mind relatively clean and return to ordinary reality with begrudging steps. Pancreatic cancer is always mortal. Coughlin’s sister lived alone after two bad marriages and as an aspiring painter she had refused to have children. She was a pretty good painter but not good enough, Coughlin said, adding that this put her in the highest category of the “almost” and made her a clear example of the “wretched” and “mysterious” lack of democracy in the arts. “Many are called but few are chosen,” he concluded pouring himself an amber glass of malt scotch at two A.M.

  I had quit drinking earlier in the night out of fear that my mind was spinning backward to a familiar place I didn’t want to return to. Coughlin’s sister had set herself aside like Vernice and myself. I had asked him before how he could bear to be immersed in the problems of so many people and he had said “but that’s my life’s work.” Now he was obviously distressed to see his vacation end prematurely but that was a very small item compared to his sister’s illness. I couldn’t quite imagine Cynthia needing me, but if she ever did I’d get there as soon as possible.

  Coughlin was far from drunk but had loosened up considerably. He reminded me of my brilliant college professor Weisinger who on occasion would utterly unload on his classes to the extent that we were numb when the hour was up. Coughlin’s night speech was the verbal equivalent of the Bach solo I had heard that dawn in Aix-en-Provence. He moved from loneliness to time to death to the nature of our private religions. I got out a journal to make some notes but he asked me to put it away. Other than small pushes in the right direction he wanted me to work out my own path. If I listened to him too closely I would only be a follower. I joked that he sounded like a gnostic teacher and he agreed.

  I dropped him at the Bozeman airport close after dawn then drove to Big Timber having decided on a solo trip down the river to clear my head. We had traded the rowing chore while the other fished and now I intended to beach the boat on sandspits and islands to fish certain riffle corners we had passed too quickly. It was a very warm morning and at the launch site I watched a girl help her boyfriend pull a rubber raft off a trailer. I felt nervous when he admired my boat and said he was saving up for one. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse and aqua-colored shorts. Her legs and bottom were uncomfortably perfect as they pulled the rubber raft into the water. In fact she had the loveliest body I had ever laid eyes on. My heart actually ached and there was a silly tremor in my nuts as they floated off. She had affected my concentration and the bow of my boat glanced off a boulder in the first few hundred yards.

  I rowed hard until I reached the first riffle I intended to fish. I was streaming with sweat and discovered that I had forgotten to bring along water or lunch for that matter and it was five hours before I would reach the spot the shuttle service had dropped off my pickup and trailer. After I left Coughlin at the airport I had been sunken in the urge to drive home and trash nine-tenths of my project, clear the deck as it were, and then start again when the autumn’s cold weather arrived.

  I couldn’t very well drink the river water because the cattle along the banks spread giardia into the water. There was a single desperate bag of potato chips in the cooler but that would only make me thirstier. I daydreamt and fished and watched a big thunderstorm to the south. While taking a dip in an eddy I saw a golden eagle chasing a sandhill crane. They passed over a hill before I could see who won. The passing water put mortality in the best possible light. How could it be otherwise? I came around a bend in the full current and saw the empty rubber raft on a beach on the far side. The couple were likely up in a grove of cottonwoods making love. If I h
ad been on that side of the river I could have borrowed a drink of water and seen the girl again. Only I wasn’t on that side of the swiftly moving river and would likely never meet her again.

  Finally I could see my truck in the distance but due to my ineptitude still overshot my take-out place by a hundred yards. I beached the boat and laboriously pulled it upstream with the anchor rope, my mouth as dry as hot gravel. A young man helped me the last thirty yards or so after watching me fall face-first after losing footing on the slippery stones. He offered me a jug of cold water from his ratty old Subaru. Comically, he turned out to be a botany senior at Yale and was curious about the landscaping sign on my truck. He also gave me a candy bar and I said his accent didn’t remind me of my father’s. He told me he was a scholarship student from Ohio and the accent I was talking about was in the minority. He was studying weeds and showed me which weeds weren’t indigenous in a patch of pasture near the site. When I said good-bye I added that he had helped me to partially remove another aimless prejudice, and he said, “Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.”