by Jim Harrison
My location had become eerie with memories of fishing expeditions of more than fifty years ago. I looked longingly at the high-forested banks on the other side of the river. I checked up and downstream and selected the shallower spot, wading across the water which was only thigh deep though quite cold. It was exhilarating to do something so totally out of the ordinary, at least in my own life. I meandered around in the forest for an hour or so catching brief sight of the pileated woodpecker which is nearly as large as a crow. Naturally I was quite lost but quickly settled my emotions when I determined I was walking the wrong way from the sun, an easy enough perception if you avoid panic. When I reached the river again it seemed to be flowing in the wrong direction rather than my own. I calmed myself, opting for the river’s sense of direction. Now I was headed again toward my cabin and stopped on the bank for a rest near where Joe had buried the baby bear who had never seen the light except for a few months of spring. Sentimental tears formed but perhaps this sort of mourning really isn’t sentimental. As a geezer I had a perfect right to empathize with a creature whose life was truncated barely past its beginning. Mortality indeed. We’re always standing on a trapdoor with wobbly hinges. The little bear perhaps had only been out of its birth den two months. Joe was probably at least halfway there at the point of his beech-tree collision. Of course he was still technically alive, but I was beginning to think that in some ways he might have a distinct edge on the rest of us. At sixty-seven I was doubtless seven-eighths “there,” a matter on which it is impossible to draw conclusions.
I had long since evolved a system wherein I was always right but of late there have been tremors where the very concepts of right and wrong in the conduct of one’s life recede into the ready-made, off-the-rack past. Life seems so unlike, in certain moments, what I expected it to be, and I have begun to question Joe’s effect on me.
Sitting there against the warm bank of the river I could lay back and see the protruding roots of trees, bushes, grass. Turning on my side I could see Sonia’s butt prints on the sand spit where she had sat a few weeks before. Across the river a smallish trout was rising to midges in the cool shadow of an undercut bank, then was joined by others, one apparently of large size. There was the ever so slight urge to drag my jumble of fly-fishing equipment out of the closet, unused for a decade in favor of nothing in particular.
I had noticed something troubling which quickly became amusing, on recent trips to the grocery store, or the saloon for my occasional Sapphire martini. The populace at large, and especially his old friends who were now distant from him, had begun to talk about Joe in somewhat mythological terms as if he weren’t quite part of the human community, or had ceased to be. Often the descriptions or gossip referred to “sightings” as if Joe were a rare ornithological or mammalian specimen. He was seen crossing the highway in a swampy area after midnight on a moonlit night. In June he made love to a big fat woman on the beach for hours. He was a millionaire (not quite true but close) whom the doctors had bilked (possibly). He was seen by an old Finn and a park ranger walking next to a bear (hard to believe). Beautiful women (Sonia and Ann) liked him because he was weird. He slept in a cave (how did this get out?). He had become a religious nut (a park ranger had glassed him gesturing at the sky).
You really couldn’t blame the locals. I had a greeting knowledge of nearly every one of the four hundred souls in the village and in the summer they gossiped most often about the foibles and idiocies of their lifeblood, the tourists. There are utterly natural resentments here. In the winter they could talk about each other or the weather. Since I had been around before most of them were born I was in a category best described as “odd rich guy.” I admired the ingenuity and intelligence of many of them who, strangely enough, would have become great successes in the outer world about which they never showed much interest. They were all experts in human limitations, and knew their own in a way city people rarely do.
Joe was snoozing on my sleeping bag on the picnic table when I returned. Marcia was full of the kind of wriggles of which only a Labrador retriever is capable. I fetched her an ample chunk of cheddar cheese, her favorite snack. While Joe was asleep I looked closely at the indentations is his skull above his hairline with a momentary admiration for doctors who have to deal with such matters. When I was younger many older folks still referred to doctors as “sawbones,” a graphic name indeed. I caught sight of Joe’s notebook near his left hand, feeling a touch of dread at its presence because it always entailed the struggle for questions and answers. I was scarcely a therapist, and it was impossible to imagine a professional capable of doing him any good at this point. Still he came to me occasionally carrying the notebook when there was something especially bothering him. A few weeks ago I found myself trying to explain the idea of color and the nature of the spectrum. Also, why don’t animals have six legs! Why were all the huge white pines cut down at the turn of the century? Why were the stars colorful? I assumed with the latter that he had seen some of the Hubbell photos in a magazine at the Rathbones’ but wasn’t sure.
I flipped through the notebook and was quite startled to find a risqué Polaroid photo of Ann taped against a page toward the back. The angle was from the rear and she was on her hands and knees in the briefest blue undies and turning her head with a flashing smile. “Land sakes alive,” as codgers used to say. I knew Dick Rathbone had a Polaroid camera from just before his retirement when he was on a project for trapping and examining fish populations. He had shown me photos of the largest specimens. I could imagine Joe holding the camera for this particular photo. It was obviously Ann’s attempt at a reminder since he tended to forget all faces but evidently not the sense of touch, smell, the sound of her voice, and scarcely her unique taste.
Joe awoke abruptly with a shudder and reached over the edge of the table and scratched Marcia’s head which quickly grounded him. Since I was already caught I handed him his notebook but then he didn’t question my snooping. He showed me Ann’s photo as if it were a precious, religious relic, then turned to a page where there were four clumsy drawings, the kind you might expect from perhaps a second grader. The first was of a fish, which he demonstrated to be longer than the outsized picnic table, say about ten feet. The drawing reminded me of a lake sturgeon I had seen in the fifties along the beach north of Harbor Springs. The second drawing was clearly a bearded male raven but Joe held out his arms to show that it was somewhat larger than the usual raven. This wasn’t alarming in itself because I have learned over the years that maybe one raven out of thirty is demonstrably interested in me so that I feel warm to them. The third drawing was a bit off the charts in that it didn’t illustrate any animal I recognized. It somewhat resembled a very round bear but with a largish curved proboscis, and Joe held a hand midway up his chest to show its height. The fourth drawing was the raven superimposed on the bearish figure with the big nose so that they were a single creature.
I was at my wit’s end and it took a sweaty half-hour to figure out what he meant by the drawings. It turned out that the beast Joe had mentioned that afternoon down the river when Dick Rathbone, Sonia, and I had found him supposedly changed shapes. In the middle of the day it was a fish and from twilight to about midnight it was the round furry creature shaped like an enormous bowling ball, and then in the middle of the night until mid-morning it was the overlarge raven.
This all filled me with the densest lassitude. My mind cried out for lunch and a long nap. The company of a madman is exhausting, even though you somehow have grown to like him very much. In short, I wanted to be alone but for a change I overcame this banal impulse. It’s not like I see myself as a Romantic Hero brooding in solitude on matters of enormous import, if in fact there are any. It’s probably more connected to my accumulated wealth and the obvious fact that rich people are usually cagey, wary, suspicious, guarded as if the world were quite set on a uniform effort to get their money, which is also true but so what? The fact that I’m not really a member of any family, group, or c
ommunity is something I no longer see as virtuous. “I wandered lonely as a cloud” is not necessarily good thinking.
So I indulged Joe’s chatter. When he becomes excitable about one out of ten of his words is on the money. When serene he can be as close as one out of two. His animals which, of course, were ridiculous raised him to a pitch I hadn’t witnessed before. He was actually trying to convince me not only of their existence but also of their most frequent whereabouts. I was forced to affect an attitude of gullibility to calm him down. Even Marcia had become restless and worried over her master’s anxiety. In fact, he was so passionate that for the briefest moment the back of my neck prickled at the idea that this trinity beast might exist, no matter how patently absurd the idea. I have read so many novels with preposterous plots that I end up believing if the writing is of sufficient quality. Maybe we’re all fools in this way except for the most redoubtable epistemologists.
Joe’s aphasia, his language difficulties, were normally quite endurable and certainly understandable, somewhat on the order of a stutterer whom you like very much, and whose speech difficulties emphasize the importance of what is being said. In this case Joe had lost the trace of humor usually present and his face bulged with veins sticking out in a hopeless effort to explain himself lucidly. He sputtered, paused, wheezed, mumbled, and keened with spit flying through the air. It finally became apparent that he wanted me to see his beast in whatever form, which was the last thing I intended to do.
“O deus ex machina!” I was saved by the bell in the form of Dick Rathbone driving into my cabin yard with a large, rather bovine girl I’d guess to be in her late twenties, the third of Joe’s girlfriends, and not one to give you that faintly ominous buzz to the testicles. Shirley was plain as day, noon to be exact. She was spontaneous as barbed wire, a young woman of Norwegian extraction, who lived on a farm near Ovid, Michigan, where Joe used to pheasant hunt. She obviously was as stricken with him as Ann. Only Sonia, being a nurse, showed any good sense. Nurses are specialists of the present tense, in reality, as it were.
Shirley had driven north with a splendid, fresh peach pie, which was on the level of some of the best desserts I’ve had in France. Before we ate the pie she had taken Joe into my cabin toilet and washed him up, then brushed his tangled hair at the picnic table. This all reminded me of the public grooming of chimpanzees. I must say that though Shirley was quite large, nearly six feet and thickish to my taste, her big figure wasn’t lumpy in the least and she resembled any sturdy, well-built girl only larger. When at her insistence she and Joe took a river dip (she told him he smelled “gamy”) I noted that she was perfectly symmetrical. She had also picked up Marcia as if she was cuddling a kitten and I’m sure Marcia weighed seventy-five pounds. Farm girls!
It’s amusing, and I’m sure an anthropologist can explain it, the way men prate and yap how a woman or girl is formed no matter how sloppy and ungainly we men are. I’ve seen the ugliest bastard in the world rating some poor woman on a one to ten scale, but then I’m sure women must have some vaguely commensurate behavior, largely secret from us.
When they left I was a limp noodle with the identifiable dread that I was going to traipse around in the wilds looking for nonexistent beasts. Joe had left his notebook on the picnic table and I was alarmed over the idea that Shirley might have picked it up and seen the garish photo of Ann. Only she hadn’t. How often we are alarmed by something that didn’t happen. I had once gone to a Chicago Bulls game with Roberto who, rather than merely lusting after the players, was an astute student of the technical aspects of the game and a season-ticket holder. The renowned Michael Jordan had leapt clean over the head of a referee who had suddenly stopped at mid-court. There had been a sudden moment of silence in the crowd. No matter how astounding the feat was, for hours after the game I dreaded that he hadn’t succeeded at what he already had done.
I treated myself to an ample martini and leafed through Joe’s notebook, trying but, of course, failing to avoid the photo of Ann. This geezer trembled again, wondering at the power of a simple photo when all forms of normal pornography left me cold. Evidently scientists now know the exact part of the brain where these emotions generate themselves. This pushed me to think of Joe in terms of “who cares what is wrong but that it is wrong and can’t be fixed.”
His prose, as such, didn’t exist. It was mostly a jumble of nouns, colors, smells. The bearish figure smelled of “horseshit and violets.” It takes real ability to smell a non-existent beast. “Mud. Rain. Orange bus. Elephant cloud. Gull cloud. Rock cloud.” What is this but the shapes of things?
I delayed dinner and took one of those truly wonderful hourlong naps when your body becomes at one with the bed. I awoke at twilight with all the birds around the cabin saying good night and the sound of distant thunder coming from the southwest. Both Joe and Dick Rathbone love a rain because it wipes away older, blurred animal tracks and everything becomes new again. The year before, right after a fine late-July rain, Dick had showed me a very large set of bear tracks in the sand not fifty feet from the door of the cabin.
When I lifted myself off the bed, glancing habitually at my watch, part of an insight I had had just before falling asleep returned. Joe’s consciousness is totally predatory, hyperthyroid, because he senses the end, that he’s going to die. The injury, and the massive medical portfolio that attests to this, altered his sense of time, or destroyed the sense of time necessary to conduct the business of a culture, a “civilization,” as it were. Joe’s sense of time has become hopelessly round while ours is linear. His time is the duration, immediate, of what his senses feed him. Thus a bird’s song is time, so is the wind, the slow passing of a particular cloud, trees giving way to other trees, growing hunger or thirst. It is not a clock. His individual universe is totally holographic, so that he moves dimensionally within time’s enclosure but quite unrelated to it. In his natural world death is child’s play. Of the million and a half living species (some scientists now speculate it is closer to eight million) everything that has lived dies.
This had become a bit heady for me so I made the simplest supper available, a sandwich of Italian sausage fried with green pepper and onions, opened a bottle of Cotes du Rhône, and took my supper outside to enjoy the very last of the light and to watch the moon rise. How upset my parents would have been at such an idea! They permitted themselves nothing out of the ordinary. Unless we were here at the cabin, my father invariably wore a tie for dinner and, what’s more, he never spilled on it. He died with a closet full of clean ties, which I gave to our Winnetka yardman, a Jamaican named Cedric, along with fifty or so dress shirts and twenty suits. I even paid to have all the pants shortened two inches. This rather elaborate wardrobe enabled Cedric to become the manager of the yard-grooming service rather than a laborer, though when I saw him over a drink many years later he had become rather bloated and unhappy, complaining that in the old days he used to fuck every day and now that he was behind the desk and well out of shape it was once a week. Success again.
I had a night of intermittent sleep in the cabin, quite upset that the rain was keeping me from my picnic table, my outdoor nest, as it were. At three A.M. I got up and searched through my gear closet for a tarp and used safety pins to wrap it around the sleeping bag. I went out in the rain, naked except for my slippers, and got into the bag only mildly wet. To the east of me there was a thunderstorm creeping violently north where it would reach the cold air above Lake Superior and be repelled, re-gather its strength and try again. For a moment I had the wonderful illusion of seeing a little signpost in the sky that said “This way lies madness,” and quite like a college student who feigns instability to simply catch his breath, I was willing to take this route.
A modestly troubling thought arose in the rain over Ann’s Turgenev research which at first made me wonder if I’d grind another tooth to death when I fell asleep. Sad to say I could remember all too clearly Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man and its wretched hero, Chulkaturin, who wa
s obsessed with his gestures rather than his contents. It is a bitter, hopeless little novella written in the mid—nineteenth century and signals the literary birth of the alienated man who now, of course, seems to number in the millions. Ann doubtless knew this novella very well and I wondered, or, more explicitly, suspected, that she saw me as an aged Chulkaturin in the same manner she viewed her father.
But of course, as the French say, I am cranky at times, querulous, guilty of lassitude, strangled somewhat at an early age by brutally insensitive parents just like Chulkaturin, but then, as I’ve implied, there must be millions of us lapsing into old age in a state of irritable melancholy. Above all else, at least according to this culture, I am a not especially noteworthy success. As far as I know, there’s nothing on earth I could do to make Ann care for me.
The rain increased deliciously, bathing my face as if I were an oceanic “lacrimae Christus.” I could not help but laugh at the ordinariness of my condition. January loves May who naturally is bent on wounded July. I tried to recall for amusement the details about another Chicago boy’s aged affection for a young woman. Hemingway’s love for Adriana Ivancich was absurdly delusional which didn’t slow down the wonderful old fool for a moment. Like the rest of us he was trained rather harshly by his parents to be a good boy, a good man, a good old man, and demonstrably failed at goodness. He instead became a courageous fool though there is evidence he drank far too much from his twenties onward and probably had no firm notion what a preposterous fool he had become. In any event, there is nothing in him that requests our forgiveness. Luckily the young woman escaped his palsied clutches though someone told me she eventually committed suicide and won a New York Times obituary, a sign of success in life. But then the tidy bourgeoisie (am I a member?) is always “tisk-tisking” about those few who struggle out there on the borderlands, though the feeling of moral superiority while suppurating within your investment portfolio is also a struggle. I remember as a boy when my father drove me past the Hemingway house in Oak Park and I thought I sensed a specific doom that I also felt about our own home. Everything is up in the air, thus our vertigo.