A Really Big Lunch: Meditations on Food and Life From the Roving Gourmand

by Jim Harrison

  Labs, however, show their love of nature by eating it. My Scottish Lab, Zilpha, loves to eat the gophers caught by her housemate, an English cocker named Mary. I’ve tried without success to rescue cheeping gophers from Zilpha’s capacious mouth. She loves green apples though they make her intestinally restless. This omnivorous capacity can be a problem as a recent X-ray showed that she was failing to digest some deer hooves. She is an obedient bird dog and we had a grand dove season along the Mexican border, though she pretended she couldn’t find the last bird of the year and on opening her jaws I found the feather evidence. Zilpha, however, is not in the league of a previous Sandringham Lab who once made it in a hip cast to the top of the counter and ate a bunch of bananas, a pound of butter, and a dozen eggs (in the shell).

  We had a bitch Airedale named Jessie whose favorite snack was snakes, which she would catch and shake into manageable pieces, while another Airedale, Kate, never got beyond voles, popcorn, and pizza crusts in her preferences. A squeamish French Brittany who fishes with us likes Spanish Zamora or eight-year-old Wisconsin cheddar but will not touch fine salami because it is an Italian product. His name is suitably Jacques and he refuses chicken and pork but is frantic for beef in a hot Korean marinade.

  But do dogs have souls? Of course they do for reasons I have delayed. Many scientists like myself have wondered at the sheer number of androids that have infiltrated our population. The obvious test is the absence of the belly button but a primary diet of fast food is also a good indicator. You can also add as evidence the reading of fast food–type books—99 percent of all published books here in the United States—and the predominance of television in their lives. The average bitch mutt is an absolute Emily Dickinson of the soul-life compared to the large android portion of our population.

  In this slow swim toward shore I have been considerably impeded by my defect of Lab-like eating the world. I mean not just the food but every aspect of life on earth. My esteemed mind doctor of thirty-five years has been helping me banish this nasty habit. As a literary scientist I must remember that our work disappears quickly like a child’s money at the county fair. A certain austerity is required if I’m ever to touch the bottom. Never again will I eat a fifteenth-century recipe, a slew of fifty baby pig noses a dear friend in Burgundy prepared for me. It did look peculiar with all of those tiny nostril holes pointing toward the heavens beyond the kitchen ceiling. His Alsatian, Eliot, had scented these noses when they were still in the refrigerator and was frantic for his portion.

  In order to sense the rather obvious souls of dogs we must first admit that much of life is inconsequential, a matter of frying eggs over and over, moment by moment, or daily playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on an accordion at an amateur show. This is because we’re seeing life from our own point of view. In order to clearly see a dog’s soul you must give up the hopeless baggage that is your personality. Dogs and other creatures are made nervous by our errant personalities that herky-jerkily infest the atmosphere. Forget your ninny self-profile and become accepting as your dog. You must totally absorb the dimension of stillness to fully meet the otherness of this creature, at which point you’ll have at first what you think is a metaphysical experience, and later realize is a birthright because you are nature too. Not surprisingly this attitude or state of being is also of great advantage in writing poems or novels, or cooking. Why get in the way of the actual ingredients? I’m not saying this is easy. It took me fifteen years to get a flock of Chihuahuan ravens to take a walk with me down on the Mexican border. Until last April I was properly on probation.

  Once within the lucidity of extreme grief I was lucky enough to see the soul of a dog. She was in extreme pain and we rushed her to the vet in the middle of the night. I was holding her big body in my arms as if she were Juliet or Isolde and after the fatal injection I saw her soul shimmer out of her body. Frankly, the vision was a little banal like a science fiction movie but life is like that.

  Rage and Appetite

  Perhaps I’ve done as well as could be expected. I remember in my late teens reading the Thomas Mann novella Disorder and Early Sorrow and feeling quite at home within the lugubrious pages. The same with The Sorrows of Young Werther, which is all rolled up in a little ball of melancholic antimatter. And there was a succession of fictive biographies of Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and van Gogh. The suffering lives of writers aren’t nearly as interesting as those of painters for the simple reason that a painter’s calling justifies seeing as many nude women as they wish and wantonly coupling day in and day out. Nothing so little resembles the female body as a typewriter except perhaps a V-8 engine. A paintress friend in Paris admitted to me over a light lunch of seven dozen Belons that she had reveled in the bodies of dozens and dozens of male models. Often she is too exhausted to pick up a brush or mix colors. To get the feeling I once took a ten-dollar sketch pad into my favorite strip club in the Canadian Soo, but I forgot a pencil. Suffice it to say that this place afforded me a level of reverence not to be experienced in the great cathedrals of Europe or at a typewriter. I believe it was the renowned art critic Bernard Berenson who implied that the Sistine Chapel was a poor second to a Montreal girl’s derrière.

  Mental bedsores pursue us day and night as if they had wings. Recently my haunted, cloaked figure has been struck down by gizmo problems. Gizmos are mechanical objects, the comprehension of which escapes me. Before we left Montana for our winter quarters on the Mexican border, our $40,000 two-year-old car shit-canned for the fifth time. It was ten below in Montana and the heater wouldn’t work. In a giant snit I had a new car that we could ill afford delivered by mid-afternoon. When we arrived at the casita on the Mexican border the freezer was irreparably broken, as was the fax machine, and the water system that cost ten grand to replace, also the television that I use only to watch Netflix movies. The television refused to play R-rated films, which meant no nude bodies to boost my wilting morale. Not incidentally the radio-stereo and the indoor-outdoor thermometer also went on the blink. To hopefully draw this streak to a conclusion I awoke the other night to a truly violent pain in my lower abdomen. I writhed and flopped around the house like a beached fish. An ambulance took me to Nogales ER, and after five hours and three hypos of morphine I gave birth to a concrete block. At dawn it was wrapped in swaddling clothes beside me on the bed. The euphemism for this experience is called “passing a kidney stone.”

  Oddly enough by the afternoon the world became transcendentally beautiful as I shuffled along the creek and up my favorite canyon. I was in tears at the splendor of certain ordinary rocks and the mesquite and Emory oak trees clinging to the cliff faces near which an old female mountain lion lives. During the extremity of pain the soul barks out fearful clouds of stinking effluvia. When the hours of pain pass you are at least temporarily rid of your ego and the silly content of your personality. There is nothing to interfere with the luminosity of what is always there, nothing to prevent you from talking to the pair of splendid hepatic tanagers who listened attentively to your most recent poem. Since the CAT scan revealed that I have eighteen more kidney stones I am bound to repeat this experience. If you want to try it, find a rusty railroad spike and drive it into your bladder with a sledgehammer. I now regret the thousand mornings I ate oatmeal and yogurt to ensure health, truly a nasty way to begin a day. This morning I had a hearty bowl of the tripe stew called menudo with the delicate feminine texture of soft tripe. It is best made with a calf’s foot in the pot. At the table you add chopped cilantro, raw onion, and a few ground wild Sonora chiltepins with soaring heat.

  Doubtless the citizens of other countries have noticed that our republic is imperiled. We are everywhere controlled by low-rent chiselers and satanic warmongers, and now they’ve grown bored with Arabs and are demonizing Mexicans, my favorite ethnic group. I recently tried to write an essay called “The Zen of Waterboarding,” but expect I’ll have problems publishing it in the New York Times, even with its fashionabl
e title. I once nearly drowned on a vast, turbulent river while trout fishing. My waders filled up and I was swept under by the current. Struggle was fruitless. I had to abandon life and relax in my last few moments. I relaxed and the river carried me into an eddy where I alarmed a flock of mallards. Facedown in the mud I watched some interesting insects and puked up water. The experience was frankly torturous though without the company of any government employees.

  In November I fled to France for solace. Actually the city of Lyon paid my fare in order to give me a medal that weighed two pounds and was consequently too ungainly to wear, plus my secret religion forbids any jeweled adornment. I accepted the medal, rare because they are rarely offered, and because I wished to again search for the lost valise of poems of Antonio Machado. He had to abandon this satchel of poetry while fleeing Franco in order to carry his mother across the border from Spain to Collioure in France. My own mother would have been far too heavy to carry, but unluckily for the world of poetry Machado’s mom was tiny. It is still my hope to find these lost poems, which are far more important to the world than the United Nations or internal combustion.

  Unfortunately flying involves airports, which in the recent decade have come to resemble giant restrooms with a touch of the dog pound added to sweeten the air. Due to the acuteness of my claustrophobia I have to fly first or business class, and my hideously expensive flights from Chicago to Paris and Paris to Chicago were no more pleasant than pissing down your leg for nine hours apiece. The food both ways was shamefully atrocious, and there was no vodka on the return flight. No vodka? Please! After twenty-five years as a faithful customer I’m abandoning Air France unless they offer me the comparatively pleasant alternative of being dragged behind the plane in a gunny sack. It is a moot point anyway because with the current exchange rate France has become improbable. An Absolut vodka at the Lutetia Bar was twenty-four dollars while it’s only fifteen in New York City, but in Two Dot, Montana, and the Wagon Wheel in Patagonia, Arizona, the same drink is three bucks. Several nights in France we slept in blankets in roadside woodlots to save money for food and drink, but the mistral that followed us personally was astonishingly cold. Once we tried to sit up all night at a café, but I fell asleep and pitched off a chair further battering my homely old face. Several times on the trip I was mistaken for the dead poet Bukowski, surely the ugliest poet in the history of the art form.

  Why, then, was this two-week trip a triumph of the human spirit whatever that might be? It is not altogether clear, but I suspect that it was because the trip was a pilgrimage. It was helpful indeed that my traveling companion and old friend, Peter Lewis, isn’t totally covered with the warts (the comprachicos of Rimbaud) of neurosis like I am. We have made many trips in search of the genuine in food, wine, and location, and Peter was enthusiastic about my pilgrimage idea wherein I visit the graves of writers who meant a lot to me, not necessarily the best writers on earth but those to whom I had an intense personal response (sad to say I have limitations and can’t visit the graves of Hölderlin, Trakl, and Rilke because I don’t care for Germanic food and wine).

  We entrained for Narbonne at dawn after a difficult evening at Café Select on Montparnasse in which a group of French intellectuals claimed to me that their new leader, Sarkozy, didn’t have a belly button and was consequently an android. Like Solomon of old I suggested that he be asked to reveal his midriff on the Arte channel. In Narbonne we had dinner with Michael Redhill, the publisher of this magazine (Brick), Alexandre Thiltges, the prominent French critic, and Gene Griego, a chef friend of mine. We ate lavishly at a restaurant called Brasserie Co. Redhill is a man of marvelous humor and intelligence who should be called back to Canada pronto because he is gaining weight at an alarming rate owing to his free rein with French food, doubtless afforded by his embezzling funds from the usual woebegone arts organization. Outside, in the twilight, whirling in the air above the canal, there were twenty-seven thousand starlings from which pies can be made.

  Collioure was difficult indeed. I had a profound stateside dream in October that Machado’s valise would be found in one of the deep secret passageways beneath the fifteenth-century chapel of l’Ermitage de Consolation, now operated as a bed and breakfast by the vintner Christine Campadieu and her companion, a Normandy oysterman, Cyril Hess. Peter, Christine, and Cyril crowbarred up an ancient flat stone and lowered me down into a hole with sturdy hawsers. I was wearing a weak miner’s lamp and actually wept with fear. I found no manuscripts but only the skeletons of hundreds of vipers whose ancient bones turned to dust on touch. When they cranked me out of the deep hole with a boat winch I was a changed man in ways that are yet to be determined. Back on the reassuring surface of earth I babbled, but they couldn’t hear me in the seventy-knot mistral that had plagued the area for days. Above us birds flew south toward Africa at an astounding speed, and miles down the canyon the Mediterranean was rumpled and wind racked. Lucky for us Cyril had brought down five hundred oysters and a large sea bass from Normandy. I drank as much of Christine’s Domaine la Tour Vieille as possible, remembering Rilke’s dictum: “When the wine is bitter become the wine.” I could not accept my failure to find the Machado manuscripts, and my stubbornness continued the next day when we climbed steep mountains until our fingers were bloody, looking into caves where we found only empty wine bottles and used condoms. My depression only lifted that evening at Antoine’s restaurant, where we had a half dozen types of seafood, some wild ducks, and a dozen bottles of wine.

  Not so bright and early, Peter and I headed toward Bandol to spend the night at my friend Lulu Peyraud’s Domaine Tempier. We continued our intense four-day discussion on the illusions of control in us humans, in this case especially me. In my best moments I can accept the fact that I’m a mere trajectory, but most of the time I’m trying to control the world from my operational headquarters called Jim’s Brain. This is a demeaning way to live. I have begun to believe that the mystery of human existence so aptly described by Wittgenstein can best be examined when we are asleep or eating, twitching, dreaming, chewing, and swallowing like the rest of our fellow mammals who lack the experience of the French Enlightenment wherein we stood up on our tiny back paws and babbled about our uniqueness. I’m convinced that 99 percent of all literary intent is only an especially otiose form of mammalian narcissism similar to the mating dance of the weasel that I witnessed along the river last spring.

  After the usual fine food at Lulu’s—sea urchins, oysters, lamb, salmon, kidney stew—and some fine years of her splendid wine, in the morning we drove up to Lourmarin where we looked at Camus’s lonely grave covered with rosemary bushes. We found out that my early hero René Char was buried in the next town, l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. It was a mysterious experience because we couldn’t find his grave among the other dirt-nappers, but I watched an old goofy trying to sharpen a rubber knife near the cemetery entrance, also a radiant girl on a three-legged chestnut horse. Unfortunately I forgot the French for “Will you marry me” and also forgot in my hormonal trance how deeply I’m embedded in the biological dumpster. The cold mistral had pursued us, so we repaired to a café bistro called Longchamps that proved to be an old Char hangout. I truly loved this place and ordered tête de veau, which is my habit. Peter questioned, finally, why I had tête de veau five times in two weeks in France, and the obvious answer was that the gods told me to. This dish of brains, cheeks, neck-meat, and tongue with sauce gribiche seems to bring me closer to the playful serenity of the calf. We agreed, though, that I might better seek the spirits of dead writers in their favorite bars. A beautiful girl in the corner was also eating tête de veau and I felt a trembling kinship. She managed not to exchange glances with me.

  I was feeling a specific dread about the upcoming Lyon ceremony and for courage stopped near Cercy-la-Tour in the Morvan region of western Burgundy, a little-visited, heavily forested area of great beauty, to visit my friend the renowned writer and gourmand Gérard Oberlé, who a few years ago hosted t
he thirty-seven-course lunch I attended that took twelve hours, though there were only nineteen different wines. Gérard fed us edible courage in the form of pig’s feet stuffed with local snails among other subtleties and told me the utterly startling background of his new novel, which kept my mind preoccupied for days. It is a matter of grace in terms of my pilgrimages to think of writing as a guild of sorts with the disparate members through history offering one another consolation.

  We easily define our characters by what we don’t want to do, and I’ve become nearly unable to go out in public unless the venue offers a bonus of some sort. In Lyon it’s the rivers and the prodigious market, the lack of the bruised spectacle of tourism, and the couple dozen classic old bistros. I have often thought that if I received an early warning that I would pass on sooner than later, I’d get myself to Lyon and eat for a solid month, after which they could tip me from a gurney into the blessed Rhône. Maybe I’d swim all the way downstream to Arles for my last supper. It also occurred to me how much easier it would be to address an auditorium full of dogs and birds rather than people, though indeed the folks in Lyon lack the abrasive edges of New York City and Paris.